Four Shots at an Unarmed Boat in Uncontested Waters
Twenty-eight paragraphs into the story that first focused attention on the murder Pete Hegseth ordered back in September (though as it notes, Nick Turse first revealed the second shot just days after the attack) is this revelation: it took four strikes to kill first the people then destroy any debris from the targeted boats.
The boat in the first strike was hit a total of four times, twice to kill the crew and twice more to sink it, four people familiar with the operation said.
It took the most powerful military in the history of the world four shots the get the job done.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
That fact lies at the core of a whole bunch of other senselessness about Trump’s feckless rule. There’s Trump’s release of Juan Orlando Hernández, a proven high-level threat, even as forces that normally prevent turbulence in the Middle East gather off of Venezuela’s oil fields. There’s the many ways, starting with the destruction of USAID and definitely including Trump’s trade war, that has added to global instability. There’s the cost involved in drone-striking small boats. There’s the neutering of legal advisors who might have saved Admiral Frank Bradley from being underbussed by the guy who promoted him. There’s the pretend press corps filled with nutballs and cranks that ensures that Whiskey Pete will never be challenged with actual knowledge.
But at root, you’ve got Pete Hegseth sitting atop that most powerful military boom boom boom boom, treating it like a children’s game.
And he doesn’t realize that on this, his first attempt, and twice more after that, the most powerful military in the history of the world could not take out an unarmed boat in uncontested waters with one shot.
Donald Trump thinks murderboats make him look strong (though the video he released of this one hid that it took four shots to get the job done).
Pete Hegseth thinks murderboats make him look strong.
But holy hell, can we talk about how feckless the reality is?
Update: This timeline of the conflicting things Trump and his minions have said about the September 2 strike is useful.
“Feckless in Sea Battle”?
Pious Hegseth needs to ask himself, “How would Jesus off some brown-skinned clay pigeons?”
PS, Thanks Marcy for highlighting the target practice aspect of these high crimes on the high seas. It pinpoints the depraved ineptitude of this portion of the absolute nadir of American history we are living through right now.
Something else just struck me. If those four shots saw no push-back from the trigger-pullers then the depravity of some members of the American military will see increasing domestic blow back as these killers will have no problem committing violent crimes on fellow Americans–even once they’re separated from the military itself. Russia is seeing this exact thing with its use of convicts in Ukraine. The US might see a spike in violent crimes coming out of this because military members are being groomed to be (or being allowed to be) killers without remorse, limitation or sanction.
This gets uglier the further I think on it.
Sean
Yup. It’s greenlighting and grooming a whole cadre of Calleys.
And that’s not the only similarity between this and that Vietnam atrocity’s stain on our nation’s honor: Calley was court martialed and sentenced to life for the massacre, but Nixon commuted it and Calley ended up with 3 years of house confinement — which will be the minimum of what Trump does for any of the hundreds of war criminals he’s enabled — in the unlikely event that they’re tried and convicted before he’s evicted from the WH in a straight jacket.
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/30/g-s1-14339/william-calley-lai-massacre-vietnam-death-obituary
One unintended consequence of that…
So, Whiskey Pete “didn’t stick around”
Lots of service members have disliked Hegseth from the beginning…but I’ve been hanging around some of of the military comments boards and talking to old buddies—want to know who now has an especially furnace-hot hate? The entire Armed Forces special ops community (especially SEALs) for Whiskey Pete being a REMF throwing their guy (career SEAL with a long mission record highly admired in that community) under the speeding go-fast boat.
Beyond completely missing the point of the “fog of war*” metaphor, Hegseth is insulting Mitch Bradley while pretending to support him—so trying to be the My Lai Massacre’s Capt. Medina, implying ADM Bradley is akin to the rather dim Lt. William Calley, whose unsuccessful court martial defense was essentially ‘The Capt. was my boss. He told me to kill them all. I followed his orders. I’d do it again.’
—————-
*The “fog of war” is not about Hegseth’s literal “the vessel “exploded in fire, smoke, you can’t see anything. … This is called the fog of war.” It’s a widely used metaphor about but trying to make good decisions in the overload of fuzzed, clouded, unreliable, contradictory fog of information available once combat starts. He probably heard someone smarter say it so, like Trump does, parroted the term trying to sound smart.
It may be that the US won’t want these actors to actually come back to the country. Just like the Russian’s want the mercenaries, convict soldiers, undesirable violence-prone warriors to stay away. There will be more foreign wars to be fought on other people’s lands.
trump needs the military for the big ammunition but it is still small game they hunt. The real movers & shakers in the international criminal world are the friends trump & his cabal want. USA services offered: attacking small boats [drug runners or fishermen] in international waters creates terror just as homeland kidnapping does. (Just as drug use does, btw)
“Losers” from the civilian militias performed poorly on January 6, 2020; although they are good enough for grunt street fighting. As he promised, trump found work for them. Yes, these violent goon squads will be a societal problem for years. Bloodlust is not “ordered away”, it is a festering addiction.
I suspect that this has an overlap with the DC National Guard murder. The government is not going to be happy for the public to see/hear what the suspect has to say, upon trial.
I’m gonna post this comment in this thread just as a marker, having just flashed on something related to the Rubio comments the day of and the day after the Sept 2 atrocity in question.
Rubio in that first statement said
As I noted below, his tone changed dramatically the next day in a Mexico City presser, getting full into the agitprop language that Hegseth/Miller/Trump had established for this “war on narco-terrorism.” That, Constitutionally-bereft tagline, of course, is their casus belli, and they don’t even need an actual casus!
And that last bit, war without a true justification, along with Rubio’s putting the onus for the action on the Department of Defense the day before, got me wondering exactly when Trump/Miller/Hegseth decided to change the DoD to the Department of War. Turns out it was just three days later, Sept 5.
https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/4295826/trump-renames-dod-to-department-of-war/
My takeaway from that timeline is that the DoW idea may have sprung from their realization, after that first botched “kinetic encounter” that “Defense” doesn’t quite fit the bill for what they were getting underway in the waters on either side of the Isthmus of Panama. IOW they knew they couldn’t ask Congress to issue an AUMF for what their killing spree was putatively about, so the “justification” for it had to spring, like some 9th-circle-of-hell immaculate conception, from their fevered brains onto the DoD letterhead.
I am fully expecting, if they ever have to reply to the militarily existential question of the criminality of what they’re doing down there, for Hegseth to say something that at clearly implies: “I run the Department of War, and war is what we do. This is therefore a war.”
Inquiring minds want to know if the DoD name change was that kind of veil of deception, the kind expert publicists shroud their most hideous clients in, including beaucoup politicians.
For some reason, my mind is drawn right now to another Trumpism-created weirdness at the edge of our perception: televangelists serially laying hands on and praying over Trump, at the Resolute Desk and elsewhere…
Reportedly, there’s an OLC memo that provides legal rationales for the boat strikes. Is that what Admiral Bradley relied (relies) on to carry out Hegseth’s orders? Is he exercising his own judgment as to the legality of those orders, based on his knowledge of the laws that have been out there for decades?
The DoD’s own Law of War manual says:
18.3.2.1 Clearly Illegal Orders to Commit Law of War Violations. The requirement to refuse to comply with orders to commit law of war violations applies to orders to perform conduct that is clearly illegal or orders that the subordinate knows, in fact, are illegal. For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.
This was 100% murder.
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An OLC memo? From the current OLC? Not worth the paper it’s printed on.
As illustrated by Franklin’s aim.
I would point out that Franklin is a much beloved Canadian children’s book series here in Canada.
I read them to my grandchildren.
I’m not sure how deeply this series has penetrated into American culture, but it would similar to using someone like Sandra Boynton’s book’s in the same way.
Not a lawyer so I’m wondering, can’t someone be sued here for unauthorized use of intellectual property?
Also … gotta love AI. /s
I hadn’t realized that mock cover had been posted by SOD himself. I remember hours of enjoyment reading it to (and with) my daughter when she was little. I was going to hand wave it away, until I saw that he posted it. But no Mr. Nice Canadian when it comes to the SOD: Whiskey Pete is such a bag of shit. Excuse my French.
Sean
I did not have “Sabrina Carpenter telling ICE not to use her images and songs in their propaganda against immigrants” on my 2025 bingo card, and yet, here we are …
Convict-1 and his minions see no value in asking permission, and will hide behind official business when busted. However, Sabrina and every other artist ripped off should sue for copyright infringement in as many places as possible so markers are laid down and it hits the officials’ pocketbooks. If necessary subpoena every one of the chain of command until the perps are found. It’s interesting to see how fast this crew retreats when it becomes costly to themselves.
IIRC copyright infringement cannot be construed as ‘official business’.
IANAL, however I have followed the stories about artists telling Drumpf to stop using their music at CAMPAIGN events. The defense is always the same: the arena/campaign had a standard broad license to use music by myriad artists. Doubtful but somewhat applicable. OTOH, appropriation like the SecDef is a violation of copyright law. It would seem their only defense would be to call it parody (see Mark Russell and Two Live Crew SCOTUS case around 1990-91). Good luck defending that. Cruelty is the point, admitted, under oath, in court.
Also not a lawyer, but fairly well acquainted with this kind of use.
This cover would likely fall under the free use exemption for a parody, made famous in the public consciousness for us old fogies with the case of Hustler and Larry Flynt v Jerry Falwell. Flynt, of Hustler magazine fame, targeted Falwell with a parody of a Campari ad campaign, in which Hustler concocted a fake interview with Falwell about his “first time” (the same thing that Campari did with fake celebrity interviews). When the case reached SCOTUS, it was an 8-0 ruling in Flynt’s favor with Rehnquist writing for the court.
Campari did not try to sue Flynt for IP use, as it would have fallen afoul of the same legal issue. Falwell, though, wasn’t as worried about the legal battle as much as he wanted to make a religious point — trying to set himself up as a pseudo-martyr in the culture wars, strung up on a cross by Hustler magazine..
Also “sung to the tune of” and MAD magazine. IIANM, which is likely.
It’s really hard to sink a Boston Whaler!
Those boats are nothing like Boston Whalers. And I doubt that the builders of those boats certified that they were manufactured in compliance with any nation’s requirements, let alone USCG’s
None of those boats have the range to reach the US. As to the first boat with 11 people aboard and four gas sucking engines, it’s hard to imagine it was smuggling drugs given the extra 10 people aboard and the limited fuel capacity.
You don’t pardon the guy that put 400 tons of cocaine on our streets if you care about illegal drugs.
[Moderator’s note: see your comment at 11:05 am. /~Rayne]
Among the odd aspects of this thing is that there was no need for a double-tap to kill the 2 survivors. They were going to die very soon and in agony.
Adam Serwer told us, the cruelty is the point.
A game: yesterday this story had me picturing Pete (adult Pete) sitting in a bubble bath “bombing” toy boats around his hairy, soapy legs–and missing. It is *that* feckless. But all the more evil for the lives lost.
Has Trump’s administration’s purge of the military’s “DEI” and JAG and IG elements caused the rot to spread to those in charge of operational planning? In any case, it does not seem to have helped.
Seafair at Seattle could have a new twist. Instead of the Blue Angels doing only trick flying, they also could try to sink one of the hydros during a heat, and see if they could quickly sink all signs of it so the other hydros do not encounter derbies. Would Peaty hang around to see that? There’s a lot of whiskey around the log boom during Seafair, so Petey would be in his comfort zone. His element.
Reminds me of the swimming pool scene in “PeeWee’s Big Adnenture”.
Another Republican Executive Branch full of people that can never leave US soil again (not leave the US, US soil implies embassies may be problematic).
More importantly, has Adm. Bradley said anything to make people believe Hegseth? Even if Bradley did so, there is current precedent, In re Yamashita, can could, in theory, hold Hegseth responsible for murder under US law. No chance that Johnny Roberts and company apply the same rules to Republicans as Democrats, much less follow precedents that are politically-inconvenient.
TRUMP, 12/2/25: “Land is much easier”
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3m6zmoueoqj2u
Dec 2, 2025, 1:57 PM
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3m6zmtruzyy2j
Dec 2, 2025, 1:59 PM
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3m6zn5ohy6v2x
Dec 2, 2025, 2:05 PM
About Convict-1’s comment about Venezuela (‘they would send murderers … empty jails’), it sure sounds like thoughtcrime became a justification since nothing else is supported by reality.
And the addled Don knows that most fentanyl supplies come from China? Wanna pick a fight, Donnie?
Or that the US home-grows a huge amount of new psychedelics and opiate-like drugs. So many new variants come on the market that the poor DEA can’t keep up with classsifying them. Donnie – are you siccing your thugs on those good old boys in the hollers cooking up the next brew?
Most of the fentanyl in the US enters this country from Mexico. Precursors come from China, and people make it here themselves too.
Not that Trump or anyone else in his administration cares. Addiction is the addict’s fault as far as they’re concerned. Project 2025 contained not a single reference–not one word–about treatment.
“I hear Colombia the country of Colombia is making cocaine. They have cocaine manufacturing plants, ok? And then they sell us the cocaine we appreciate that very much”
They sell us the cocaine and we appreciate that very much.
I wonder who the “we” is.
We are at “war” with Venezuela. Cocaine users are enemy combatants. Ergo, Don Jr. , Kash Patel, et al are enemy combatants.
The test I like to apply is “how would Trump react if the roles were reversed?”
So he claims (falsely) that it’s legal to kill (alleged) drug smugglers because of the harm they’d cause to the USA.
Ok then, by that logic it’s perfectly acceptable for country X to murder an American citizen on American soil becuase of the threat they pose to a national of their country, right?
OF COURSE NOT, and Trump would rightly be furious if the Venezualan government murdered people on the streets of New York, for example.
Which just underpins how crazy, illegal, immoral and plain-old stupid Hegseth and Trump’s murderous crusade is.
Your faith in American outrage is misplaced. It didn’t happen when Ronnie Moffitt was murdered in Washington, DC.
trump is a very bad man but he is not that much worse than some of our American heroes.
Reply to Harry Eagar
2025/12/03 at 4:56 pm
“but he is not that much worse than some of our American heroes.” << the lens of your privilege very evident here. -__-
I expect a newspaper guy to be a little jaded about what passes for heroism in America. But I think you seriously underestimate the harms Trump has and will commit.
Mr. TheUK didn’t mention his having faith in US outrage; I know because I read his post several times to try to figure out what irked you. Nor did he compare Trump to other US villains, which is indeed a futile exercise.
The quickest of the sort to come to my mind is Custer, an illustrative case in point. Was Custer better than Trump? That’s like comparing a boxcar of rotting watermelons to a large week-old road kill in a drainage ditch.
Yeah, starting with Juan Hernandez whose previous residence was a West Virginia Prison. https://abcnews.go.com/US/former-honduran-president-juan-orlando-hernandez-freed-prison/story?id=128036575
Regarding Marcy’s CNN timeline update: the second entry is Rubio’s comments about the Sept 2 quadruple strike:
That was a CYA as he’s playing the “rational member” of the Trump cabal, akin to his last second attempt at salvaging the RU/UKN peace deal that Witkoff delivered behind Rubio’s back directly from Putin last week.
Speaking of which, here’s a report that Kushner and Witkoff did it again, meeting Putin separately without Rubio.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/witkoff-kushner-meet-putin-moscow-discuss-an-end-ukraine-war-2025-12-02/
The (s)hits just keep coming.
I disagree about the CYA part.
No matter who the Secretary of State is, you ALWAYS defer to the DOD on questions about military operations. Ask instead about the foreign policy implications of the strike, and that’s fair game – but not the military specifics.
Not always. A famous exception was the veto of the bombing of the port of Haiphong.
I was talking about how the Secretary of State responds to public questions about the activities of DOD after said activities take place, not about policy debates behind the scenes about what DOD actions should be taken in the future.
Here’s the entirety of that CNN timeline-entry for Rubio:
That last quote indicates that his Sept 2 comment needed to be corrected (i.e. made to fit) wrt the rationale the military was using for the strike. A lot can be drawn from that change in both the substance and the tone of his comment the day before, but two things stand out to me: that he was kept out of the loop prior to the strike as to the “rationale” that gave him evident pause the day before, and that he needed to parrot the bogus rationale that Miller devised in order to mollify the Boss whom Miller controls.
I called that initial response to the strike a CYA because that follow-up the next day indicated that — again like the Witkoff/Putin UKN surrender plan that blindsided him and the Europeans — he was genuinely out of the Trump/Miller loop, but unlike how he tried to salvage the UKN peace effort with NATO and the EU, he uncovered his ass for a vigorous spanking on Sept 3.
It also occurs to me that perhaps the immediate forced retraction of the speedboat-strike comment of 9/2, the very next day, (which then did include the bogus, propagandistic military rational for the mass murder) had burdened whatever was left of his conscience and rational thought processes, such that the RU/Witkoff UKN surrender plan was finally a bridge too far for him.
Here’s the link to that Rubio/de la Fuente press conference in Mexico City on Sept 3:
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2025/09/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-and-mexican-foreign-secretary-juan-ramon-de-la-fuente-at-a-joint-press-availability
If you go down to the first question from AP’s Matt Lee (a floating softball which makes me question my support of AP going forward), you’ll see his freshly corrected (and loaded with propagandistic particulars) accounting of the DOD criminality. He got his marching orders following the prior day’s “You got me, call the DOD if you want to know what’s going on,” and he marched like hell.
I’m just surprised he had any remnant of a soul left last month when he took the Ukrainian shitpile that Witkoff and Putin deposited and tried to recraft into some semblance of an actual peace deal.
The question remains, does Rubio have any remnant of a soul? If so, he hasn’t displayed it. It’s been a long hard fall since the days of the Senate committee that found Trump and Russia had indeed connected to their mutual advantage.
Trump yells that each of these boats will “kill twenty-five thousand Americans.” This absurdly false. More Americans die by suicide than any cocaine on a drug boat could kill, and Trump evinces no concern for them, including the veterans who can’t get care.
GdB:
I made that “remnant of a soul” comment because Rubio actually surprised me, startled me even, when he took the NATO et al group into a huddle in Geneva on a moment’s notice following the Witkoff/Putin surrender demand, and emerged with something Ukraine could at least deal with. I made a comment here just prior to that happening that he would be laughed out of that meeting, assuming he’d just be trying to do a Glengarry Glen Ross sales pitch for the Putin victory proclamation. “Gobsmacked” is probably the most accurate description of how I reacted to what came out of the Geneva talks.
That’s what I considered his “display” of the remnants of a soul, although I must admit that it was analagous to watching a comatose patient on a hospital bed suddenly blink or smile. IOW, probably not worth the effort of calling the neurologist in to reevaluate his condition.
This doesn’t exactly surprise me. Depending on what the hull was made of, it can be spectacularly difficult to actually sink a boat. If it was foam core fiberglass (most likely given the speed), they would probably have needed to puncture every compartment that holds air. Even if it was aluminum (the other option), small pockets of air can float pieces of the boat pretty easily. It will take more shots to make sure everything sinks. FWIW, the bow section of the freighter New Carissa took 400 lbs of explosives and 69 shots from a 5″ gun without sinking. One torpedo finished the job. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Carissa
What I find more interesting is that they sunk the wreckage. They must not have wanted to risk searching it and finding no drugs on board. If they were actually confident there were drugs on board, one would think that the photo op on the Navy ship would be worth it.
Good points, especially their need to obliterate the evidence, but the fact remains that this was target practice on non-combatants without so much as a whisper of constitutionally required legal authority.
As entertaining as the kinetics are, that becomes a distraction from the more important procedural processes — and those frame the possibility of an illegal act.
When you become aware that a hazard to navigation may exist, you need to locate, identify, and assess before any kinetic or other activity begins. The assessment really needs eyes-on (as in competent human eyes-on). This is best accomplished by helicopter and/or small boat.
If there are persons in the water (PIW), in or on floating debris or a derelict vessel, the entire focus of operations immediately shifts. This is so fundamental to safety of life at sea and centuries of maritime tradition that it barely merits discussion for anyone other than the criminal class. Rescue and/or recovery becomes the first priority. Only when the rescue and/or recovery of the persons has been completed will you consider how to deal with the debris. And it may take just a wee bit more effort eliminating that hazard than just pointing some kind of stand-off munitions at it.
This points out the fallacy being spread by the White House and DoD; that the later strikes were just good housekeeping and elimination of hazards to navigation. But having those comments on the record will be a good thing if efforts are ever taken to establish accountability.
Thanks for the pull-back.
The notion of seeing people in the water and deciding that the appropriate solution is to fire on them/their boat is anathema to everything that maritime law stands for. Their first duty is to offer assistance to the best of their ability to save lives. Period. These Navy ships have helicopters and small boats and are perfectly capable of pulling people out of the water. At gunpoint if you think that they’ll fight back, maybe, but you still pull them out of the water.
We do not want a world where people do not feel the need to assist US (or any, honestly) mariners in distress.
Rarely do we get the opportunity to document statements from military and government officials that so clearly illustrate misdeeds.
(USCG E-1 to O-4)
The hazard to navigation excuse is also preposterous. Hazards to navigation most often arise from partially submerged wreckage blocking narrow channels. The notion that debris from a small vessel in open water would become a hazard to navigation is laughable. And even if it did make sense somehow, it would not justify killing people.
speaking of: there is an ongoing outrage over the Coast Guard moving the rescue helicopter from Newport, OR and re-staging it 100 miles South. no reason has been given, but there has been increased ICE interest in the Newport area for staging. a judge has issued a temporary injunction demanding the helicopter’s return while she considers a permanent injunction. crabbing season is just beginning, and the crabbers and their families rely on the helicopter for rescues.
Megathread response:
Raven Eye: Thank you for your service. It’s a little scary how everyone from Triple SecDef on down is bragging about their war crimes. They’re fully expecting no consequences.
Old Redneck: It would be no different from the hundreds to thousands of shipping containers that fall overboard. Those are only hazards to navigation when they drift close to land. And if the premise was concern about hazards to navigation, you definitely would pull survivors out of the water first.
rosalind: This affects a bunch of our clients who run boats out of Newport. USCG reportedly moved out of Newport so that DHS could have space at the airport for immigrant detention facilities. The new helicopter location turns a 15-30 minute response to 45-60 minutes. For those who don’t know the area, it’s cold water and survival time (with or without lifejackets) is measured in minutes, not hours.
Every time Trump (or sycophant) responds with, “it is his prerogative to do what he did in the name of his office because I am the President;” he is telling us that he can commit murder to whomever, wherever, or whenever he pleases.
All true, although in real war the duty to rescue survivors often is ignored by the necessity of preserving the rescue ship.
In the naval war around Guadalcanal, there were instances when Americans made little or no effort even to rescue our own sailors, notoriously following the sinking of USS Juneau. On the other hand, off Iwo Jima USS Case sank a Japanese transport and despite danger from Japanese submarines tried to rescue 300 survivors. All preferred to drown. (My father was gunnery officer of Case that day.)
Besides desecrating the beloved Franklin, who has spent decades helping children learn to read, the meme shared by Hegseth serves to alter the perception of the actual events.
The real murderboats are in international waters, and it’s not clear to the naked eye what’s on the boat, or maybe that’s just my eyesight getting worse.
The meme shows that:
1) the boats are almost at their destination
2) the boat people are clearly armed
3) the illicit cargo is clearly visible
The four strikes shows that the regime knows that these strikes are illegal; three of the four are the cover-up. They can’t afford anyone alive to testify against the regime’s lie about drug terrorists, or any debris that might provide other evidence that their cover story is a lie.
Thanks for covering this so well, Marcy.d
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Yesterday former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance posted an excellent story about Hegseth’s legal exposure for the Sept. 2 quadruple-tap boat strike:
https://joycevance.substack.com/p/bulletproof-no-more
Here’s the piece from Ms. Vance’s story that stuck out to me:
“The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Hegseth was the TEA for the operation. TEA stands for Target Engagement Authority and refers to the person in the chain of command with the authority to approve the use of force and fire upon a target. The TEA can also stop the action—for instance, giving an order to hold fire to prevent a war crime from being committed. There is always a specific commander with this responsibility, and the WSJ says that here that it was the Secretary. ”
IANAL, but if the WSJ story is true and there’s a paper trail and/or authoritative testimony that Hegseth was TEA for the strike, it’s hard to see how he can evade legal responsibility, and he’ll be politically radioactive. Tomorrow’s congressional oversight hearings with Hegseth should be informative. I hope a Democratic senator starts with a crisp yes/no question about Hegseth as TEA and keeps on slugging.
Yeah, Whiskey Pete’s claim that he “didn’t stick around” for the final strike(s) would be irrelevant if he’s the TEA. He’s where the buck stops, even if it also hits other people along the way.
yeah, that’s some pretty weak TEA
Ouch.
Z score,
Re:The illicit cargo is visible. I’ve been wondering about that. Is *smuggling* visible to the eye, not secreted anymore? Do these boat people not know about the boots being blown up? I don’t understand continuing on a failed path!
What if your perception about the people using small watercraft has already been fucked up? What if your assumption the persons vulnerable to unlawful attack by the US aren’t just boatmen (your word) sitting in the water in boats? or sitting in the water in boats with “illicit cargo”?
Why would fishermen suddenly stop using their boats to continue to do the work they’ve done for their entire lives, and their forebears before them may also have done to support their families?
How exactly are any observers determining the contents of the small watercraft illicit substances?
How are viewers of Trump admin’s videos of the targeted boats able to discern the legitimacy of what they’re viewing in the age of AI?
What if released images are deep fakes, and what’s being blown up are offshore oil platforms? A “Trust me” from Hegseth is worth how much really?
Reagan did Grenada, so Trump will do Venezuela. Because it’s a tradition. Bush the Elder did Panama. Bush the Younger did Iraq, and that taught the lesson, stay with the Monroe Doctrine and you don’t get burned too badly.
The boats that I’ve seen being blown up in the videos are not fishing boats. These boats look to have three or four large outboards. No fisherman would have the income to afford a boat like that. You can’t tell where they are going and what they are carrying and, being about a thousand miles from the US, I don’t see them as much of a threat. I see this as more muscle flexing and distraction by the administration than anything else.
“muscle flexing and distraction”
You’re letting them off way too easily—it’s murder, plain & simple. There are a plethora of ways to flex & distract without killing.
Even if everything you suspect is true, its irrelevant to the fundamental issue.
There’s little doubt some of the go-fast boats blown up were engaged in cocaine smuggling…as has been the case for decades. The U.S. practice—entirely legal under U.S and international law—has been to interdict them, seize the cargo, and arrest the crew (the well-practiced Coast Guard technique is to disable the tall outboard engines with a .50-caliber rifle round from a sniper in a helicopter, have an armed boarding party board the boat, seize the drugs, and transfer the crew to the judicial system for trial, conviction and sentencing.
Assuming the U.S, government is at all interested in combating drug trafficking, that’s often ended with underlings accepting a plea agreement and reduction in sentence if they can provide enough information on higher-ups in the drug trafficking ring.
But backing up a little, if you’re in favor of the rule of law, all of that makes no difference. Summary extrajudicial execution of civilians (even criminals) who are not a threat to our forces is, in a time of some sort of acknowledged war, a war crime. If not in a time of war, it’s simple murder.
I just don’t want it to become accepted that Trump can, without consequence, order your or my murder for the seditious act of being insufficiently enthusiastic about his “DEATH” threats to members of Congress.
Do all the flexes fit into a coherent shape? (National Guard in cities, ICE collaring legal immigrants and citizens, blasting away at boats in international waters, pardoning kingpins and cronies.)
Is it possible Trump understands he can do whatever he wants to do, and, the military has (seemingly) submitted to this—so, if Trump wants someone dead or terrified, he can ‘make it so?’
I’m sensing these and other harm-dealing initiatives are connected in multiple ways.
[Rayne, is it possible for you, as a mod, to contact me for a very short, very specific question concerning one of my posted comments? Thx.]
I’ve mentioned here before that I feel fortunate much of my (20th Century) military career and life since, coincided with a near-societal-wide appreciation of and support for servicemembers & veterans. Part of that was because the public considered us good at what we do. A more important part is that they thought we had a sense of honor and duty, of responsibility, that was diminishing in the wider society.
“Feckless in Sea Battle.” Marcy’s post and the further observations of Bruce Cole, Peterr, Rugger and Rayne are accurate, timely, and necessary. But I don’t have to like it. I know we didn’t always live up to that responsibility, but we tried. I tried. My Navy CPO son is still trying.
I had also mentioned society’s sense appreciation didn’t always exist but was earned in the decades since Vietnam, and it seems likely Trump’s East-Wing-level of demolition on everything I had always understood to be what the military stands for, is blowing away those hard-earned decades of work like they’re a droned go-fast boat, and bringing that era of respect to an end.
I won’t repeat the long and always growing bullet list of examples I included, but it started with:
• Appoint a sycophantic Fox News influencer of little experience or abilities and few apparent principles—basically, a clownishly non-serious person in every important way—to lead the Department of Defense
Youngest Purple Son—finally back from several months underway in the Persian Gulf with the USS Carl Vinson’s Carrier Strike Group, under the worst CINC & SECDEF any of us have ever known—seems unlikely to experience the decades of societal respect once accorded me & my comrades in arms. He’s preparing to PCS (Permanent Change of Station) from San Diego to Rhode Island. A shore billet, It will probably be his last assignment before retirement. He tells me, with a sense of weariness and guilt he tries not to show, that he’s glad that it won’t be on a ship in what Donald Trump considers his own Navy.
As he boasts, Trump alone could do this.
Thanks for you kind words, and I agree that you (and I, and anyone else) don’t have to like it.
But one thing I’d disagree with is your last five words. Trump can’t do this alone. He needs minions and sycophants to carry out his wishes, and he needs those who might check him on these things (the courts, the Senate, the House, the GOP leadership, the media) to cower in fear and to not exercise their ability to challenge if not thwart completely his wishes.
Too many Big Law firms caved to him.
Too many Universities are caving to him.
CBS, ABC, and too many other media outlets are caving to him.
But not all – and those folks need encouragement to continue to speak out.
Trump can’t do this alone, and folks like Marcy can’t stand against him alone. When Sen. Kelly and the five other Dems in Congress made their “Don’t follow illegal orders” video, they were speaking to the folks like Youngest Purple Son and his military colleagues, to remind them that they are not alone either.
Peterr, thank you for the needed clarification, and thoughtful support and encouragement.
Trump’s boast is of course, like most of his buffoonish puffery, not literally true. So change that thought to: Trump’s ill will alone is necessary but not sufficient. And it’s necessary for all of us to do what we can to make sure not sufficient stays that way
Not directly related to the murders but it does relate to Hegsesth’s incompetence:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/03/politics/watchdog-report-hegseth-signal
Signalgate is becoming a bigger story today than murder on the high seas. Hegseth apparently refused to release his phone to the IG’s investigators, and refused to be interviewed. Both are anomalous and outrageous.
The drumbeat on the Potomac is growing louder by the hour. How long will Trump keep this embarrassing war criminal as his figurehead?
Added to an earlier post, but worth mention here too, the Treasury Department today issued a press release: Treasury Targets Money Laundering Network Supporting Venezuelan Terrorist Organization Tren de Aragua, with an accompanying lists of persons sanctioned –
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0327
https://ofac.treasury.gov/recent-actions/20251203
Has there been much/any prior push on the money laundering front, vs sinking boats?
I wonder if what’s going on re Venezuela is related to Venezuela’s oil industry. Venezuela has large oil reserves, which appear mostly sold to China. The U.S. hasn’t been wild about Venezuela’s leadership for decades. Why the sudden interest now.
It makes no sense for us to be suddenly obsessed with so-called drug boats when “we” just released from prison a different country’s president/major drug kingpin. Also, why wouldn’t we be interested in, say, Columbia?!! It also makes no sense for the Trump folks to be so evasive about providing proof that the boats being attacked indeed carried drugs.
Hegseth just used the words “Fogs of War” when describing his orders for attacking the Venezuela “drug” boats. His use of these words really puzzles me.
The last time I heard these words used was when I heard Robert McNamara (Secretary of Defense) speak in person decades ago in San Francisco about his August 1964 executive order (“Operation Pierce Arrow”) — the aerial bombing campaign/fiasco against North Vietnamese vessels (and other) in the Gulf of Tonkin, which was the start of the U.S. escalation in Vietnam. News articles indicate he gave this order mistakenly/irroneously (due to receiving bad information) — that at the time he and others had believed there had earlier been an attack by North Vietnam.
I was a few feet from where Robert McNamara spoke. I recall McNamara stating he and others had been very skeptical from the start about the news of an occurrence of a strike on one of the U.S. destroyer ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. I believe I heard him admit he lied when he told others our vessel had been attacked and gave orders to retaliate. Regarding the words “Fogs of War,” it’s the name of a film/documentary in which he talks about the above, including his remorse.
Thank you Observitor.
Adding … “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara” is a 2003 American documentary film about the life and times of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and is based on the eleven lessons presented at the end of McNamara’s 1995 book, “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam”.
Would that young men heed the lessons of the old.
That was a chilling and important movie. It offered no easy lessons, certainly not for those bloodthirsty enough to seek war as a means to consolidate power.
My father was friends with McNamara. They bonded over books. But war isn’t literature. Literature simply offers lessons on why war is not the best answer..
One of the things that I think is underappreciated is the extent to which the Trump administration chooses to accomplish its ends by the most unlawful means possible. It’s not just the cruelty that’s the point, it’s also the destruction of the rule of law, the evisceration of the other two branches of the federal government, and the blatant corruption.
I’m absolutely serious when I say that these murders are a step towards Trump making his boast come true. You know, the one about him being able to shoot someone on Fifth Ave. and get away with it. The man desperately desires to be able to order the murder (extrajudicial killing) of an American citizen in the United States. In his mind, that’s the ultimate display of power. And John Roberts is now and will continually let him get away with it.
We come to the same point, the destruction of the rule of law, from different viewpoints. I simply think it is the under realized and underappreciated extent to which a completely feral Trump and his partners in understanding, including those in his administration and those in the other two branches, use the letter of the law to destroy the spirit of the law. It’s quite remarkable that so many are so willing to perform their acts of perfidy and supplication so readily.
Another poster references Timothy Snyder in some of the poster’s comments. I finished Snyder’s book Bloodlands not long ago. Watching Trump and his partners in action is like seeing a chapter of Bloodlands play out.
Roberts gave him the go-ahead to murder an American citizen last year, in the immunity case. I know, supposedly it applies to “the president.” But why does it feel like they wrote it just for Trump?
Maybe it’s what you note, William: He wants so badly to break all the laws.
It’s the Russian model.
It seems obvious that the trump crime family envy Putin and what he has wrested from his people.
This is scary for legal issues, but the other point raised is that, possibly like the third largest military in the world invading their Ukranian neighbors, revealing themselves to be not nearly as strong in reality as they were on paper, if the our military requires multiple strikes to sink an unarmed commercial boat, our weapons systems may not be all that we expect them to be for an actual shooting war. I hope we don’t find that out in the near future.
Now that Hegseth has fired so many competent and honorable service people, it’ll be disastrous if the US gets into a fight.
The striking thing to me is that these attacks can only be about instilling fear. It’s not a realistic way to stop drug trafficking. In many ways, they remind me of Putin’s attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. Perhaps they’re meant to intimidate, but the really only create hatred and America and Americans are much safer if we are liked, not hated.
Khadaffi blamed an HIV outbreak on 4 or 5 Bulgarian nurses and arrested them. It was one of the top issues in Bulgaria for years. Every Bulgarian was up in arms. So, I can easily imagine that the deaths of a small number of fishermen in a small country can be a ginormous scandal that poisons relations with that country for years.
I contacted my congressman and senators today with a one-sentence message: take action to prevent the president from starting a war with Venezuela.
This was raised elseweb but makes a lot of sense to me. Not only did Whiskey Pete beat feet mid mission (nice warfighter cred there) but also no one has heard anything from the JCS chairman General Caine who was promoted to get this very job. Where was he and why hasn’t he supervised this operation?
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, notwithstanding that he’s the highest ranking commissioned officer in the US armed forces, is not part of the operational chain of command. In fact, the law prohibits it. They are advisers to the president and SecDef.
You’d think, though, that a CJC would be involved with this before or after the fact. But maybe not the one Trump put in place.
And Admiral Holsey, head of Southern Command, was sidelined by Pete over the Admiral’s unwillingness to sign on to extrajudicial killings.
“No one’s in charge here.”
Rather odd isn’t it that 2 survivors of illegal/immoral US strikes were murdered in one instance and “repatriated to their home countries” in another instance? I can’t figure that one out. Then again, trying to make sense of these nasty buffoons is likely impossible.
This is a very interesting THREAD for those who, like me, get lost with the acronyms.
It begins here:
https://bsky.app/profile/mikeblack114.bsky.social/post/3m77pwdrwrs2i
Dec 5, 2025, 12:10 AM [scroll DOWN from here]
…and continues through:
…and ends here:
https://bsky.app/profile/mikeblack114.bsky.social/post/3m77pwdslcg2i
Dec 5, 2025, 12:10 AM [scroll UP from here for THREAD]
I want a t-shirt saying ‘Boring Dork Shit Matters’.
Because that boring dork shit keeps everybody safe. Even the Bully-in-Chief.
The phrase doesn’t quite work for me. First thing that came to mind reading “Boring Dork Shit”? Elon fucking Musk — founder and CEO of pipe dream The Boring Company.
That asshole should not matter in the way that keeping fascism on its heels should.
Well, okay, maybe there’s a better way of putting it but, as someone who has geeky or nerdish tendencies myself, I don’t want Elmo to speak for me.