The U.S. Just Hit Strike #50…
And Nobody Asked Who We’re Killing
By Tom Hicks - The Unredacted Bastard | Independent Journalist • Democracy’s Fire Alarm • Professional Shit-Stirrer
Bastard’s Law
When a government quietly reclassifies a problem as “terrorism,” it’s not because the problem changed. It’s because the rules did — and they needed a way to break them without saying so.
Fifty.
The United States just carried out its 50th military strike against boats in the eastern Pacific, and I’m going to go ahead and guess that number surprises you, because it surprised the shit out of me, and I’ve been paying attention. That’s the whole fucking problem right there — fifty strikes, more than a hundred people dead, and this thing has been running so quiet that someone who actively looks for this shit still had to go hunting for it.
That’s not an accident. That’s a feature.
This isn’t some rogue operation that snowballed. This is a program. This is a counter that somebody set running and then let run, while the rest of us were busy watching whatever fire they lit that week to keep our eyes somewhere else. Fifty strikes don’t happen by mistake. Fifty strikes happen because nobody with any power to stop it decided to give enough of a damn to try.
And here’s the thing that really gets me — this isn’t a war. Not officially. We haven’t declared anything. There’s no enemy nation, no authorization that went through the process it was supposed to go through. These are military strikes in international waters against people the government called “narco-terrorists,” and the whole reason that phrase exists is so they don’t have to explain the rest of it. Say terrorist, conversation over. That’s the whole move.
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The last strike killed four people. The total dead in this campaign is north of a hundred. And here’s what the public has been given in terms of evidence that any of these people were who the government says they were: nothing. Not “the details are complicated.” Not “we can share what we can.” Nothing. No names. No verification. No independent confirmation of a goddamn thing. Just the word of the people who did the killing, delivered after the fact, and we’re all supposed to file it under “probably fine” and move on.
The U.S. has not publicly provided evidence to support its claims that those targeted were drug traffickers.
I’ll just leave that sitting there for a second.
Because that sentence is the whole story. That’s it. That’s what this comes down to. We are killing people, more than a hundred of them now, and the official position is essentially: we said so, that’s enough, next question. And the truly maddening part? It’s been working. The next question mostly hasn’t come.
Once “we said so” becomes an acceptable answer for why someone is dead, you haven’t just bent the rules. You’ve pulled the floor out. Due process isn’t red tape. It’s the thing that separates a government that has to justify itself from one that just does whatever it wants and dares you to push back. That line has been getting thinner for a while now. We just hit fifty on the counter, and the line is looking pretty goddamn faint.
Now I want to talk about the word. Because the word is doing all the work here, and it deserves some attention.
Narco-terrorist.
Not drug trafficker. Not smuggler. Not even cartel member, which at least implies some kind of organizational structure they’d have to demonstrate. Terrorist. And I know that sounds like I’m splitting hairs, but I am absolutely not splitting hairs, because that one word is a trapdoor that drops you out of the entire legal framework that was supposed to govern this. Drug trafficker is a law enforcement problem. Terrorist is a warfare problem. And warfare has different rules. Or rather, fewer of them. Evidence becomes classified. Courts don’t enter into it. Oversight becomes a suggestion. The whole architecture of accountability that somebody spent a long time building gets routed around with a vocabulary choice.
Civil liberties people flagged this. They said it plainly: slap the terrorist label on someone and you’ve just handed the military authority over a problem that law enforcement was specifically built to handle. Built to handle because handing the military a domestic-adjacent problem with no evidentiary standard and no real oversight was, at some point, understood to be a catastrophically bad idea. That understanding is now inconvenient, so here we are.
And once calling someone a terrorist is sufficient justification to kill them, no trial, no evidence made public, no accounting for who they actually were, the definition of terrorist becomes the single most dangerous tool the government has. Because it’s not a fixed category. It’s a decision. It moves. It expands to fit whatever the problem is next week, next year, in a different context that today seems totally unrelated, justified with the same logic and defended with the exact same silence.
Today it’s boats in the Pacific. Keep watching where the label goes.
Oh, and it’s not even working. I should mention that part.
Most fentanyl coming into this country doesn’t come in on boats floating around in open water. It comes through land routes. Through legal ports of entry. Because the people running this operation aren’t idiots sitting in the middle of the ocean hoping nobody notices them. The actual supply chain is moving through the front door, structured and efficient, and has not missed a step while we’ve been out here racking up a body count in the Pacific.
This isn’t strategy. This is the government trying to shut down Amazon by busting a guy selling phone chargers out of his trunk, except in this version, the guy might not have worked for Amazon, nobody checked before he died, and the warehouses are still shipping. It looks like something. It produces numbers. It gives someone a press release. It doesn’t do a damn thing to the actual problem.
And that’s not a side effect. If it were a side effect, someone would have adjusted course somewhere between strike ten and strike fifty.
There’s a reason this has stayed quiet, and it’s not just the classification. It’s the noise. Attention goes to whatever is loudest, and this isn’t loud; it just runs. It’s been running. Tab open in the background, counter ticking up, and the news cycle obligingly kept pointing everyone somewhere else. No vote. No debate. No sustained moment where somebody on television asked the obvious question: on what authority, exactly, are we doing this? Who authorized a hundred-plus deaths in international waters based on a label the public doesn’t get to examine?
Nobody asked. The answer might be that there isn’t a great one. So nobody asked.
Just continuation. And continuation is how something goes from “did you hear about this” to “that’s just how it works now.”
I keep coming back to one thing. The question isn’t whether the people on those boats were guilty. Some of them might have been. We don’t know. That’s the problem, not a detail around it; we genuinely do not know, and the system as currently operating does not require us to know, and that is what should be scaring the hell out of you.
Because if the government gets to decide in secret that someone is guilty enough to die, and the public’s role is to find out later and decide they’re probably okay with it, that’s not a quirk in the system. That’s the system. And systems like that don’t stay pointed at boats in the Pacific. They get refined. They get applied. They find new problems to solve with the same tools and the same silence.
You can decide that’s too far away to matter. That’s the easy call, and it’s exactly why this thing is on fifty.
Or you can sit with the question: what are you comfortable letting run without asking?
💣 TRUTH BOMB When your solution looks tough but misses the problem, it’s not policy. It’s performance with a body count.
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