The US military has, since early September, been blowing up small boats and killing their occupants in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. This killing spree has been undertaken based on evidence-free “trust me bro” claims that the boats were being used by “narco-terrorists” to transport drugs to America.
Early on, the US military followed up on an attack by intentionally killing survivors floating at sea among the debris, instead of doing what military guidelines and decency dictate — try to save the survivors. Even many people who supported or would let slide the ongoing summary executions of people in small boats did not abide this attack on people stranded at sea after an attack.
So, a new protocol of trying to save survivors has been implemented. However, it looks like that “trying” is so pathetic it makes one wonder if it is a sincere effort instead of something done just to summarily check the “searched for survivors” box despite it being virtually guaranteed that nobody will be rescued.
In a Tuesday The Intercept article, Tomi McKluski and Nick Turse related just how underwhelming the US effort to save survivors of its attacks on small “narco-terrorism” boats can be. When eight people survived one of the US military’s attacks on boats on December 30 in conditions in which it would be hard to continue living for an hour, McKluski and Turse’s article revealed that it took nearly 45 hours before a lone Coast Guard plane began searching the attack zone for survivors. Unsurprisingly, no survivors were found.
McKluski and Turse further wrote:
The slow response and lack of rescue craft in the area suggests there was scant interest on the part of the U.S. in saving anyone. It’s part of a pattern of what appear to be imitation rescue missions that since mid-October have not saved a single survivor.
And it is not as if the US government is incapable of conducting a serious search and rescue operation at sea when it chooses to make the effort. Indeed, McKluski and Turse explained that the US did just that this month in an effort to save one of its own military members:
The search and rescue operation for the boat strike survivors differs starkly from the U.S. response when a U.S. Marine involved in the military campaign in the Caribbean fell overboard from the amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima in the SOUTHCOM area of operations this month. It sparked a “nonstop search and rescue operation” that included hundreds of flight hours and extensive aviation support, according to a statement from the Marines’ II Marine Expeditionary Force. Five Navy ships, a rigid-hull inflatable boat, surface rescue swimmers from the Iwo Jima, and 10 aircraft from the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force joined the search efforts. (Lance Cpl. Chukwuemeka E. Oforah, 21, was declared deceased on Feb. 10, 2026.)
Read McKluski and Turse’s article here.