Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
The Trump administration isn’t just acting illegally with domestic actions, but foreign policy actions. Assassinating criminals, even in foreign territory, is murder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfW6B66E3Qk
The Trump administration is using dishonest legal tactics to get away with their crusade to gather the medical records of transgender children.
A biased judge defying the law out of ideology or/and partisan bias, is helping the Trump administration and weakening America’s rule of law.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_bl71wDqSs
Some deporters say they are just enforcing the law, but they ignore laws they don’t like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N-qB20rYwA
ICE has been capturing people here legally and detaining them far away from where they were picked up. When courts find out about this and order ICE to release individuals, ICE sometimes doesn’t follow the orders. ICE Lawyers have been overwhelmed defending ICE’s lawlessness. One of ICE’s own lawyers admitted that when she tells them they have to release people held illegally, they don’t follow through because they don’t respect the courts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6o-_2thaI8
In an interview, Trump’s chief of staff described Elon’s brash, illegal, incompetency, and Trump’s lack of basic knowledge about what he’s doing, and the damage that his and Elon’s policies are doing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWk0OHko7m0
“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
…
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.
…
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/
“These bogus numbers would be merely amusing if Trump were not deploying them to justify a policy of killing suspected cocaine couriers, at a distance and in cold blood, without legal authorization or any semblance of due process.”
https://reason.com/2025/12/09/trump-is-still-claiming-he-saves-25000-american-lives-when-he-blows-up-a-suspected-drug-boat/
“military personnel not only “can refuse illegal orders”; they have an obligation to do so. Lederman also cited The Commander’s Handbook on the Law of Naval Operations, which similarly recognizes an exception to the general rule that “an order requiring the performance of a military duty to act may be inferred to be lawful, and it is disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate.” The handbook says that inference “does not apply to a patently illegal order, such as one that directs the commission of a crime.” The first example it offers—”an order directing the murder of a civilian [or] a noncombatant”—is clearly relevant to Trump’s bloodthirsty anti-drug strategy.
Trump has tried to justify that strategy in various ways: by conflating drug smuggling with violent aggression, by describing the men whose deaths he has ordered as members of “foreign terrorist organizations,” by asserting a “noninternational armed conflict,” and by preposterously claiming that “we save 25,000 lives” with each boat that is destroyed (which would add up to more than half a million deaths supposedly prevented so far). These arguments have been widely rejected by experts on the law of war.”
https://reason.com/2025/11/21/trump-says-legislators-committed-treason-by-noting-that-soldiers-are-not-obligated-to-obey-unlawful-orders/
Multiple high level military men have stepped down as the Trump administration appears to murder suspected drug traffickers. The administration showed their intel justifying the strikes only to some Republican Congressmen rather than to members of both parties, so Congress as a whole can’t even analyze the justifications.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wUXGd7P-0g