True, but if Elon gave you $1 million in Tesla stock you could still easily sell it, be taxed on it, and use the remainder to buy a lot of bread.

Why did you have to draw my attention to this

I think it echoes that video of those two Apache crews blowing up civilians in Baghdad and then targetting people who came to help the injured. One of the most chilling parts of that video was probably how casually routine it all seemed. Can only imagine what footage existed that never got leaked.

I agree, I’m separating the justification of the engagement from how they label people. So the parallel I’m drawing only has to do with how they loosely label people as part of a group based on broad characteristics once they decide a group can be a valid military target, i.e. “insurgents” or “narco-terrorists”.

Declaring drug smugglers as valid military targets is certainly new, but ordering strikes on military targets on the thin rationale of “hey, they look like the group we said we can hit” is not new for the US military.

If it’s not obvious, I disagree with both of these issues.

I agree, but it’s also consistent with how the US operates. Through Afghanistan’s and Iraq, anyone appearing as a military-aged male in the vicinity of an operation (e.g. a village where insurgents were shooting from) was labeled an enemy combatant and treated as valid targets.