Murder is murder and lies are lies
By 
I think it’s important to emphasize that murdering people suspected of criminal activity is, from a legal perspective, exactly the same as any other type of murder.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Friday that the U.S. carried out another strike on a vessel allegedly operated by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua that he said was trafficking drugs in the Caribbean Sea.
Hegseth said on social media that the strike killed all six men who were on board, and took place in international waters. He said it is the first strike to take place at night.
“The vessel was known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, was transiting along a known narco-trafficking route, and carrying narcotics,” he wrote. Hegseth included in his social media post a video, marked unclassified, of the vessel as it was hit.
This latest strike appears to be the 10th carried out by the Trump administration against alleged drug trafficking boats over the past several weeks, which have now led to more than 40 deaths. The first several took place in the Caribbean Sea, but this week, the administration’s campaign broadened into the Pacific Ocean.
Two men, one from Ecuador and the other from Colombia, survived a U.S. strike on a suspected drug-trafficking submersible vessel in the Caribbean Sea last week and were repatriated. The Ecuadorian man was released after the authorities there found no evidence he committed a crime, Ecuador’s attorney general’s office said. The Colombian citizen was hospitalized, and authorities there said he would be prosecuted.
The nature of the both sides frame is that it’s impossible to report these stories accurately, since an accurate report would point out that the US government is murdering people on the high seas, and that again it’s simply irrelevant as a matter of law whether these people are engaged in criminal activities or not. Instead, we get stories in which “legal experts” are quoted to the effect that these strikes are illegal, aka murder, and these quotes are paired with sub-frivolous claims from the government that they’re not.
The problem with this frame is that it creates a “debate” where there is none, at least among people who know anything about the subject. This is similar to “debates” about climate change or vaccines. These aren’t debates: they are conflicts between reality on the one side and propagandistic lies on the other.