With Two New Attacks In Pacific, Trump's War-Crime Boat Murders Go Bicoastal-Curious
Trump-Hegseth killing spree now up to 37 victims.
Donald Trump’s campaign of using the US military to carry out extrajudicial killings of alleged drug smugglers has expanded to the Pacific ocean, with drone-launched missile attacks against two boats on Tuesday and Wednesday that killed a total of five people. The administration insisted yet again that the boats were absolutely positively carrying narcotics and that those aboard were “narco-terrorists” although yet again it offered no evidence to support those claims. Don’t expect any proof, either, since the Guardian reported Tuesday that most intelligence being used in the drone strikes comes from the CIA, so it’s secret and will stay that way.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth didn’t specify where the boats were blown up beyond saying they were in international waters in the eastern Pacific. Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia, said in a statement on Twitter (archive link) that it wasn’t clear whether the most recent attack was on a vessel from his country or from Ecuador, but he added, “It is still a murder. Whether in the Caribbean or the Pacific, the US government’s strategy breaks the norms of international law.” (Auto-translation provided by Twitter.)
When combined with seven previous attacks in the Caribbean Sea against civilian boats the administration claims (still no evidence) were carrying narcotics, the death toll since the murder campaign began last month is now up to at least 37.
Despite the administration’s insistence that drugs are just like terrorism, drug smuggling is a criminal offense, not an act of war, and these killings are premeditated murder. While the Supreme Court has declared that Donald Trump can’t be held criminally accountable even for ordering extrajudicial killings, it hasn’t (yet) extended such immunity to top officials involved in the murder campaign, like Hegseth, nor to the members of the military responsible for carrying out plainly illegal orders like “go kill those civilian criminal suspects.”
Hegseth said yesterday it’s all fine, because drugs are bad, precisely the same as crashing airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing thousands. “Just as Al Qaeda waged war on our homeland, these cartels are waging war on our border and our people,” Hegseth said, stretching the bounds of metaphor. He added that “there will be no refuge or forgiveness — only justice.” Again, since there are no courts involved, Hegseth’s invocation of “justice” is entirely as metaphorical as his talk of drug smuggling being an act of “war.”
To give the murders an additional pretense of legitimacy, the administration has rolled out some bloodless quasi-military jargon for its targeted killings; on Twitter (archive link), Hegseth described the most recent execution-style attacks as “another lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization (DTO).”
Hegseth’s statement was liberally sprinkled with such pretend military rhetoric in an attempt to justify the murder campaign, essentially promising it will never end:
These strikes will continue, day after day. These are not simply drug runners—these are narco-terrorists bringing death and destruction to our cities. These DTOs are the “Al Qaeda” of our hemisphere and will not escape justice. We will find them and kill them, until the threat to the American people is extinguished.
They are in fact not terrorists, but (alleged, not proved) drug smugglers who should be interdicted by the Coast Guard, arrested, and tried. Under Trump, however, language means whatever the regime says it does. And if the murders will continue until Americans are no longer using narcotics, then get ready for multiple murders every week with no appreciable effect on addiction in the USA.
That point was underlined by President Gustavo Petro of Colombia, who pointed out that most cocaine is smuggled by merchant ships into the US and elsewhere, not by speedboats right off the coasts, so “focusing the strategy on launching missiles at boats, whether in the Caribbean or the Pacific, does not stop cocaine trafficking and puts the US outside of international law.”
And for all the administration’s claims that blowing small boats out of the water will reduce American deaths from fentanyl, we need to remind you again that virtually all fentanyl enters the US by land, most frequently smuggled through legal border crossings in cars driven by US citizens, who are least likely to be searched thoroughly. The amount of normal civilian traffic through ports of entry is so heavy that most fentanyl gets through undetected.
But blowing up boats on the oceans sure looks dramatic, so Trump will keep doing it. It doesn’t need to actually reduce drug use or overdose deaths. That’s not the point anyway. If the administration wanted to prevent deaths it wouldn’t have eliminated federal funding for grants to first responders to administer the lifesaving anti-overdose drug Narcan (and slashed funding for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, too).
No, for Trump, as ever, it’s far more important to look tough and to kill people he says are drug dealers, so he can be a great strongman like other world bullies who similarly kill accused drug offenders even as drug use in their countries continues to grow. Treatment and prevention are actually more effective than enforcement, but they’re wimpy and liberal and don’t provide the gonadal rush of videos showing a boat being blasted by Hellfire missiles. So that’s what we’ll continue to get. After all, why would anyone be in favor of letting drug terrorists live?
[AP / BBC / NBC News / Gustavo Petro on Twitter (archive link) / Guardian]
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OT: Getting ready to go get my second in the series of rabies shots. Back to a possible 8 hour wait in the ER.
This fucking podunk hee haw hick state in which rabies vaccines are ONLY fucking available at the goddamned ER and not anywhere else for less than $600 fucking dollars a dose.
Meanwhile, my scumbag neighbors totally get away with it and suffer zero consequences.
What about when Antifa, BLM & Indivisible are DTOs - do they get summary execution as well?
Supposing Dems do that to Oathkeepers, III%ers and Proudboys next time they're in power? Come to think of it suppose they do that to ICE?
This could get pretty messy