The scandal is not that one secretary of war may have ordered a second missile into a sinking boat. The scandal is that after Vietnam, Iraq, Gaza and the entire drone era, anyone in Washington can still pretend to be surprised.

The official story is neat. A fast boat in the Caribbean. Suspected narcotics. A strike to “protect Americans” from the fentanyl epidemic. Then a whisper that someone in the chain of command might have ordered a second hit on survivors in the water.

Washington reacts with theatre. Committees announce hearings. Retired officials express grave concern on cable television. Think tanks rediscover phrases like “rules based order.” The political class performs shock at a practice it has spent half a century normalising.

Seen from outside the bubble, the scandal looks different. It is not about one boat, one order, or one man who likes the smell of cordite. It is about a system that has steadily turned extrajudicial killing into routine administration, then feigns horror when one episode leaks into view.

The long habit of killing from a distance

America did not wake up one November morning and discover that it was comfortable killing people in the water. It walked there step by step.

First came the frontier. Indigenous nations were labelled savages, then cleared off land that suddenly became available for Christian civilisation. The language of salvation covered the reality of organised theft. You bring the Bible; you take the land; you call it destiny.

From “savages” to “collateral damage”

There is a straight conceptual line from calling Native peoples savages to calling dead civilians collateral damage. In both cases, the victims are moved outside the circle of moral concern.

On the frontier, that exclusion was justified with talk of heathens and pagans. In the twentieth century it was communists and insurgents. In the twenty first century it became terrorists and narcos. The label changes. The function does not. Once a population is placed beyond the moral pale, anything done to them can be framed as regrettable but necessary.

This is why arguments about whether one boat was “really” smuggling drugs miss the point. The boat is an instance of a much older logic. You designate a category of people as less than fully human, and you erase their right to surrender.

By Vietnam, the language had changed but the structure remained. Entire villages were treated as legitimate targets because they were “VC controlled.” The system did not need to prove who was fighting and who was not. It was enough that a line on a map had been drawn in red pencil.

Vietnam: kill anything that moves

In Vietnam, operational orders and practice converged on a simple principle: if it moved in certain areas, it could be killed. Investigations many years later documented free fire zones, body count incentives and a pattern of massacres that were not aberrations but policy in action.

The My Lai massacre was treated as a singular horror, pinned on a handful of soldiers. The deeper truth was more uncomfortable. The system had been telling men for years that any Vietnamese in designated areas could be treated as a combatant. Law followed politics, not the other way round.

The lesson absorbed in the Pentagon was not “never again.” It was “never again let it leak in this way.” The violence did not end. The documentation did.

Nuremberg for losers, impunity for winners

On paper, Nuremberg established a stark rule. Individuals cannot hide behind orders if those orders are manifestly illegal. Soldiers have a duty to disobey. Leaders who design criminal policies can be held personally responsible.

In practice, that duty is applied with extraordinary selectivity. Iraqi conscripts, German officers and Serb commanders are expected to risk death rather than carry out criminal orders. Western officers are praised for “difficult decisions” and retire into consultancy and publishing.

How Nuremberg really works

In theory, international law sits above power. In reality, Nuremberg has been turned into a precedent for victors’ justice. Leaders of defeated states are tried; leaders of victorious states are invited to give keynote speeches on human rights.

This is not just hypocrisy; it is a training signal. Soldiers and officials inside dominant powers absorb a simple message. Law is something that happens to other people. If your flag is the right one, you will not be in the dock. At worst, you will be asked to write a reflective memoir in which you gently regret “mistakes” without ever using the word crime.

The Caribbean boat fits perfectly into that pattern. Nobody seriously imagines that the authors of the policy will face a Nuremberg. At most, a few expendable names may be nudged into retirement once the headlines fade.

The war on drugs as a cover for war on people

The language of the drug war has given Washington one of its most flexible moral tools. Call something a cartel, and almost anything becomes permissible. Call strangers narcos, and you can drop ordnance on them far from any battlefield without asking the public to think too hard about what you are doing.

This is where the Caribbean boat sits. Its crew can be killed on suspicion alone, because they belong to a category that has been emptied of rights. Survivors can be treated as disposable material, not as human beings who might have information, stories, or even innocence.

When “terrorist” and “narco” replace evidence

Over the last twenty five years, the word terrorist has been used to short circuit thought. Attach it to a person or group, and the debate stops. The same sleight of hand has now been extended to narco and cartel.

Once that label is applied, the normal sequence of law enforcement collapses. Criminals are supposed to be captured, interrogated, put on trial and punished with a record that can be examined. Extrajudicial killing does something else. It destroys the evidence and the witness at the same time. It ensures that whatever the truth was will never have to stand up in court.

The real danger is not abstract. If a state can destroy a boat on unproven intelligence, abroad, against people with no political voice, there is nothing in the logic that stops that practice sliding inward. Today it is narcos in the Caribbean. Tomorrow it can be dissidents, journalists, or simply the wrong faction in the wrong city.

What the drug crisis really says about America

There is a stubborn refusal in elite conversation to look at what the drug crisis reveals about the United States itself. The script is familiar. Evil cartels. Weak borders. Ruthless smugglers. It is a story that turns a social collapse into a foreign threat.

The unspoken truth is uglier. People do not inhale fentanyl because some Colombian made them. They seek oblivion because their lives have been stripped of security and meaning, because work is precarious, because health care is priced like a luxury brand, because mental distress is criminalised rather than treated.

Displacement: bombing boats instead of fixing home

Killing boat crews is displacement activity. It is a spectacle that reassures frightened voters that somebody is being punished, while carefully avoiding the people and institutions that would have to change for the crisis to end.

The real culprits sit far from the sea. They include employers who grind people down and discard them, pharmaceutical companies that fuelled dependency for profit, banks that launder river after river of drug money, and regulators who look away because the flows are convenient.

Missiles are easier. They do not require the rebuilding of communities, the funding of treatment, the admission that an economic model is producing despair at scale. They provide the illusion of action with none of the work.

Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza: the normalisation of the double tap

If the Caribbean strikes feel different, it is only because they happened close enough to the continental United States to make headlines. The methods are old. In Afghanistan and Iraq, double tap strikes became a quiet habit. Hit a target once. Wait for rescuers and relatives to gather. Hit it again.

The age of the double tap

During the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, reports accumulated of strikes on weddings, funerals and houses where suspected militants might be present. In many cases, the pattern was the same. An initial strike, a pause, then a second strike aimed at those trying to help the wounded.

Legally, this is hard to distinguish from the deliberate killing of survivors in the water. Morally, it is identical. Yet across two decades, the outrage never quite reached the standards mobilised for adversaries. When others do it, it is a war crime. When we do it, it is a tragic necessity.

In Gaza, where Western governments continue to arm and shield a state that repeatedly hits rescue workers, medics and densely populated civilian areas, the same principle is at work. Victims are placed outside the circle of full humanity. Their killers are given legal fig leaves and talking points.

Yemen and the precedent of open assassination

Long before a Caribbean boat, Washington crossed the line into openly assassinating its own citizens abroad in the name of security. Those precedents matter. They tell every official watching that there is almost nothing they cannot get away with if they wrap it in the right language.

Yemen: when passports stopped mattering

In Yemen, the United States used drones to kill individuals it accused of terrorism, including at least one citizen and his teenage son. There was no indictment, no trial, no attempt to capture. The executive branch asserted the right to be judge, jury and executioner for people who carried its own passport.

Congress did not impeach anybody. International courts did not issue warrants. Comment pages did not call for tribunals. The political system absorbed the crossing of that line by doing what it does best. It looked away.

Once a state learns that it can kill even its own citizens without consequence, the idea that foreign crews in distant waters have rights becomes very thin indeed.

What official narratives will not admit

The truths you will not hear on a think tank panel

There are a few uncomfortable observations that polite debate rarely touches.

One is that Nuremberg justice is largely reserved for the defeated. The duty to disobey illegal orders is held up as a universal principle, but in practice it is imposed on those who lose wars. Those who win rebrand the same behaviour as resolve.

Another is the way labels like terrorist, narco and extremist have been engineered to replace evidence. Attach the word and most of the hard thinking stops. The label does the work that due process is supposed to do.

There is also a deeper, structural point. The drug trade at the level of go fast boats and semi submersibles does not exist in a vacuum. It relies on shipping networks, finance, intelligence relationships and political protection. Drug money has been useful to powerful actors for a very long time. To focus on the men in the water is to stare at the bottom of a very tall pyramid.

AI, drones and the next phase of impunity

The drone era did not just give the United States a new way to kill at distance. It also changed the culture of decision. Strikes could be ordered from safe rooms, half a world away, with the messy reality of bodies and families reduced to icons on a screen.

From remote killing to algorithmic war

A new layer is now being added. Artificial intelligence systems are being woven into targeting, surveillance and information control. These systems will not only help choose who is marked as a threat. They will help shape the narrative after the fact.

It is not hard to imagine how this develops. You designate an enemy population. You feed data about them into models. The models help you rank targets, justify strikes, and flood the public space with convincing stories about why the dead had it coming. Synthetic witnesses, synthetic emotion and synthetic footage will make it harder than ever to challenge the official line.

The logic that treats foreign boat crews as expendable will not stop at the waterline. Once you have built tools that can erase human beings and then erase the truth about them, there is nothing in the technology that prevents their use against domestic opponents. The only brake is political, and that has been weakening for a long time.

Venezuela, the Caribbean and gunboat politics reborn

The strikes in the Caribbean do not only sit inside the drug war. They also sit inside a renewed contest over Venezuela and the wider region. Warships, no fly zones, sanctions and covert action are different instruments of the same project. Control the sea lanes. Control the airspace. Keep a government you dislike under constant threat.

Those who live in the region have seen this before. The Monroe Doctrine dressed up intervention as protection. Today, the language has been updated, but the underlying assumption remains. The Caribbean is treated as a strategic lake in which only one power has the right to project force.

Why the boat matters beyond its own tragedy

Whether that particular boat was carrying drugs, people or simply living bodies trying to survive in a shattered economic order, the message sent by its destruction is the same. Washington will use lethal force in what it considers its backyard, on the basis of secret intelligence, and expect the world to accept its story.

For people in South America and the Caribbean, this is not a revelation. It is confirmation. The helicopter over Nicaragua, the cruiser off Grenada, the carrier group off Venezuela, the missile over a go fast boat – these are chapters of the same book.

The only novelty is that, for a brief moment, some of that reality leaked into view in English for domestic consumption, stripped of the normal euphemisms. That window will close again unless it is forced open.

Why this matters for everyone who is not on the boat

It is tempting to see the Caribbean story as a niche scandal in a far away sea. That would be a mistake. The patterns it reveals are not confined to one policy or one geography.

They show a political class that has learned it can bypass law with impunity, so long as it does so to categories of people it has successfully dehumanised. They show an information system that can be relied upon to provide outrage at the crimes of enemies and euphemism at the crimes of friends. They show a technological system that is making it ever easier to kill at scale while keeping the public in a cloud of curated unknowing.

The real scandal is not that one secretary of war may have ordered a second missile into a sinking boat. The real scandal is that after Vietnam, Iraq, Gaza, Yemen and the entire drone era, anyone in Washington can still pretend to be surprised.

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References

Source Relevance to this article
UN Charter, Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocols Baseline legal framework on distinction, proportionality and treatment of combatants and civilians, including protections for survivors of ship sinkings and obligations to render aid.
Post Vietnam investigations and Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves Evidence that free fire zones, body count incentives and civilian massacres in Vietnam were systemic rather than isolated misdeeds.
UN and NGO reporting on civilian harm from U.S. drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen Documentation of double tap patterns, signature strikes and the killing of individuals outside declared battlefields including citizens.
Human rights and legal analyses of the U.S. “war on drugs” Tracing how criminal enforcement blurred into militarised action, including cross border operations and cooperation with foreign forces.
Investigations into financial institutions and drug money laundering Illustrating the role of major banks and global finance in sustaining the drug economy that public rhetoric blames solely on cartels.
Telegraph Online coverage of Venezuela and Caribbean militarisation Previously published reporting on sanctions, naval deployments, airspace restrictions and media narratives around Venezuela and U.S. power in the region.