National Security

Rand Paul | 10.8.2025 5:54 PM

Somewhere off the coast of Venezuela, a speedboat with 11 people on board is blown to smithereens. Vice President J.D. Vance announces that "killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military."

When challenged that killing citizens without due process is a war crime, the vice president responded that he "didn't give a shit."

Sometimes in fits of anger, loud voices will say they don't care about niceties such as due process—they just want to kill bad guys. For a brief moment, all of us may share that anger and may even embrace revenge or retribution.

But over 20,000 people are murdered in the U.S. each year, and yet somehow we find a way to a dispassionate dispensation of justice that includes legal representation for the accused and jury trial. 

Why? Because sometimes the accused is actually not guilty.

As passions subside, a civilized people should ask: To be clear, the people bombed to smithereens were guilty, right?

If anyone gave a you-know-what about justice, perhaps those in charge of deciding whom to kill might let us know their names, present proof of their guilt, and show evidence of their crimes.

The administration has maintained that the people blown to smithereens were members of Tren de Aragua and therefore narcoterrorists.

Certainly, then, if we know they belong to a particular gang, then someone must surely have known their names before they were blown to........

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