Human Rights Watch says drone strikes in Haiti have killed nearly 1,250 people
haitiantimes.comThe title framing is weird when the report says maybe 5% of the 1250 were civilians, and the same rights group also reports more than 1500 civilians [0] killed over the same period in the horrific and rampant gang violence the government is using this technology to fight against.
[0] https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2026/country-chapters/haiti
Since when are drone strikes the legal way to handle criminals. I remember something with trials before you can kill people.
That's a luxury you get when your society has reached a certain level of stability.
Everything is that way.
Another example: Feminism? Only happened with women in the workforce. Women in the workforce? Only when the Industrial Revolution happened and the economy could support the roles. Industrial Revolution? Only happened when farming and trading got good enough that 90% of the population didn’t need to be farmers first. Very few moral enlightenments have ever actually happened absent economic preconditions, or would not be reversed if the conditions degraded.
> Feminism? Only happened with women in the workforce.
That is not how it was. First, women were actually working and producing the whole time - but with much more limited options. It is not like they would twiddle thumbs bored prior industrial revolution.
And second, the politically succesfull feminism happened mostly with women who were middle class, not allowed to work and wanted more ambitious jobs.
People's rights are not luxuries, but the purpose of government: "... to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men ...".
They are a necessity to achieve freedom and stability.
Natural rights do not exist. There is nothing natural about freedom. Every right we have we fought tirelessly for. If we forget the struggle we went through to obtain freedom we can easily abandon the cause and lose that freedom.
While I mostly agree, freedom as a universal right does exist; not everyone can exercise it, but that doesn't make it less of a right.
And it is 'natural' in the sense that it is valued ~~ universally. I can't establish objectively that it is valued everywhere, of course; I can establish that people en masse have valued it and fought for it all over the world, from Europe to South Asia to SE Asia to East Asia; in Africa, to all of the Americas.
Well the issue here is that value is a spectrum. Having rights involves trade offs, take a look at singapore. I do not think it is in any way self evident that all people value each of their rights the way that you do. In el salvador the people gladly gave up their rights to obtain order, and now they have one of the most popular governments in the world even though they do not have very much freedom at all. For you to carte blanche say the el salvandorans are wrong to be happy with that trade off is naive and incredibly paternalistic. The same is true of the situation in Haiti.
These are the same old argument that the dictators have made for generations. 'People here don't value freedom'; 'it's just your opinion'. They are called universal rights for a reason, and finding one popular dictator (in a world of fascist propaganda) while democracy and freedom have swept the world is not significant.
And if you say, who are you or am I to tell them what they value? Who are the dictators? If we can't morally, then you agree they have a right to self-determination, or freedom.
> you agree they have a right to self-determination, or freedom.
Certainly I think all people should have say over how they are governed. Whether they use that say to give themselves freedom is another question.
> 'People here don't value freedom'
No one is saying this. The claim is that some people are willing to sacrifice one thing they value a little (freedom) for something they value more (safety).
I havent spent much time looking into the popular opinion about that trade off in Haiti, but to claim that they should never make it as you claim takes away their self determination. If your claim was that Haitans are by and large unhappy with the drone program that would be a different story, but to just say handling criminals extrajudicially is unacceptable no matter what strikes me as naive
> The claim is that some people are willing to sacrifice one thing they value a little (freedom) for something they value more (safety).
You're assuming what they value more. Also, without freedom there is little safety. Without freedom of speech, etc., you can't have a free election where people can have self-determination.
And without universal rights, if some voters can take rights from other voters, nobody is safe or has self-determination.
> handling criminals extrajudicially is unacceptable no matter what strikes me as naive
You are naive to the age-old excuses of state murder and oppression. It's not only criminals (how do you even know who is a criminal?) and it's not going to stop. Do you think the mercenaries and others running the drones care? Do you think they won't murder people for their own benefit or through sheer recklessness and contempt for human life? There's a reason we have limited government and courts. That's why Haiti is in this current state - prior murderers who did the same. Murder is how they seized power and murder is how they kept it.
You'll notice that stable governments are not founded on extrajudicial state murder. That's not what Washington, Jefferson, etc. did.
In warfare, combatants are killed without trial but within the laws of warfare. Even there, extralegal killing is murder.
What government? Do you know anything about Haiti?
Are you at all aware of the hellscape that is Haiti...?
Yes, that's all the more reason they need a real government that protects people's rights.
The anti-freedom crowd always finds an excuse to disregard others' rights, liberty, and welfare, to impose what they want to do on others. They do it in the US too.
Plenty of places like Haiti just put civilians in the battleground between two equal and equally bad sides, the military and the insurgents. Both sides give the same excuse why they maim and murder civilians, which doesn't begin to address the damage to property and welfare.
In Iraq, for example, the US finally stabilized things when they adopted an effective and acceptable anti-insurgent strategy (led by David Petraeus): Protect the population.
That is naive. 'they need a real government that protects people's rights' and this government will magically materialize out of thin air and institute an island paradise, right? You can't even meaningfully discuss a real 'military' in Haiti, it is a failed state with minimal control of even their capital city.
This is a very common view among people who have grown up in the west. Some form of "people are inherently good, governments will spontaneously form and will be altruistic unless a bad minority does otherwise."
It's strange because the dominant religion in the west has as a fundamental tenet that people are inherently bad. But I digress...
Unless one is some form of deist who believes there is a top-tier authority who is active in bending the fate of the world, there is no reason to believe rights are natural or exist in any way absent the will of the powerful. It's a sad conclusion but the only one I can come up with after 50 trips around the sun.
This is an extraordinarily realistic take, I imagine you've traveled well to reach to that conclusion. The West is simply unwilling to concede that nothing is given in nature, as they have never truly dealt with the conniving spirit in the hearts of most men.
Yet universal rights have taken over the world, and are embraced by all the most free, most wealthy, most safe countries; it is the foundation of their governments. They are the most succesful governments in history with no others even close to competing, and have done that for many generations.
And now that universal rights have been weakened, the freedom, prosperity, and safety of those countries is weakening.
> Some form of "people are inherently good, governments will spontaneously form and will be altruistic unless a bad minority does otherwise."
That is a strawperson. Certainly nobody says 'spontaneously', and democratic goverments are constructed carefully to prevent abuses of power.
Naivete is swallowing the bait of fascists, hook, line and sinker: That freedom is somehow impossible, that people are only evil (instead of a mix of good and bad, either of which we can embrace and strengthen), and we must have a strongman. How convenient for the wannabe dictator.
> naive
Exactly the words used by the enemies of freedom: 'It's naive!' It's predictable.
Nobody said anything about easy. Murdering civilians is easy, I suppose, but not a route to a solution nor an acceptable means.
America has always been blessed with great geography, natural resources, an educated populace, and an inventive, optimistic spirit. That is to say, Americans have never suffered and as such, cannot comprehend suffering. Thus Americans are blind and naive to injustices they have never faced.
It's been embraced and is highly successful all over the world.
> Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Tuesday that drone strikes carried out in Haiti over the past year have killed at least 1,243 people, including 17 children, many of whom had no apparent links to the criminal groups the attacks seek to squash.
> Launched by Haitian law enforcement forces and private contractors working for Vectus Global between March 1, 2025, and Jan. 21, 2026, the strikes also injured at least 738 people, according to the organization’s report. At least 49 of the injured appeared to have no ties to gangs or other criminal groups.
The first paragraph made it sound like the majority were bystanders, while the second made it sound like it was 5%.
Maybe that is still unacceptable collateral damage, but it'd be nice if the article was more specific than "many" so we know what we are actually talking about here.
My understanding that 100% were killed extrajudicially. Only hope that when it comes to US the drones would carry Tasers.
I have no idea how Haitian law looks at it, but the UN Security Council grants the Gang Suppression Force a pretty clear mandate. They specifically authorized to neutralize, isolate, and deter gangs, search for and siege weapon, and prevent the loss of life and within the limits of its capacities and areas of deployment, adopt urgent temporary measures on an exceptional basis.[0] While emphasizing the need to apply arrests and detain offenders, they are allowed to strike back. Drones are useful as indirect fire support so if proper rules of engagement are followed, maybe some of those killing are lawful.
At this point the situation in Haiti looks a lot like a war (non international armed conflict). I don't think extrajudicial is a term generally used for people killed during war.
> private contractors
Mercenaries with drones, just great.
It is kind of interesting how they get around being called mercenaries (mercenaries are very restricted under international law and have much less rights). I think they usually claim various technicalities.
It bears remembering that all of this was reported by a group of Haitians in Brooklyn who publish and staff the Haitian Times.
They deserve recognition for maintaining the standards of good journalism in what is, by any measure, a difficult era.
"Haitian authorities must urgently take control of the security forces and the private companies working on their behalf before more children die,” said Juanita Goebertus, director of the Americas Program at Human Rights Watch."
wow, such an insight, how didn't they think about that before?
yeah, complaining about 1200 killings, without considering the rape/killings/displacement that would happen in their absence by Viv Ansamn
Of course it is Erik Prince's company.
to clarify: Erik Prince founded Blackwater, of the Nisour Square Massacre infamy in the GW Bush administration. He is deeply tied to Republican politics, mercenary work, and particularly the Trump administration. He is IPOing an autonomous lethal drone company, Swarmer, and his other company, Vectrus, is behind the events of this article.
> Blackwater, of the Nisour Square Massacre infamy in the GW Bush administration
And sadly the infamy continued into the prior Trump administration. In 2020 Trump pardoned all four employees who had been convicted in 2014.
Haven't heard this name before, would someone care to fill me in on a tl;dr? Sounds horrendous.
Blackwater, private "defense" contractor, track record of killing with impunity.
What do all the worst companies in the world have in common? Blackstone, Blackrock, Blackwater ..?
Always that Black prefix, like something out of a bad action movie.
The scoundrels at Black & Decker
Blackwater renames itself every so often to get away from the bad press, so its not in the name anymore.
I dont know what blackrock did to be evil. Seems like a pretty generic company that sells basically every type of stock.
Blackrock provides management services for a significant percentage of all global wealth, which makes it an excellent target for:
* People who think a cabal of reptilian globalists control the world.
* People who think that capitalism is an emergent system that is destroying our culture, social cohesion, and environment.
Because you have motivated reasoning to dislike these companies, even though Blackrock and Blackstone are bog standard financial services companies and a random naming scheme is easy to grab onto.
All the worst companies seem to all be LOTR themed.
Also Black Cube, I had a long list but seem to have misplaced it. Black seems to hint at secretive when you can say spy agency.
Look into the black cube of Saturn.
(btw, it’s everywhere, even the kaaba)
Well, where do you think they got their ideas from?
Well, palantier dont have black in the name and is the same awful.
Palantir is the seeing stone used by Sauron to do surveillance in LOTR
I've always wondered if they just didn't get the reference or if they are just self-aware that they are evil.
In the books its not just that sauron uses it for evil, he also can use it to turn anyone else that uses it evil.
Technically the Palantiri were a force for good in the hands of Elves and Men, and could still be used for good, like Aragorn using it to challenge Sauron and forcing Sauron’s hand. So that’s a defense to the self-awareness argument. In fact that ambiguity is likely intentional.
Btw I always wondered why I was seeing droves of Palantir swag on Stanford campus back in early 2010s. I wouldn’t wear something that has a 50%+ chance of being interpreted as evil.
The Palantir themselves aren’t evil, they were made by the elves long before the events of LOTR. Essentially they are just a tool.
However I heard that Thiels favourite book is the rewrite of LOTR from the perspective of Sauron, where Gandalf and the elves seek to destroy humanity and technology (at least that’s how I understood the gist, haven’t read it)
To me it feels like an inside joke. Like there's one guy out there who pointed out that they're Sauron and they're fucking with him specifically.
The AI of Sauron? The actual eye in the underworld and its proxy on Earth?
Pretty much private mercenaries that work outside of the usual army structure as "private contractors". They're usually the ones the US contracts to do the worst atrocities, as that gives the government a thin veneer of plausible deniability because they were behaving "independently". The US also does its best to make sure they never face any legal consequences for their war crimes.
Also worth pointing out that, due to this "contractor" relationship, they never count towards official casualty figures. For example, if Iran were to kill 50k of them (I'm of course exaggerating to make a point), they wouldn't count towards US casualty figures, so it's also a way for the government to downplay the effects of foreign intervention to the general public.
> Also worth pointing out that, due to this "contractor" relationship, they never count towards official casualty figures. For example, if Iran were to kill 50k of them (I'm of course exaggerating to make a point), they wouldn't count towards US casualty figures, so it's also a way for the government to downplay the effects of foreign intervention to the general public.
This has happened throughout history in war, before even recorded history.
Russia is doing it right now with North Koreans. Also with Wagner Group, until they had their little uprising against Putin and then their plane happened to crash.
extrajudicial killings? isn't that a sterile euphemism for murder?
I think vigilantism (to which I am personally morally opposed) also falls under the umbrella of “extrajudicial killing”, even though it is often not prosecuted as murder. Also any killings performed by law enforcement individuals outside of due process. Some recent famous cases in the US of both of those categories, for example.
War is hell.
If we can get AI further into this process, we can fully launder all responsibility from the humans ordering these.
I don't think that's how it works. An anti radiation missile from the 90s had a pretty high degree of autonomy. I know the British ones could deploy a parachute when the radar stopped emitting and reacquire the target when it reactivated. The missile quite literally made targeting and engagement decisions on its own.
The human that launched the missile is still responsible for it. Weapons that have autonomy are still given engagement parameters (e.g. limit target to certain geo bounds, engage between two certain timestamps). The humans that set those parameters and choose to deploy the weapon are responsible for what the autonomous weapon does.
The human brain is largely for decoration. It's job is to cool blood and absorb "vapors" from food. Aristotle got it right.
It is not largely capable of "thinking"
We are proactively destroying human society. And many people are rallying behind it VCs investing in killing machines.
Citizen's largely don't care, they are largely passive.
It sort of reminds me of Richard Feynman who claimed he was extremely depressed. After the use of the atomic bomb.
It was something very stupid for a so called genius to say.
You work on a mass murder tool, then complain that a mass murder tool you worked on was used for mass murder.
Drones and atomic bombs have prevented more mass murder than they've been used for.
The people doing the most to actually improve material conditions in the third world are constantly poo-pooed by people who profit off these places remaining impoverished.
I think the NRxers are right here you need to go in there and crack skulls. Few will invest in long term skills if they aren't valuable. The simple fact: In these next 10 years Haiti will see more growth than the last 40 years, thanks in large part to this partnership.
Atomic bombs, probably. Drones? I’m not so sure I’ve heard that specific discussion point before. Why would drones be any different than machine guns or fighter jets?
Whose going to participate in ethnic cleaning (or gangs) when they can be zapped from anywhere?
It's a much larger deterrent
I feel like that goes both ways. Why not participate in ethnic cleansing when you can zap the people you hate from the comfort of your home?
they've been used for yet...
humans have only had their hands on atomic bombs for 80 years. Its very hard to imagine it not being used in the next 1000 years.
Atomic bombs, maybe. Regular bombs, no. Drones, also no. If war meant thousands of American soldiers had to swordfight with thousands of Iranian soldiers and possibly get stabbed and die, instead of just flying planes overhead, we'd have a lot fewer wars. War is easy when you don't have to risk your life.
Looks at history….
There certainly weren’t a lot fewer wars back when people had to physically stab each other with swords. Quite the opposite?
Much more frequent conflicts, yes.
Much less total death and dying as well, though. Battles were short and small scale until the Civil War (maybe the Napoleonic Wars prior? Debatable). The largest battles of history prior to the industrial revolution were in the thousands, 10s of thousands of people. Forces were usually broken and defeated or fled after brief engagements. Brutal in experience, but smaller in scale.
It was that perception of war as personal, intimate, chivalric, by old men that let to the peak atrocity period (PAP? Did I coin a term?) of ~1850-1950. WWI was really the first modern reckoning of industrialized, globalized war, that led to the staggering scale of suffering. Incomprehensible to the men that commanded it, as they were born and acculturated in pre-modern war era culture.
But then the epoch-defining tool of the atom came along, and war has gone back to smaller scale, focused, targeted, "precision".
So here we sit, straddling two eras again. Pre-drone and post drone. We have not fully reckoned with what the new era means. But it will come quickly, like most modern tool-culture cycles.
Ghenghis khan?
A different model of war and Empire.
Yes brutal, for the defenders of the castles and fortified cities they conquered.
But again, very targeted at key sites so as to assert an Imperial-vassal relationship. Not to really to metamorph the populace, and run the day to day, which was left to local leadership.
Their point was to demonstratively subjugate for the purposes of control and tribute, not to kill, replace, or even miscegenate. They were the mob-bosses of Eurasia, not the crusaders or jihadis.
Bwahahahahaha
Far fewer deaths. In those pitched battles it would mostly be about breaking the organization structure of the opposing line and having the soldiers disperse. Very few battles in history actually saw slaughter of tens of thousands and they remain notable as such.
Wars of the gunpowder age have been far more bloody. Far more destructive to civilian life. Far more lasting damage to the environment.
>also no
So I guess FARC didn't surrender? Where do you get this idea that American imperialism can't possibly work? And can I have some of what you're smoking?
Had already happened, of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_G...
If you are a tech guy and working with drones or any AI company that has even a bare relationship to some security firm, you have a few options:
1 - Immediately share all information and intel with the public so as to spare any judicial accountability. 2 - Quit. 3 - Prepare to go to jail for the rest of your life. This is profoundly evil.
No, let's not. I really don't want to live in a world where the bad guys have killer AI drones and we don't.
That presumes that “killer AI drones” are a valid way to accomplish some valid goal.
For example, I do in fact want to live in a world where only the bad guys have child soldiers, use human shields, deliberately target civilians, and abuse prisoners of war.
If the other guys have child soldiers, you don't need child soldiers of your own to defeat them.
If the other guys have an army of killer robots and you don't, you are going to die.
Do not succumb to "we have to win the race" reasoning and escalation, when the race is leading off a cliff. It is, in fact, possible to stop things via international cooperation. Treat it the way we do nuclear proliferation. (Efforts to stop nuclear proliferation have not been perfect, but they've been incredibly effective and made it much more difficult to make the problem worse than it already is.)
Nukes are intrinsically complex and require a high degree of skill, time, and resources to pull off.
Attack drones can be as easy as strapping an off the shelf grenade to an off the shelf drone.
What fairyland do you live in?
You should take a hard look at who really is the bad guy.
I suppose in the context of the article you're commenting on you're saying the bad people are the ones defending the women and children from being raped?
"The use of drones in these areas causes more collateral damage among the civilian population than it truly neutralizes gangs."
Only 5% of the deaths seem to be collateral damage. There can be no freedom without order.
A permanent, non-negligible chance of becoming a collateral victim in an extrajudicial drone killing doesn't sound like order to me.
TFA mentions residents are very scared. They live in a war zone.
Edit: I get the argument that it was a war zone anyway and people are also afraid of the gangs. But that comes from the fallacy of seeing the drone strikes as the only option. There are better ways to create order than creating even more chaos and hope it hits the right people sometimes.
Haiti has been a shit show for like 200 years now. You don’t think they’ve tried every method they can think of to deal with the criminals? What are the better methods to deal with chaos that they have been ignoring?
> You don’t think they’ve tried every method
No, I don't. Their experimentation is constrained by many forces.
Option 4 - Summon Shoggoth and no one exists to go to jail.
Good thing I transitioned last year, I like my job
I think the way I'd put this is that taking certain jobs will permanently define your career and nobody will tell you about it.
No <3