"Drug boats should be stopped and searched, and their operators should be arrested and tried; they should not be blown up. The penalty for transporting drugs is years in prison, not immediate death without proof or jury. When a first bomb strike doesn't kill everyone, survivors should be rescued and tried, not blasted into small bits as they sit atop a capsized boat in the middle of the ocean. As a society, what's come over us?"
"But there's another side of that coin, which I fully understand: Drug dealers are scum who ought to die. The military is probably pretty good at sorting out who the drug dealers are. If the military kills those bastards, that's OK with me. It just saves us the cost of trying and imprisoning the creeps. And I don't really care if the military is occasionally wrong when it kills people."
One view holds that the United States is not at war with drug cartels and that suspected drug boats should be stopped, searched, and their operators arrested and tried rather than destroyed. The penalty for transporting drugs should be imprisonment, and survivors of failed strikes should be rescued and tried. An opposing view holds that drug dealers deserve death, that the military can identify them, and that lethal strikes with some innocent casualties are acceptable as collateral damage. Preference leans toward restraint while acknowledging the opposing viewpoint. There is uncertainty about whether Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth misused a personal phone to send messages to a Signal group.
Read at Above the Law
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