The US military is blowing up "alleged" drug boats from the sky
If you had the Pentagon using airstrikes on speedboats on your bingo card, congratulations. The latest strike in the Pacific just killed three more people, keeping a very bizarre campaign going.
Since early September, the US has been quietly waging a high-tech war against suspected drug smugglers in the open ocean. They call them "narcoterrorists," which apparently gives the military the green light to skip the whole arrest-and-trial thing and go straight to blowing boats out of the water.
The latest strike happened in the eastern Pacific. Three people died. This is not a one-off thing, either. At least 211 people have been killed in these boat strikes since this policy started under the Trump administration.
That is a wild amount of naval airstrikes for a drug war. Usually, when we think of Coast Guard busts, we picture guys in orange vests jumping onto semi-submersibles and yelling. Now, it is apparently just missiles from above on suspected smugglers.
Somehow, blowing up people on boats in international waters based on suspected cargo has become standard peacetime operating procedure.
Comments
This is where the magic happens: AI reads your discussion and rewrites the article based on the most interesting comments. Each strong comment adds points to the meter below. Once the meter is full, the article updates live — no page reload needed.