The United States passed a grim milestone in the past few days: The Trump administration has killed the 200th civilian in its military strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. U.S. Southern Command marked the occasion by releasing footage of the strike in color for the first time. As the nation prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our founding, we would pause to consider that what was once a scrappy little collection of colonies fighting against a mighty empire in a quest for self determination has become a mighty empire itself, asserting its dominance over the Western hemisphere by picking off small speed boats in two oceans and blowing them to bits with massive military force. What a triumph for the cause of human freedom promised in the Declaration of Independence.
This military action has been ongoing since September with very little serious explanation or oversight, and originally appeared to be a precursor to the administration’s January operation in Venezuela, which deposed the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and brought him to New York to stand trial. At the time, the thinking was that the presence of the military in the area and the violent action against these boats in a seemingly random manner would put pressure on Maduro to resign to allow the U.S. to install a regime more amenable to its ambitions in the region. But if anyone thought the boat strikes would end once Maduro was out of office they were quickly set straight. They have carried on unabated, even as the story has faded from the media’s attention — and the public’s consciousness — what with Donald Trump’s war of choice in Iran and all the other crises he is precipitating.
According to Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other administration officials, the ostensible cause of action against the boats is to stop the flow of drugs, especially fentanyl, into the U.S. — the assumption being that the boats’s crews and passengers are drug runners carrying the lethal drugs to America’s shores. But everyone knew that fentanyl was not made or distributed in the region, and that cocaine — which is — was not trafficked to the U.S. on boats in the Caribbean. If those vessels are carrying drugs, they are destined for Europe.
As it turns out, these aren’t the only lies being told about this operation, which leads to the question of why exactly the strikes are taking place at all. In their announcement of the 200th strike, the military posted on X, “SOUTHCOM is unwavering in its commitment to applying total systemic friction on the cartels.” But it appears that “systemic friction” — whatever that is — isn’t exactly having any effect. According to the New York Times, experts from epidemiologists to addiction specialists and law enforcement agree that cocaine is as easy to obtain as it ever was. The drug, which is produced in South America for American consumption, is not trafficked here in small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.
The Times reported that these experts evaluated “street prices, lethal overdoses, purity of samples and drug seizures at U.S. borders” to arrive at this finding, which raises questions about the “effectiveness of the largest U.S. military deployment in Latin America in decades.” Supposedly, Trump has “closed the border,” and yet cocaine is somehow still making its way into the country, despite the military blowing up boats supposedly stocked with drugs destined for Europe.
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There is also a question as to whether the boats are actually carrying drugs at all. When Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified on Tuesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a couple of his questioners brought up a stunning new claim. Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., both said they had learned in classified briefings that the boats being targeted aren’t necessarily carrying drugs or weapons. The senators weren’t able to share the actual criteria for the strikes, but they did confirm this was not among them.
Rubio avoided the question in his reply: “Every strike has a legal officer on the deck that has to make a determination about whether the call is legal or not, and this is done by the Department of War, the way it’s been done in other theaters around the world.”
That’s nice, but it isn’t actually responsive. The senators knew the criteria existed, but they were understandably surprised it did not include the fact that the presence of drugs was among them. This, in turn, certainly raises the question for the rest of us as to what the criteria might actually be.
It’s been difficult to learn much about the victims of these strikes. The administration insists they are all “narco-terrorists” who must be stopped by any means necessary. Locals are afraid to name those who have died for fear of retribution themselves. But there have been some clues. The Guardian reported in mid-May on an investigation by the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism, which published the identities of 13 of those killed. There was no evidence that some of them were involved in the drug trade, and all of them came from extremely poor communities, which are being terrorized by these strikes and have been left largely unable to do even the subsistence fishing they need to live for fear of being blown up by the U.S. military. Trump has even bragged about this, “joking” repeatedly that fishermen are now afraid to go out in their boats, a line that has elicited big laughs from his audiences.
You cannot allow the military to literally wage war against drug traffickers and kill them; they are not terrorists, even if you decide to call them that. There is an actual legal definition for that designation.
All of this violates both domestic and international law. You cannot allow the military to literally wage war against drug traffickers and kill them; they are not terrorists, even if you decide to call them that. There is an actual legal definition for that designation. Neither is the government, military or otherwise, allowed to just blow people up, even with a set of “criteria” that they just make up to justify their actions. The classified memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which holds that U.S. troops involved in the strikes cannot be exposed to prosecution, pretty much gives that game away. The administration clearly knows they are breaking the law.
As I watched Rubio evade questioning about this during his Senate hearing, I said to myself that the U.S. has completely lost any semblance of morality. We’re just murdering poor people on boats for no other reason than to cause “friction” without cause or the sanction of the rule of law. Then I remembered that just over 20 years ago, we learned that our country was engaging in a systemic program of kidnapping and torture of suspected terrorists. There were investigations that came out in dribs and drabs, but the official report was repressed by both Republican and Democratic administrations, with the CIA even revealing in 2016 that it had “accidentally” destroyed its only copy.
People say that torture was justified because we had been attacked by actual terrorists and terrorism constituted an existential threat. But it’s now clear that once you abandon all restraint and say the ends justify the means, even if there’s an argument for it, the whole legal edifice crumbles. There was no accountability for that atrocity 20 years ago, at least not for anyone who was in charge. Now another, even more reckless president has found a reason to ignore the rule of law and basic morality. What did we expect?
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