Huff Post: Things Are Getting Real For Democrats As Food Cliff For Millions Approaches by 6ixStringJack

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Huff Post: Things Are Getting Real For Democrats As Food Cliff For Millions Approaches

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Friday, October 31, 2025 20:46
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Friday, October 31, 2025 4:29 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/democrats-government-shutdown-food-stam
ps_n_69027e97e4b057baa82d6cdb

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Friday, October 31, 2025 6:17 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

It got real when Trump began executing people rather than arresting them. At least 61 people have been killed on 15 vessels. There is even a wiki page keeping track of how many people Trump murders:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_military_strikes_on_a
lleged_drug_traffickers

Even the Nazis kept secret how many people Hitler murdered, but Trump is proud of his murders. He brags!

Getting Away with Murder

Trump has now ordered the killing of at least seventeen people on the high seas—with no accountability.

By David Cole | October 23, 2025 issue

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/10/23/getting-away-with-murder-t
rump-strikes/

During his first presidential campaign Donald Trump famously claimed that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any voters. At the time it felt like an empty boast. No more.

Between September 2 and September 19 the US military, acting on President Trump’s orders, bombed three boats traveling in international waters, reportedly killing seventeen civilians in cold blood. Ordinarily when US armed forces kill civilians, the president does not brag about it, yet Trump is apparently so proud of the executions that he posted video footage of them on Truth Social. And while ordinarily the killing of any civilian prompts investigations and apologies, in this instance the administration has promised only that there are more to come. “To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America,” Trump said during his speech at the UN General Assembly on September 23, “please be warned that we will blow you out of existence.”

There was no conceivable legal authority for these killings. We are not at war with drug traffickers. The “war on drugs” is a metaphor, not a legal term of art that authorizes killing the “enemy.” The human beings on these boats were civilians, and even if there were an actual war going on, the laws of war prohibit targeting civilians unless they are directly engaged in hostilities. Even if the boats’ occupants were, as the administration alleges, carrying illegal drugs, that offense would at most have authorized their arrest, trial, and, if convicted, incarceration for a period of years. It would not authorize the death penalty, much less their summary execution without trial.

Trump has called the dead “narcoterrorists” and has asserted that the eleven killed in the first strike were associated with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, a “foreign terrorist organization.” But that designation authorizes only economic sanctions against the group, such as freezing their assets, and criminal penalties against Americans who do business with them. It does not authorize any use of military force, much less the intentional lethal targeting of civilians.

The boats did not pose any conceivable threat to the United States requiring lethal force. They were found on the high seas, reportedly coming from Venezuela. The first boat, according to The New York Times, had turned around before it was bombed, and the military reportedly continued to bomb it even after it had been disabled. Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged that they could have interdicted the vessel, but said that instead they bombed it to send a message: “This president is not a talker; he’s a doer—he’s going to do it.”

Trump has maintained that drug cartels kill tens of thousands of Americans every year, presumably through overdoses, and that other nations are not doing enough to stop the trade. The result, he insisted in a letter to Congress after the first strike, is that “we have now reached a critical point where we must meet this threat to our citizens and our most vital national interests with United States military force in self-defense.” But the fact that drugs are a scourge in the US in no way gives the president the authority to start killing drug dealers—here, abroad, or at sea. And it is farcical to cite “self-defense” to justify bombing these ships to smithereens, without even a shred of evidence that they threatened to attack us.

In the absence of any conceivable military justification for these acts, it is difficult to view them as anything but premeditated murder, pure and simple. Federal law makes it a crime to kill a human being “with malice aforethought” on the high seas, and to conspire to do so. As my Georgetown Law colleague Marty Lederman, a former Justice Department official in the Office of Legal Counsel, has explained in an essay on the website Just Security, not only is it “questionable whether the President had any affirmative legal authority to order” the attack, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that, “absent further facts that haven’t yet been disclosed, the strike would appear to have implicated the federal felony murder statutes.”

Maybe “most alarming,” in Lederman’s estimation, is how dramatically these killings break from the Defense Department’s stated commitment, required by international law, not to target civilians, even in wartime. Indeed, Trump’s actions are so indefensible that even John Yoo, who as a Justice Department official authorized waterboarding and other forms of torture against suspected al-Qaeda detainees, and who takes about as robust a view of executive authority over national security as anyone, has seriously questioned the legal basis for the strikes, insisting that it is dangerous to blur the line between law enforcement and war.

But the White House couldn’t care less. This was made crystal clear when Vice President J.D. Vance, ever the good learner at the foot of his boss, posted on X that “killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.” When Brian Krassenstein, a critic of the Trump administration, replied that “killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime,” the vice-president of the United States responded, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”

This is not normal. Prior presidents have invoked war authorities on dubious grounds to justify the use of lethal force and other unlawful measures, as when Ronald Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada on the pretense of protecting Americans in medical school there, or when George W. Bush asserted the authority to disappear suspected al-Qaeda terrorists into secret CIA “black sites” and torture them, or when Barack Obama resorted to drones to assassinate suspected members of al-Qaeda or ISIS. Each questionable exercise of executive authority eases the way for further expansions. But never before has a US president asserted the authority to order the cold-blooded execution of civilians outside any even arguable military conflict. And never before has a US president then turned around and boasted about his own crimes to the public at large. If the president can order the summary killing of drug dealers on the high seas, why not elsewhere—say, Mexico, or Chicago?

Now a draft bill is reportedly circulating in Congress and the White House that would expressly authorize Trump to execute more “narcoterrorists,” a veritable license to kill civilians without trial. The fact that the White House and its allies are considering such a bill only underscores the absence of existing authority for the strikes. Such a blank check, moreover, would not change the fact that targeting civilians who are not directly engaged in combat is illegal under international law. It would just make Congress complicit in Trump’s crimes.

When the Supreme Court last year granted President Trump absolute immunity from any criminal prosecution for “official” acts taken while in office, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her dissent that the Court was giving presidents a green light to kill. Trump has now apparently acted on that opportunity — by his own count, on at least three separate occasions. Yet, in keeping with his 2016 campaign boast, as far as we can tell Trump has not lost any support to speak of as a result. Indeed, amid the White House’s barrage of daily assaults on the rule of law, the killings seem barely to have registered on the nation’s conscience.

So much of what Trump has done since taking office is beyond the pale that it’s easy to lose track. He’s pardoned the January 6 rioters, even those convicted of violent attacks on police. He’s invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority, to summarily deport Venezuelans, even though we are not at war with that country. He’s dismantled agencies that Congress established, and refused to spend billions of dollars that Congress directed him to spend. He’s tried to deny birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants, in direct violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. He’s used pretextual charges of antisemitism to target universities he considers too liberal, and imposed blatantly unconstitutional penalties on law firms for filing cases or hiring attorneys he does not like.

But since long before the founding of this nation, the law has recognized that in the hierarchy of illegal and immoral acts, premeditated murder sits at the very apex. The US remains one of the only democracies to continue to employ the death penalty, a punishment most of the world has rejected as cruel and unusual. But at least there are limits on that sanction. It can only be imposed for homicide (not drug smuggling), and only after a full trial and a robust round of appeals. The hapless—and thus far nameless—persons on board the boats that Donald Trump literally had blown out of the water this month did not even get that.
—September 25, 2025

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, October 31, 2025 7:07 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
It got real when Trump began executing people rather than arresting them. At least 61 people have been killed on 15 vessels. There is even a wiki page keeping track of how many people Trump murders:

Oh. THAT is when it got real, huh?

So the last 9 years of TDS bullshit out of you was just fake then?

Shut the fuck up. This thread is about food stamps and the Democrat shutdown, idiot.

As for Venezuela... Stop sending drug boats to our shores and we'll stop killing you before you get here.

--------------------------------------------------

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Friday, October 31, 2025 7:24 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
It got real when Trump began executing people rather than arresting them. At least 61 people have been killed on 15 vessels. There is even a wiki page keeping track of how many people Trump murders:

Oh. THAT is when it got real, huh?

So the last 9 years of TDS bullshit out of you was just fake then?

Shut the fuck up. This thread is about food stamps and the Democrat shutdown, idiot.

As for Venezuela... Stop sending drug boats to our shores and we'll stop killing you before you get here.

6ixStringJoker, you are deranged. I'm not joking.

Trump Administration Admits It Doesn’t Know Who It’s Killing In Boat Strikes

Officials acknowledged they don’t know the identities of the people they’re killing and can’t meet the evidentiary burden to prosecute survivors.

By Nick Turse | October 31 2025, 4:30 p.m.

https://theintercept.com/2025/10/31/trump-venezuela-boat-strikes-unpri
vileged-belligerants/

The Trump administration has made a series of startling admissions about the people it is killing in its undeclared war against suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Trump officials acknowledged in separate briefings provided to lawmakers and staffers on Thursday that they do not know the identities of the victims of their strikes, and that the War Department cannot meet the evidentiary burden necessary to hold or try survivors of the attacks. Such victims who find themselves in the water are now deemed “unprivileged belligerents,” a murky designation under international humanitarian law.

Since September 2, the U.S. military has been attacking boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing more than 60 civilians. The Trump administration insists the slayings are permissible because the U.S. is engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations,” or DTOs. Two government officials told The Intercept that the administration secretly declared a “non-international armed conflict” weeks before the first attack of the campaign.

Trump has justified the attacks, in a War Powers report to Congress, under his Article II constitutional authority as commander in chief of the U.S. military and claimed to be acting pursuant to the United States’ inherent right of self-defense as a matter of international law. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has also produced a classified opinion that provides legal cover for the lethal strikes.
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/trump-offers-first-legal-justific
ation-for-venezuela-boat-strike

Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement arrested suspected drug smugglers.

“We are not in an armed conflict with these cartels. And so this is just murder.”

The administration has no plans to seek an authorization for the use of military force similar to the 2001 AUMF, which authorized counterterrorism operations by the U.S. military against those responsible for 9/11, Pentagon briefers told lawmakers on Thursday. “Even if Congress authorized it, this would still be illegal under U.S. and international law because we are not in an armed conflict with these cartels,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee who attended the briefing, told The Intercept. “And so this is just murder.”

Jacobs said the Pentagon officials who briefed her on Thursday admitted that the administration does not know the identities of all the individuals who were killed in the strikes. “They said that they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessels to do the strikes,” Jacobs told The Intercept. “They just need to show a connection to a DTO or affiliate.”

Three people are known to have survived the U.S. attacks: two on an October 16 strike, and one during a series of attacks on October 27. But none have been prosecuted for the supposed drug smuggling for which Trump claims the right to summarily kill them. “They said they could not actually hold or try the individuals that survived one of the attacks — in our country or one of the repatriating countries — because they could not satisfy the evidentiary burden,” said Jacobs. “It led some to speculate that there’s a higher evidentiary standard to hold someone than to kill them, which is problematic.”

Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson did not reply to questions about why the Department of War is unwilling to positively identify the people it is killing and cannot satisfy the evidentiary burden necessary to hold or prosecute suspects.

Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, noted that Trump administration’s inability to identify the people it is killing “certainly undermines the labelling of these individuals as ‘narco-terrorists.’”

Jacobs and other government officials who spoke to The Intercept conjectured that the administration may not want to reveal its sources and methods of determining that the targeted craft are smuggling drugs. “These individuals don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. It’s not worth it. If it’s not the leader of the cartel, you’re not burning your sources,” said one government official, referring to so-called top secret sensitive compartmented information involving human sources and signals intelligence integral to the U.S. attacks.

Three government officials who spoke to The Intercept said that the Pentagon deems survivors of strikes in the water to be “unprivileged belligerents,” a term for those who are not entitled to immunity from prosecution for lawful acts of war and do not benefit from prisoner of war status if they fall into enemy hands. The term has been used to designate members of a non-state armed group in a non-international armed conflict. Experts noted that the designation was used during the global war on terror for Al Qaeda and associated groups.

“The problem with DoD calling cartels ‘unprivileged belligerents’ is that the U.S. is not actually in a non-international armed conflict — a legal term of art that, to be applicable, requires specific facts that just aren’t the current reality — and so cannot lawfully use lethal force as a first resort,” said Sarah Harrison, who advised military leaders on extrajudicial killings in her former role as associate general counsel at the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs. “Notwithstanding the fictional narrative being pushed by the White House, the U.S. is not in a war with these groups and the people DoD is targeting are civilians who should be afforded due process.”

Wilson, the Pentagon press secretary, did not reply to a request for comment about the reasons behind the War Department’s use of unprivileged belligerent status for attack survivors.

The Thursday House briefing was led by Rear Adm. Brian H. Bennett, a military officer overseeing Special Operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff with assistance from Richard Tilley who serves as the acting assistant secretary of war for special operations and low-intensity conflict. Military lawyers had been scheduled to join them but were withdrawn at the last moment on orders from the Trump administration, according to two government officials who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity. As a result, the Pentagon officials were unable to provide a full explanation of the legal basis for the military strikes.

“At a classified HASC briefing on recent counternarcotics operations in the Pacific and Caribbean, the Pentagon pulled its lawyers — the exact people who would supply a legal justification for these strikes — from the briefing with no notice,” Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., explained. “If the Trump Administration thinks these strikes are legally justified, hiding from Congress sends the opposite message.”

“I found their justification for what they’re doing so flimsy that it makes the case for the Iraq War look like a slam dunk,” he said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “It was that bad.”

The Pentagon has been withholding key information about the attacks and the list of DTOs for almost two months. During a Wednesday press conference, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, blasted the Trump administration for conducting a secret briefing on the legal rationale for the strikes for a select group of Republican senators on Wednesday after Secretary of State Marco Rubio had assured Warner that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel opinion would be provided.

“Shutting Democrats out of a briefing on U.S. military strikes and withholding the legal justification for those strikes from half the Senate is indefensible and dangerous. Decisions about the use of American military force are not campaign strategy sessions, and they are not the private property of one political party,” Warner said in a statement. “This partisan stunt is a slap in the face to Congress’ war powers responsibilities and to the men and women who serve this country. It also sets a reckless and deeply troubling precedent. The administration must immediately provide to Democrats the same briefing and the OLC opinion justifying these strikes, as Secretary Rubio personally promised me that he would in a face-to-face meeting on Capitol Hill just last week.”

Two government officials told The Intercept that a select group of lawmakers were able to see the OLC opinion and list of DTOs in a restricted setting on Thursday, following Warner’s press conference. Warner’s office did not return a request for comment about whether he was one of those lawmakers.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., believes that there may be “dozens” of DTOs. Jacobs agreed. “Dozens is the range,” she told The Intercept.

Jacobs, despite her role on the Intelligence and Special Operations subcommittee, has yet to see either the Justice Department opinion or DTO list. “They told us is that they’re working on getting the OLC memo, the list of DTOs, and one or two other things that we’d asked for over to us, but that they wouldn’t give us a timeline,” she said.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, October 31, 2025 8:05 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I noticed you getting all huffy and virtue-signally, SECOND, so ...

Quote:
Obama’s covert drone war in numbers: ten times more strikes than Bush

Obama embraced the US drone programme, overseeing more strikes in his first year than Bush carried out during his entire presidency. A total of 563 strikes, largely by drones, targeted Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen during Obama’s two terms, compared to 57 strikes under Bush. Between 384 and 807 civilians were killed in those countries, according to reports logged by the Bureau.

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/obamas-covert
-drone-war-in-numbers-ten-times-more-strikes-than-bush/

Jeez, what a Karen, clutching his pearls.

-----------

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Friday, October 31, 2025 8:46 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Why don't you go back to crying about your 300,000 dead kids from lack of USAid funding, idiot?

Nobody is going to cry for Venezuelan drug boats being blown out of the fucking water, douche bag.

Just wait until we really kick it into high gear here and start removing illegals by the millions.

--------------------------------------------------

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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