Can somebody help me understand why everyone is losing their minds over us blowing up drug boats in international waters?
If you want to make an argument that they deserve a fair trial, I don't disagree.
If you want to make an argument that the Coast Guard is primarily responsible for drug interdiction, I don't disagree.
If you want to make an argument that people in government should be held responsible for giving orders to murder innocent people, I don't disagree.
But why now? Our government has been killing people without trials for decades - sometimes under the guise of war, but oftentimes not. I'm not justifying it, I'm just questioning why OH MY GOSH THIS IS A HUGE DEAL all of a sudden.
For context, lets look at the Obama Administration?s reliance on killing at a distance and toleration of avoidable civilian casualties. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported on January 17, 2017 that President Obama authorized 563 strikes with estimated civilian deaths ranging from 384 to 807. Obama?s first strike was a disaster in Yemen when they misidentified a target and hit a tribe with cluster munitions killing 55 people of whom 21 were children with 10 of them under five. Twelve of the victims were women with five of them pregnant. If the House and Senate Armed Services Committees want to investigate the death of two drug cartel members off Venezuela maybe they could begin with a roll-call of the innocent civilians, including women and children, killed by President Obama?s orders and a review of the rules of engagement the Obama Administration followed.
I'm floored by the hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance on display. It was totally okay and even well-supported by the press to delete thousands of people without fair trials from drones overhead in the Middle East for two decades, but suddenly it's not okay anymore? What's the reason people are suddenly upset about something we've been doing for years and years? Joe Biden even argued on camera in 1989 that the president wasn't doing enough and he even advocated for sending the military into foreign lands to stop the source of the drugs:
So why now?Quote:
"The trouble is that the president's proposals are not big enough to deal with the problem. We think we should do more to stem the flow of drugs across our borders, and we think we should go one step further: Let's go after the drug lords where they live with an international strike force. There must be no safe haven for these narco-terrorists and they must know it." -Joe Biden in 1989 as a rebuttal to the president's proposal to deal with the national drug problem.
We all know why.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
