Trump’s military strikes against boats allegedly part a drug cartel from Venezuela are done without any public evidence or proof of who was killed in this “war”
Last week saw an escalation of the ongoing U.S. military strikes against supposed drug smugglers in international waters. The string of attacks on unidentified targets, all of whom the Trump administration has labeled “narco-terrorists,” in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean are without parallel in American military history. But the closest comparison, last decade’s campaign of drone strikes against targets in Central Asia and elsewhere against suspected terrorist cell members, serves as an ominous prelude to the current lawless enterprise. Much like Trump’s string of extralegal killings, the signature strike program allowed the military to rain death down on its targets regardless of whether their identity was fully known.
President Donald Trump has claimed that the strikes are part of an ongoing war against drug cartels bringing fentanyl into the United States. “Every boat kills 25,000 on average — some people say more,” he claimed in September when addressing the military’s top brass. “You see these boats, they’re stacked up with bags of white powder that’s mostly fentanyl and other drugs, too.” That language is shared across the administration when defending the attacks, even as they’ve provided no evidence to back up their claims that the boats were even carrying drugs, let alone making their way to the United States.
Moreover, as The reported last week, the routes that the U.S. has struck most frequently off the coast of Venezuela are not used to traffic fentanyl as Trump claims. Most of the synthetic drug that makes its way to America, causing an estimated 48,000 overdose deaths last year, is produced in Mexico and most often smuggled across the border by American citizens. And even if they were, as the ACLU’s Brett Max Kaufman recently noted, the bombings against these potentially innocent civilians are “extrajudicial killings that are flagrantly illegal under both domestic and international law.
