The War on Drug Boats Is Propelled by Impunity
The first drug boat attacked on September 2 in the Caribbean near Trinidad reportedly had turned around before it was blown apart. That missile strike, however, left two survivors among the crew of 11 clinging to smoldering debris in the middle of the sea.
Consequently, a second strike was ordered to kill the stranded survivors, raising the specter of a war crime. The tell that such a concern exists within the Pentagon and the CIA (also part of the Venezuelan adventure) is that two survivors were fished out of the water in a later boat attack.
Why were those survivors rescued if there were no concerns over the cold-blooded killing of the two survivors in the first boat attack? And why are Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and President Trump now backtracking on releasing the full video of the September 2 boat assault to the public?
Still, there is no declared war by Congress, which is the only branch that can declare war under the Constitution. So, charges of a war crime don’t appear to fit the context. International piracy might work — if that didn’t require declaring the U.S. Navy now off the coast of Venezuela a pirate fleet.
Outside a declared war, however, an act of murder in international waters involving a U.S. national can be prosecuted under U.S. federal law. Those blown apart to date, however, appear not to have any claim to U.S. protection. That means prosecution in the home nations of those killed might be the only legal option left on the table — one the accused can easily dodge by avoiding those nations on family trips.
Further supporting a climate of impunity, Trump in his second term, has consolidated control over the Justice Department, which decides who gets prosecuted or not. Beyond that, Trump can pardon those accused of crimes. That includes murder charged under federal law.
Plus, Trump can issue illegal orders with impunity because he has absolute immunity when acting in his official capacity as president, even if he issues illegal orders — thanks to the twisted reasoning of the U.S. Supreme Court. What we have now, then, is a recipe for slaughter on the high seas — and elsewhere — with no quarter or recourse. Strikes even on the U.S. homeland would be afforded the same impunity, it seems.
But a sword cuts both ways. It’s worth remembering, as Trump ramps up his war on drugs for oil in Venezuela, that a large share of any U.S. lives lost in battling cartels will be killed by guns made in the US — both in recent years and left over from past U.S. misadventures in Latin America.
The drugs go north, and the guns flow south, a river of iron. That simple formula offers a keen insight into why the war on drugs has been such a huge failure. Follow the guns, drugs and money, and you will realize the war on drugs is not supposed to end.
Those making and/or selling the guns make money off weapons that are later illegally sold to cartels or legally to the cops or military. It’s an industry with a stake in both worlds. It’s not a surprise, to me anyway, that ATF’s resources have been slashed under the current administration.
The corporate overlords of the gun industry are among the few winners in the war for drugs (now a half-century old) — along with the greedy politicians, bankers and cryptocrats that benefit from the blood money. They all have a perverse incentive to keep the war raging, as do the law enforcement and intelligence agencies whose budgets are now bloated with a growing treasure trove of tax dollars to wage Trump’s war on narco-traffickers. The same destructive dynamics have existed in the war on drugs since Nixon launched it in 1971.
Clearly, Latin American drug mules shlepping bricks of cocaine on and off boats for a few hundred bucks a run are low on the totem pole. They are the new crash-test dummies in the drug war.
