Charlie Savage

And the rhetorical justification has been, yes, but tens of thousands of Americans are dying from overdoses each year.

And that's equivalent to an attack.

So once it's an armed conflict, you can hit the boat, supposedly.

One of the things that this memo says that is different than...

the public rhetoric the administration has been putting forward is that the drugs, the purported cargo on these boats is a lawful military target.

Why?

Because the drug cartels could sell those drugs, they could get the profits and spend them on military equipment to sustain their supposed war efforts against the United States.

Hmm.

And so part of this murkiness around what is the reason the U.S.

fires on this boat in the first instance, keeps firing on it until everyone is dead, then the boat is at the bottom of the ocean, is was the target of those follow-up strikes especially?

Was it the drugs?

Was it the boat?

Or was it the people?

Was it all of them in some confusing way?

Yes.

Admiral Bradley is in a much stronger position if that's what he says and if there's contemporaneous evidence backing him up.

Again, though...

Only if you accept in the first place that this is an armed conflict and this is the right lens to be bringing to bear on this at all.

Because if it's not, they didn't have a right to kill the people in the first place.

It is an extremely difficult dilemma when you're faced with a commander in chief who's issuing orders backed by a Justice Department memo that very few people outside of the current executive branch of government think holds water.