Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
The US as a rule of law democracy, and international norms and values against military action against other countries, are under threat with this attack on Venezuela.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu9QSeAI22I
The Supreme Court has always had elements of reverse engineering where justices reach their conclusions based on political ideology, then reverse engineer a legal argument. Their political ideology may even design their legal philosophy from the very beginning of their legal thinking! However, the justices on the right seem to even be dropping the reverse engineering, and getting more sloppy in their legal thinking, pushing forward their political ideology and partisanship even more. Bush V Gore may have been the moment that the conservative justices crossed the Rubicon and realized that they can get away with pushing partisan, ideological agendas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yrj66mQQOM
“the goal of disrupting and deterring drug smuggling would not justify a policy of summarily executing criminal suspects without statutory authorization or any semblance of due process. That is why Trump is trying to justify his bloodthirsty anti-drug strategy by calling his targets “combatants” in a “non-international armed conflict”—a term he has stretched beyond recognition.
Congress has not recognized that purported “armed conflict,” and it is a counterintuitive label for the unilateral violence exemplified by the September 2 attack. The boat that Bradley destroyed, which reportedly “turned around before the attack started because the people onboard had apparently spotted a military aircraft stalking it,” was not engaged in any sort of attack on American targets and offered no resistance. The same was true of the vessels destroyed in subsequent attacks on suspected drug boats
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The violence in such attacks is so one-sided that the government’s lawyers claim blowing up drug boats does not constitute “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution because U.S. personnel face no plausible risk of casualties. So we are talking about an “armed conflict” that does not involve “hostilities” yet somehow does involve enemy “combatants.”
Unless you accept that baffling premise, the attempt to justify Bradley’s second strike under the law of war is incomprehensible. “Two U.S. officials have said the military intercepted radio communications from the survivors to suspected cartel members, raising the possibility that any drugs on the boat that had not burned up in the first blast could have been retrieved,” The New York Times reports. “The military, they said, interpreted the purported distress call as meaning the survivors were still ‘in the fight’ and so were not shipwrecked.”
In reality, of course, those men were not “in the fight” to begin with, because there was no “fight.” A unilateral act of aggression by U.S. forces hardly amounts to a battle, and it is hard to see how a radio call for help qualifies as the sort of “hostile act” that the Defense Department’s manual says excludes someone from “shipwrecked” status. To illustrate that exception, the manual notes that “shipwrecked persons do not include combatant personnel engaged in amphibious, underwater, or airborne attacks who are proceeding ashore.””
https://reason.com/2025/12/04/boat-attack-commander-says-he-had-to-kill-2-survivors-because-they-were-still-trying-to-smuggle-cocaine/
“While the renewed congressional interest in the legal and moral justification for Trump’s bloodthirsty anti-drug strategy is welcome, that inquiry should not be limited to the question of whether one particular attack violated the law of war.
The details of Bradley’s defense nevertheless illustrate the outrageous implications of conflating drug smuggling with violent aggression. He argues that the seemingly helpless men in the water, who were blown apart by a second missile while clinging to the boat’s smoldering wreckage, still posed a threat because they could have recovered and delivered whatever cocaine might have remained after the first strike.
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In reality, there was no “fight” to stay in. The violence exemplified by this attack is so one-sided that the government’s lawyers claim blowing up drug boats does not constitute “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution because U.S. personnel face no plausible risk of casualties. So we are talking about an “armed conflict” that does not involve “hostilities” yet somehow does involve enemy “combatants”—who, contrary to that label, are not actually engaged in combat.
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Bradley seems to have determined that the flailing men were engaged in a “hostile act” simply by existing near a boat remnant that might have contained salvageable cocaine. As ridiculous as that position is, it is only a bit more risible than Trump’s assertion that supplying cocaine to Americans amounts to “an armed attack against the United States” that justifies a lethal military response.
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“There is a risk that the focus on the second strike and specifically the talk of ‘war crimes’ feeds into the administration’s false wartime framing and veils the fact that the entire boat-strikes campaign is murder, full stop,” Cardozo School of Law professor Rebecca Ingber, an expert on the law of war, told The New York Times. “The administration’s evolving justification for the second strike only lays bare the absurdity of their legal claims for the campaign as a whole—that transporting drugs is somehow the equivalent of wartime hostilities.””
https://reason.com/2025/12/05/the-threat-that-supposedly-justified-killing-2-boat-attack-survivors-was-entirely-speculative/
“the main opposition to including specific protections for the Bill of Rights came not from those who thought the document went too far, but from people who feared it didn’t go far enough.
James Madison, then a representative in Congress decades before his election to the White House, believed rights are natural and preexist any form of government. Man “has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person,” he commented in a 1792 newspaper column. “Conscience is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that, being a natural and unalienable right.” Protecting specific rights, he feared, might lead Americans to believe those were their only rights, and that they’re granted by government.
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In an 1819 letter Jefferson wrote that “rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”
That was long after he’d prevailed upon Madison in their correspondence to consider that the new Constitution assigns significant authority to the federal legislative and executive branches and should “guard us against their abuses of power.”
“If we cannot secure all our rights, let us secure what we can” with a formal Bill of Rights, he continued. While such a document “is not absolutely efficacious under all circumstances, it is of great potency always, and rarely inefficacious.”
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The Ninth Amendment addressed Madison’s concerns about protecting only some rights by embedding his natural rights ideas in the document. It states: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.””
https://reason.com/2025/12/08/bill-of-rights-day-how-your-rights-keep-authoritarianism-in-check/
“these materials, although controversial in their advocacy for insurrection, squatting, and anarchy, are all squarely constitutionally protected speech. The government cannot infringe upon one’s First Amendment right to read, possess, or write—unless the author is inciting imminent lawless action—anti-government or pro-revolution literature. And while some may see the ideas in Sanchez’s box as dangerous, anti-government zines and pamphlets are far more similar to the Revolutionary-era literature popular when the First Amendment was passed than today’s social media landscape, as Seth Stern of The Intercept points out.
However, after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in September designating “antifa” as a “major terrorist organization, prosecutors, like the ones in Sanchez’s case, are attempting to use materials that “explicitly [call] for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law” as evidence of criminality, despite their constituitonal protection.”
https://reason.com/2025/11/26/texas-man-faces-up-to-40-years-in-prison-for-transporting-constitutionally-protected-pamphlets/
“From the beginning, America was a mixture of peoples. John Adams wrote that it resembled “several distinct nations almost” and pondered whether such a collection could truly cohere. Leaders marveled as the first census revealed an array of languages, religions, and origins. Yet over time, Americans did form a common identity—not through blood or inherited culture but through shared ideals. National unity solidified after these ideals were articulated in the Declaration and given lasting institutional form in the Constitution.
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Constitutional limits exist because the Founders feared unchecked power, whether exercised by a ruler or by majorities which have at times been egregiously wrong. The Constitution protects a pluralistic society from the dangers of centralized authority and ideological certitude. In a nation as varied as ours, those protections are not optional.
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The Constitution doesn’t guarantee national unity. It guarantees something better: a system that channels conflict without destroying liberty. As Wood notes, democracy can be volatile. The Founders knew that well. Their answer is a framework that moderates collective impulses while preserving the rights of individuals and minorities.”
https://reason.com/2025/11/27/some-say-the-constitution-has-failed-this-thanksgiving-heres-why-it-hasnt/
“Back in early September, he declared that the newly renamed Department of War would favor “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”
The secretary of war clearly meant it, judging from a story in The Washington Post. The paper reports that Hegseth issued verbal orders to the military forces striking suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific to “kill everybody.”
When the inaugural strike in this campaign against a boat off the Trinidadian coast left two survivors clinging to the wreckage of the craft, the commander in charge of the operation, in accordance with Hegseth’s spoken directive, ordered a second strike to take them out too.
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The administration’s officially secret legal justification for these strikes asserts that “narco-terrorists” are using the money earned from trafficking drugs to finance their war against the United States and its allies. Suspected drug smugglers are therefore, it claims, a legitimate counter-terrorism target.
Many international law experts have retorted that the boats themselves pose no imminent threat to Americans, and that the people on board the boats are not combatants but suspected criminals who one would normally expect to be arrested, not executed.
The administration’s position “can justify almost anything the government wants to do to anyone,” wrote Reason’s Matthew Petti back in September.
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Even if one accepts the dubious idea that these strikes are legal, the second strike described in the Post report would violate the laws of war. More plainly, it would be murder.
An order to kill boat occupants no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations, told the Post.
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The Trump administration is using the military to target people suspected of breaking criminal laws against drug trafficking. It’s choosing to kill these suspected criminals when they pose to immediate threat to anyone, instead of simply arresting them.”
https://reason.com/2025/12/01/kill-everybody/
The modern presidents wield authority far beyond anything the founders envisioned
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCd0Wx4-ap4
Trump threatens to jail Democratic lawmakers for saying that troops should not follow illegal orders, even though that is true, military men and women shouldn’t follow orders that are illegal. Threatening to jail lawmakers for such statements is yet another dent in U.S. Democracy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ0RTOYhqKs