WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s justification for summarily killing alleged drug smugglers, fairly than arrest, try to convict them in courtroom, seems to be based mostly on a large lie: that they had been within the technique of bringing to the US the lethal artificial opioid fentanyl.
“You can see it, the boats get hit, and you see that fentanyl all over the ocean,” Trump mentioned at an Oct. 15 information convention, the day after the fifth of what at the moment are 15 deadly assaults on boats within the Caribbean Sea and the jap Pacific Ocean which have killed 65. “It’s, like, floating in bags. It’s all over the place.”
“Every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives,” Trump additionally advised reporters.
“U.S. Intelligence confirmed this vessel was loaded up with mostly Fentanyl, and other illegal narcotics,” he wrote in a social media submit three days later about one more missile strike on Oct. 16.
Nonetheless, the declare that the missile assaults on small boats — typically far too small to have been en path to the US with out requiring a number of stops for refueling — are disrupting fentanyl trafficking into the U.S. are belied by what Pentagon officers have advised members of Congress in current briefings.
“They’ve not recovered fentanyl in any of these cases. It’s all been cocaine,” mentioned one congressional supply accustomed to the content material of one of many briefings.
“They argued that cocaine is a facilitating drug of fentanyl, but that was not a satisfactory answer for most of us,” California Democratic Rep. Sara Jacobs advised reporters after a briefing she attended final week for members of the Home Armed Companies Committee.
The mounting frustration over the dearth of clear info is bipartisan. Final week, the Senate Armed Companies Committee, chaired by Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker, took the bizarre step of posting two letters demanding particulars of how the army is conducting the boat strikes on its web site.
“I’m not getting follow-up. We’re not getting the information. How do they choose this boat?” added Oklahoma Republican James Lankford, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Pentagon officers have additionally advised lawmakers that they don’t really know the identities of everybody they’ve killed in these assaults, solely that every vessel had on board a minimum of one one who is on a goal record of drug cartel members the administration has created, the congressional supply mentioned.
“They didn’t know the names of all the people on these boats,” the supply mentioned. “In some cases, they know only one person.”
That is in distinction to statements by Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State and nationwide safety adviser Marco Rubio suggesting that army and intelligence officers knew precisely who was on board the boats they’ve destroyed.
“We track them from the very beginning. We know who’s on them, who they are, where they’re coming from, what they have on them,” Rubio mentioned throughout an Oct. 22 photograph alternative on the White Home.
Protection Division officers declined to element what medication have been recovered or present every other details about the army strikes, together with whether or not they knew the identities of everybody that they had killed. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell as a substitute criticized members of Congress for chatting with reporters.
“The department is deeply concerned that members of Congress are making public statements regarding information received in a classified briefing. The department considers any unauthorized disclosure of classified information as [a] serious breach of national security,” he mentioned in an announcement.
Brian Finucane, who spent a decade within the State Division’s authorized workplace, wonders what the true objective behind the boat killings actually is.
“If these strikes aren’t about countering fentanyl, what are they about? For the president, they’re dramatic, performative military action,” he mentioned. “For the secretary of state, they’re another pressure tactic in a campaign aimed at regime change in Caracas.”
Harrison Mann, a former Protection Intelligence Company official and Military officer who now works to steer service members to not observe what he believes are unlawful orders to kill non-combatants, additionally suspects the strikes are extra about eliminating Venezuela’s dictator, Nicolas Maduro.
“The administration’s SOUTHCOM campaign is about three things, and none have anything to do with the overdose crisis,” Mann mentioned, referring to the army’s Southern Command chargeable for South America and the Caribbean. “One, producing kill-cam videos to distract from their abject failure to improve life in America. Two, testing to what extent the military will obey what military lawyers call ‘patently unlawful’ orders like carrying out extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean. And three, indulging neocon obsessions with launching Iraq-style regime change disasters in Venezuela and beyond.”
Trump has used the tons of of 1000’s of fentanyl overdose deaths lately to justify tariffs towards China for permitting the manufacturing of precursor chemical substances, Mexico for being the situation of the drug’s remaining manufacture and Canada, although it has nearly no position in the US’ fentanyl downside.
Trump’s assaults on the low-level smugglers on boats within the Caribbean and jap Pacific appear in that regard to resemble his therapy of Canada – based mostly on a false assertion about fentanyl. Besides fairly than going through tariffs, the alleged smugglers are going through violent dying from the sky.
Reimagining the smugglers as battle combatants fairly than criminals created the absurd state of affairs wherein the U.S. Navy, after concentrating on a vessel with the intent of killing everybody aboard in an Oct. 16 strike within the Caribbean, fished two survivors out of the water and returned them to Colombia and Ecuador fairly than turning them over to face prison prices within the U.S.
That means that the pair, underneath Trump’s logic, had been so harmful they needed to be killed fairly than arrested on the time of the missile strike, however so innocent that they might be freed of their residence nations simply days later.
“Let’s not pretend the Trump administration cares about preventing overdose deaths while they’re cutting billions from the prevention and treatment programs that actually save lives,” Mann mentioned, referring to the proposed finances cuts and layoffs that advocates say have dramatically harm the nation’s response to the habit disaster.
Fentanyl has been significantly harmful for drug customers as a result of it’s far cheaper to make than heroin, which many addicts and leisure customers turned to after the crackdown on pharmaceutical-quality opioids like OxyContin started greater than a decade in the past. It’s also way more lethal as a result of overdoses can happen with even minute portions. Roughly 80,000 overdose deaths per a yr had been going down in the US, though the quantity has been falling since 2022.
“Most fentanyl found in the United States is manufactured in Mexico and smuggled across the border by U.S. citizens, with a smaller quantity made within the United States itself,” Mann mentioned. “There is no evidence that Venezuela plays a meaningful role in synthetic opioid production, and even if that were somehow true, military action would, in the most optimistic scenario, simply shift production elsewhere.”
California Democrat Ro Khanna, a member of the Home Armed Companies Committee, mentioned no matter Trump’s rationale is for utilizing army pressure, he nonetheless has to come back to Congress.
“Trump’s strikes off the coast of Venezuela are a stain on our country’s conscience. The Constitution requires the president to come to Congress for approval. We must stand firmly against a regime change war,” he advised HuffPost.
HuffPost’s Igor Bobic contributed to this report.
