There's no public evidence of that though. No trial. It's the same as if we sent the navy to board those boats, put a gun to people's heads and execute them in cold blood.
100% agreed with this and this is one of the worst issues about the development of long range weapons. 'We droned this guy.' 'We bombed this area.' 'We destroyed this boat.'
All of this really sounds so much better than what it really is. It's murdering people all around the world, many of whom are 100% innocent. For instance the last person we droned in occupied Afghanistan was Zemari Ahmadi - a longtime worker for a US humanitarian aid organization. A US drone operator mistook bottles of water he was loading into his car for his family as bombs, and so they murdered him as well as 10 other civilians, including 7 children, all with the press of a button. [1]
Under US law, 100% of them are 100% innocent, by definition. "Innocent until proven guilty" and whatnot; it literally means that every person is innocent in the eyes of the law until a court finds them guilty.
Its kind of irrelavent in an armed conflict. There are a bunch of rules (i.e. the geneva conventions) around who can and cannot be targeted in an armed conflict, but innocent vs guilty is not how it works. Innocent people being killed can sometimes totally be consistent with the rules of war. Guilty people being killed can sometimes be a violation of the rules. Innocent vs guiltly is the wrong metaphor for what makes a legal target.
In the modern sense, yes. We no longer declare wars explicitly, nor do we limit that decision to Congress. Trump's decision to attack these targets is consistent with every other conflict we've engaged in since before either of us were born... national security threats. Even if you believe the dope itself to be no great national security threat, that's just their payload today, maybe next time they'll smuggle in a nuke or whatever.
Of all the things that people on the left might find objectionable about Trump, this should be at the very far bottom of the list.
> Of all the things that people on the left might find objectionable about Trump, this should be at the very far bottom of the list.
Given that the left are the only ones complaining about the extrajudicial killings under the Obama administration, I disagree.
Personally, I find public officials murdering unarmed people objectionable in practically all cases. And I think it's probably the worst thing a public official can do.
>Given that the left are the only ones complaining about the extrajudicial killings under the Obama administration, I disagree.
I see no evidence of that. The only places I've ever noticed any complaints there were from the alt-right and libertarians (same thing?). You can see this in magazine titles like Reason if you care to check.
>I find public officials murdering unarmed people
What evidence is there that these people were unarmed? And what if they were? If there was 800 pounds of cocaine (or whatever) on board, and they didn't even have a butter knife with them... why should that somehow exempt them from the hostile response they received?
lol, no. Alt-rights may call themselves "libertarian" while they're testing the waters before they can admit to themselves that their real desires are rooted in coercing people. But libertarianism, being concerned with individual liberty, is fundamentally leftist. The rightist axiomatic conception of the US "Libertarian" party can be useful on a small scale, but scaled up it doesn't amount to much beyond just another system of control. Proof by contradiction - definitionally ruling out coercion based on intrinsic market inefficiencies means one can merely reframe any government as a monopolistic corporation with onerous contracts to achieve a hollow "Libertopia".
We should probably enact harsher laws on drug smugglers / narco traffickers. A lot of asian countries have essentially declared the death penalty to drug importers.
The administration wants to see results and it would seem that the problem is that the American judicial systems is set up to simply cost money, which is something narcos have.
If you take a cartel to court, they just have a lawyer tie up your law team. We've made the mistake of allowing capitalism to influence too many of our systems of government from judicial (cost of lawyers) to electoral (advertisement costs and political campaigning). Isn't this the problem?
Actually i find all those other interventions unacceptable as well. Nobody on earth should be accepting summary executions in international waters without evidence. Today "cartels," tomorrow journalists.
> Of all the things that people on the left might find objectionable about Trump, this should be at the very far bottom of the list.
Saying the quiet part out loud: "Murdering people without due process should be at the bottom of the list of things to care about." Yes, thank you for clearly outlining the "right's" position on the issue.
> Even if you believe the dope itself to be no great national security threat, that's just their payload today, maybe next time they'll smuggle in a nuke or whatever.
You're saying it's fine that they're killed for something they could "maybe" do in the future? Without even seeing any evidence that they're doing what they're accused of today? Have there been instances in the past of drug smugglers moving into the nuclear warhead smuggling game?
>You're saying it's fine that they're killed for something they could "maybe" do in the future?
Smuggling of any sort is a weapon with disastrous consequences. We wouldn't let the cartels have nukes, why would we want them to have "smuggling"? Yes, I'm fine with this. That they promise not to use it for really bad stuff for now wouldn't make a difference (and they're not even making that promise).
>Without even seeing any evidence t
I'm not interested in being the internet jury for this, no.
>Have there been instances in the past of drug smugglers moving into the nuclear warhead smuggling game?
Gee. That's something I really want to wait until after they commit the offense before we do something about it. You've changed my mind with your top-notch debate strategy.
The boats they are attacking won’t have drugs, these are the slow fishing boats that are at most refueling the go-fast boats with the drugs. Killing these people is just murder and nothing else. We have been doing drug interdiction for years without killing everyone until the orange dictator came into power.
Source: I did a deployment in counter drug interdiction in the Navy.
Edit: if you really want to know how threatening these guys are, they usually spotted our aircraft and the first thing they did was ALWAYS to jettison any weapons they had immediately, then start throwing out the drugs. They knew they weren’t fighting a USN ship and that we weren’t guns to harm them if they were peaceful. I suspect they might fight back now, though.
> that are at most refueling the go-fast boats with the drugs.
Oh. Wow. That makes it ok then. As long as they can all play hot potato and the drug runners don't have it on their own persons when the missile hits, it was unjustifiable.
Most of the fishing boats we boarded that were suspected to be resupply boats were, in fact, regular old fishing boats. The 1 we found that was a resupply boat had only external signs of fishing, but internally had fuel bladders instead of fish and ice. We, of course, didn't murder those guys or the 4-5 go-fasts we caught: we captured them and turned them over to partner country navies for legal processing.
In other words, most of the boats our intelligence apparatus thought were possible supply boats were simply fishermen. We are definitely killing some innocent fishermen with these strikes, and even if we weren't it's not ethical or legal to murder a bunch of guys selling fuel to drug runners. By the way, all of the drug runners are basically indentured servants or slaves and their families are being held back home as collateral.
Keep thinking you're on the side of right, though, and when you realize the USA is the baddies on this one you will hopefully be horrified at the realization.
> We wouldn't let the cartels have nukes, why would we want them to have "smuggling"?
Because usually we only respond to behaviours and actions that actually exist in the real world. By this logic we should charge all shop lifters with treason because they're not promising they'll never steal state secrets.
> Gee...You've changed my mind with your top-notch debate strategy.
I'm not sure why you're choosing to take this tone but I would hope we could have any further discussion like adults.
>It would be possible to board and arrest smugglers with “a nuke or whatever”.
Oh sure. A 5% chance of finding that boat on that particular day, and confiscating the device. That sounds like a great idea. I think I'd rather stick with causing the smugglers enough misery that they consider another line of work.
The “smugglers” are exploited serfs forced into smuggling through threats of violence on themselves and their facilities. There is no shortage of people who exploit.
> The US attacks people and countries without declaring war.
Declaring a war stopped being a thing after world war 2. Not just for usa but for everyone. In modern times a decleration of war has no meaning in international law. It only has meaning in domestic law.
I think the reason is that the UN charter makes it illegal to fight a war except in self-defense. In modern times declerations of war have generally been replaced with sending a notice to the un security council that you intend to use your right to self defense. I dont know about this particular situation but i think a lot of the time historically the US has followed that procedure.
The majority of the West has implicitly or explicitly ceded their national defense and warfighting capabilities to the USA. The comparison between USA and “other countries” isn’t really valid, as the situations are vastly different
sure does, but temporal considerations matter and the United States military has been killing people—at the President and SecDef's direction—in the Caribbean and Pacific for weeks, now, without even the slightest fig leaf of Congressional authorization. In other words, even if there's a formal declaration of war on Venezuela (which will never happen), that doesn't excuse the prior behavior.
Declerations of war are irrelavent to if its an armed conflict (in general declerations of war are obsolete in international law. They might have meaning domestically but do not have meaning in international law).
From what i understand there are two requirements
- the violence has to be intense enough. I think we are there
- the other side has to be an organized armed group capable of conducting warfare. This is the part that seems to be a stretch. The drug runners may be organized but are they really capable of conducting warfare? The quote i found from the red cross is: "Non-governmental groups involved in the conflict must be considered as "parties to the conflict", meaning that they possess organized armed forces. This means for example that these forces have to be under a certain command structure and have the capacity to sustain military operations."
Well, here's a somewhat analogous precedent: The US (and other nations) have been fighting piracy in the Horn of Africa area for several years now. No declared war (by anybody - it's not just the US that didn't), but pirates are being killed.
So the precedent is there that this is how we do things. It's not just this operation. (If you don't like that, what do you want? Do you want to require that the military get Congressional approval for every operation in which someone might get killed?)
At least (just today), some members of Congress finally got briefed on the classified intel that leads people to think that these are in fact drug smugglers getting killed.
Look, I'm not saying that bombing these boats is justified. I'm just saying that the Congressional oversight rules are not unique to this operation.
Although the Venezuela example is quite an overreach, none of these people fall under the US laws you think they do
The legal basis is them being declared Unlawful Combatants under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Once they do they are enemy combatants in war and can be killed.
This law was so thoroughly used by all presidents since then that you cannot really claim it's illegal
> Although the Venezuela example is quite an overreach
To me it sounds like that killing was (possibly) illegal. Idk about that 2006 Act though. From a moral stand point it doesn't matter if it was (possibly) illegal or not however.
Law at biblical times had a different foundation than today. Today the foundation is legal positivism, which is the philosophical decoupling of moral and law (which sounds terrible at first glance, but is important if you think it through). Therefore, it is not useful to apply the definition of the terms from back then, because the whole context in which they were used doesn't exist anymore.
In the Western world, the meaning of murder and killing is different and while that described action might be an unlawful killing (by accident) it most likely was not a murder.
They're not enemy combatants, at worst they're drug runners. Just because Trump declares something to be true doesn't make it true (although his lackeys will act as if it is).
This is not how to deal with The Drug War™, it's very expensive theater that does nothing to address the problem. In fact that very war is the reason why it's a problem in the first place. Remember that an earlier batch of dangerous drug dealers were Americans working out of doctors' offices.
> They're not enemy combatants, at worst they're drug runners.
And even at worst, if the Navy boarded those boats, found drugs, summarily executing everyone on board would still be murder. Rule of law is what separates us from animals, and the people ordering and carrying out these killings fall squarely in the latter.
Carrying water for this is beyond the pale, but is, of course, fully in alignment with a cornerstone of a political philosophy - that there are rules that protect some people, but do not bind them, and that there are rules that bind other people, but do not protect them.
The idea here is that they are declared enemy combatants in a war (very plausible for Al-Qaeda, quite less here).
In a war bombing a boat filled with combatants or members of an armed force is legal and does not amount to murder. While in the same war capturing the same boat filled with enemy combatants and executing them is illegal.
So I don't think your example holds, and that distinction is probably the basis for drone assassinations
In what universe are (alleged, no proof provided) smugglers enemy combatants? In one where anyone is?
You can squint and claim that a wedding that has one person who spends his Saturdays and Sundays playing partisan in the hills is full of enemy combatants (obviously all men and boys above the age of 12, don't think too hard about what that means for your kid's next track meet), but justifying this is utterly beyond the pale. This is a war crime if there's a war, and murder if there isn't.
This government corrupts anyone it touches, so this is fully in its playbook - make it's subordinates choose between following their conscience and resigning, or being complicit in its crimes.
There's no war in this situation. The War on Terror™ and the War on Drugs™ are jingoistic phrases that are not actionable declarations of war.
These attacks are theater to distract us from other failures, like the ability to the federal government running again. And the Epstein Files too, it's likely that is the driver for this.
> This is not how to deal with The Drug War™, it's very expensive theater that does
That's unclear. We'd have to know more about what sort of deterrent it is making on the drug runners. Quite possibly this does have them shitting their pants and delaying shipments hoping to avoid the risk. At the very least that's not absolutely impossible. When someone says "it's expensive theater" in this circumstance, I think that their criticism has more to do with their objection to the person ordering the strikes and less to do with the effectiveness of them, especially considering that we might not know for months what the true impact is.
We created the damn cartels in the first place with our insatiable demand for their products.
The current model is designed to create crime from end to end. And it was never about safety (FFS, look at how people who are busted for using drugs are treated).
Humans like having altered states and there will always be a market for that. There are risks and dangers in that but they can be mitigated. I'll trot out the classic counterpoint to the current madness: alcohol and tobacco are legal and sanctioned but we know they're dangerous and kill over half a million US citizens per year.
Again, if you think it's about safety you are mistaken: it's about oppression and control and it's ruining this country as well as our neighbors to the south.
The Venezuelan cartel (well, cartel network) is the 5th biggest on the Atlantic/Caribbean side, and are known for people trafficking and gold smuggling before drug related offence. Targetting Venezuelans boats is political. US should target Mexican, Haitian, Dominican, Columbian boats way, way before Venezuela if it was about drug trafficking.
I have another comment that's a sibling to this and I'll avoid the copypasta.
tl;dr -- the current model is whack-a-mole and is a fiasco except for it's unstated but intended purpose (oppression of "others"). What you're suggesting will not work, will waste likely billions of dollars, and just create even more misery in the world.
I assume the pretext is actually the war on terror because of the heavy involvement of Venezuela and its drug cartels with financing and supporting of Hezbollah and the IRGC
Fun fact, if you're not a US citizen on US soil US law does not apply. I'm not saying this because I'm taking a side, but this was how the Patriot act had knock on effects.
An interesting case of this is something like you call a foreign national in another country and this is enough to be able to tap both sides of the conversation via Patriot Act / NSA purview.
> not a US citizen ***on US soil*** US law does not apply.
1) these strikes are happening in international waters
2) US law definitely applies to non citizens on US soil.
Like that's such a ridiculous statement. Even if the law was "we can do whatever if you're not a citizen", that's still law...
You think non citizens are all sovereign citizens bound to no law? To be able to do whatever they want? I didn't know my neighbor was a diplomat.
I think you mean rights. Which this is much more dubious. The constitution definitely interchanges the use of "citizens" and "people". Notably the 11th amendment uses citizens, specifying belonging to states foreign or domestic. It was ratified only a few years after the Bill of rights, so not like a drastic language change happened.
There are people who will argue "the people" means "citizens" but I find that a difficult interpretation if you read the constitution or federalist papers.
- Drone-bombing an embassy in downtown London does not look good on social media
- He's too famous and has many supporters in the Western world to be publicly assassinated, regardless of location (example: Lady Gaga visited him while he was stuck in the embassy)
- He's more useful as a deterrent, i.e., "see what might happen to you", to the people who might decide to go a similar route. Some will go that route regardless, but chances are at least a few have been persuaded otherwise.
For all the ridicule of the government, the Intelligence Community seems to be doing a fairly intelligent job most of the time to satisfy its objectives.
It does not apply in general, but a country will always declare jurisdiction if deemed necessary.
A common example in Germany is that the country will try to enforce German law for foreign-hosted websites hosted by citizen of another country if the website is targeted at German citizen.
"not US citizen" on "not US soil" is what I meant.
Sorry for the firestorm this created!
What I mean to say is that the USA INTENTIONALLY violates rights of people outside the USA, expressed in things like the Patriot Act re:wiretapping, and also the spaces between passport control where they say "USA laws don't apply, our agents have purview to do essentially anything". If you check the discussions in the 00s about this the fed govt was very dicey and you can tell they were chomping at the bit to be able to have essentially NO OVERSIGHT on any of these massive violations of people's rights.
I'll take the karma hit, there is no way to edit it apparently. Sorry!
A country jurisdiction is both territorial and personal, the laws apply to anyone on the soil, and to the citizens, permanent residents, asylum seekers etc anywhere in the universe.
But it can be even worse than that. It's "we assassinated the phone", "algorithm says vehicle has suspicious travel history and must die". There's no real thinking human in the loop for some of this stuff, just some model decided the metadata has a high probability of being associate with an opponent of some flavor and then everyone in the vicinity is blown to bits as computer said kill.
> this is one of the worst issues about the development of long range weapons. 'We droned this guy.' 'We bombed this area.' 'We destroyed this boat.'
The US administration uses the long range to argue that the War Powers Act doesn't apply: They aruge that the Act applies to 'hostilities', and US soldiers are too far from the targets to be exposed to danger, therefore they aren't 'hostilities'.
I think GP means flag as in flag state - ocean vessels are typically to some country. In this sense, nearly all submarines are flagged - US navy, Russian navy, whatever.
Not as in a literal flag flying on the submarine. (Though they do fly flags near ports and such)
Murdering people for "committing" a nonviolent crime in international waters that still wouldn't qualify for capital punishment if it was committed on US soil. It wouldn't matter if they provided mountains of evidence, it would still be wrong, and yet they are providing zero evidence. We're just openly committing war crimes knowing that no one can really stop it.
> Murdering people for "committing" a nonviolent crime in international waters
If that is the rationale usa used, then yes it would be an obvious war crime. You can't shoot people in war because they are guilty of a crime unless they can legitamently be targeted for some other reason.
I think USA is probably going to try and spin it as they are members of an armed group USA is in an armed conflict with, and they were targeted on that basis and not because of any particular crime any particular person comitted.
How convincing that is is debatable [ianal but it sounds pretty unconvincing to me], and you of course still have the problem of how exactly the US can claim self-defense against a foreign drug cartel.
>”You can't shoot people in war because they are guilty of a crime unless they can legitamently be targeted for some other reason.”
From what I understand (and I am no expert), in a war, the default is that you can shoot someone if you believe them to be acting in a manner which is against your side’s interests (and have not surrendered while satisfying certain conditions).
You can shoot them if they are in combat against you, but that's not considered a crime and it would be illegal to arrest them for it. Soldiers are considered to have immunity for acts of war (except war crimes)
So for example it would be a war crime to punish someone for fighting in an opposing army. You can hold them as a prisoner of war for the duration of the conflict, but its supposed to be a means of keeping them out of a fight and not a punishment per se.
I think the biggest difference is that crimes can generally be punished after the fact. A murderer can be punished whenever they are caught. A soldier can be shot at at the time, but if they decide they are tired of the war and run away to a farm or something, they are now civilians and can no longer be shot at or punished for previously being a soldier (unless they comitted war crimes) even if the war is still raging on.
> Soldiers are considered to have immunity for acts of war (except war crimes)
Late edit: to clarify that is soldiers of an actual country have immunity. Combatants of a non-state group do not have immunity, so can be subject to arrest for merely participating in the conflict.
In a strange way you're correct. If the Coastguard were sent then there's a risk of the drug runners pleading asylum. Then the US has to feed, water and care for them for basically forever as getting court cases deferred is easy. Which makes doing things the "right way" impossible.
That's how gitmo came about - It was impossible to do the "right thing" under US law which would be inevitably be too lenient to the captured enemies of the US.
> That's how gitmo came about - It was impossible to do the "right thing" under US law which would be inevitably be too lenient to the captured enemies of the US.
Ironically, by violating U.S. laws they made it virtually impossible to try Gitmo prisoners. They would have been better off presenting evidence at trial in the first place.
War crimes require an armed conflict but not a "war". Note that declerations of war no longer really have meaning in international law and dont affect anything whether they are given or not.
Armed conflict can be either international (e.g. between two countries) or non-international (e.g. you are atacking a non-state group. For example ISIS. However note that attacking a non-state group on the territory of a different state without permission of that state makes it be both.). War crimes apply to both types but the rules are slightly different between the two.
Keep in mind also that people often colloquial use "war crimes" to mean any international crime, but technically its only one type. Crimes against humanity and genocide are technically not war crimes but a different category. They generally do not require an armed conflict (although often when they do happen its related to sone sort of armed conflict)
Anyways this whole thing probably counts an armed conflict. I think at the least its a non-international armed conflict with the drug cartel. Attacking boats is usually an act of war even if they are in international waters, which might make it an international armed conflict with venuzula as well if the boats are connected to it (but the rules related to that im not really clear on and is a bit beyond my knoeledge).
The possibility of this being an ‘act of war’ does seem very interesting, but I’m not sure Venezuela could claim it in this circumstance, as the vessels do not appear to be ‘flagged’. I would be interested to learn what the status of unflagged vessels is in international law, and I suspect there must be law on the subject, as pirates were typically unflagged.
Taking the moral argument aside the fact that the largest best funded navy run by the wealthiest country have to call in airstrikes against barely(if at all) armed fishing vessels, that may or may not be smugglers, rather then board arrest and at least make an attempt at tracing the cash flow back to the wealthy businessmen who is organizing/funding the smuggling reeks of weakness and desperation rather then being the signal of strength and competency it's intended to be.
Sure it's a widely understood and often repeated problem with especially western naval and military doctrine that the peace time buildup favors white elephants(battleships, F35s etc) that, as was the case of the British high see fleet of WWII, end up inactive while entire new(often much cheaper and less sophisticated) classes of ships like destroyer escorts or Patrol boats have to be build as replacements. But still the US haven't quite deteriorated so badly yet that it couldn't reacquire whatever boarding capacity got lost in the relentless pursuit of military industrial complex profits quite quickly.
There is a non zero chance one of these strikes was a mistake and instead hit an innocent fishing boat. Because humans make mistakes all the damn time.
Most of the released videos show speedboats without fishing equipment. For all intents and purposes, these speedboats might be medevac or just joyrides, but I would strongly count that they were fairly confidently related, to, uhm, the groups that were being referenced as being targeted officially. The sea allows for quite a bit more clearance regarding these things, mistakes can still happen, but are less likely than on densely populated areas on land.
Anyways these strikes don't change the big picture in terms of movement of the things that they move - the things that they move comes in on airplanes, trucks, containers, through tunnels, in pockets of people arriving, even in fishing/leisure boats. For all I know they could be easily moving it using homing pigeons. And you can pass the pigeons through the gaps in the wall. Sure, not as efficient as by speedboats,but the demand will make stuff move. The solution to this problem is complex, but solving it in the society is easier than trying to stop the flow... I mean, people would just start producing locally then. Either with the groups of people that are being targeted or without.
It seems as though part of the rationale may relate to ‘defunding’ the Venezuelan government (as the current administration seems to disfavor them), which appears to be deriving a significant amount of revenue (which may not be going to the treasury) from granting ‘license’ for these traffickers to operate from their coast.
this kind of stuff lines up with the US military MO going back to at least 2008, when more than a few civilian wedding parties in Afghanistan were hit by drone strikes (not the last wedding party in the region to be blown up during the Obama administration). We can say that perhaps we are regressing but it is not really a new development.
I think its an interesting conundrum because you're right it is the same as what you said!
They don't tell us the due diligence they do, but we would hope that our bureaucracy is careful about who they target and carefully thinks about how it affects the perception of americans vs. the potential benefit to our society (elimination of narco traffickers)?
Ukraine / Russia aside, we no longer have much in the way of conventional wars where each team wears a certain color and they shoot at each other. Instead the weaker force tries to disguise itself as best possible and strike when possible. In this case, a drug cartel would try to be as under the radar as possible.
What level of due diligence would you need to see before you would trust that a strike is justified? Or is the problem that narco trafficking doesn't justify death and therefore they should simply be imprisoning traffickers?
On the subject of evidence, the problem with AI is that now video and imagery can easily be faked. You've always been able to plant a bag of weed on a teenager and arrest him, so planting a kilo of coke on a boat and arresting someone is no different.
Malaysia, Philippines, China, Singapore all punish drug related crimes with death. One could argue that the societal impact of drugs is incredibly bad, thus warranting death to the traffickers.
Without a doubt, helping addicts is a societally very challenging problem! Anyone who has had a loved one fall victim to addiction has dealt with the struggle of emotions that comes with it. A need for them to be better, but lacking the path forward when they regress. Simply removing the drugs from the equation would have never destroyed their lives.
At some point it fundamentally needs to come down to trusting the people who defend the country ... who are entrusted to do this most difficult job.
I mean, if you don't watch the evening news or look for any evidence then I guess you wouldn't think there was public evidence.
CBS Evening News has showed footage of the boats [1]. While this isn't ironclad proof (would you expect the drug runners to hold up identification showing them as criminals?), it is unlikely that these four-engined speed boats loaded with something is anything other than drugs. They are not boats full of people/refugees. They aren't cargo ships operated by a shipping company with any official records claiming to have been lost, or any legitimate tour company. The characteristics of these boats match many other drug trafficking boats that the US Coast Guard has intercepted in the past full of drugs.
You can debate whether the US President has authority to order strikes like this but insinuating these might just be innocent people and not drug runners isn't going to go very far.
No having the navy board the boats would be way worse because it would put US servicemen in danger. Bombing the boats from a safe distance is by far the best way to deal with this problem.
There's no public evidence of that though. No trial. It's the same as if we sent the navy to board those boats, put a gun to people's heads and execute them in cold blood.