Two months ago, an impoverished Columbian fisherman named Alejandro Carranza phoned his teenage daughter to tell her that he would be asea for a few days. He never came back; instead, he ended up as one of the first victims of the Trump administration’s ruthless assassination campaign against men it claims—on the basis of purported evidence that it is refusing to make public—are transporting drugs in the Caribbean and Pacific.
Carranza’s death left his children without a father, his partner without income, and his family and friends looking for answers—and, now, for compensation from the US government for what they intend to argue in court was an illegal killing. Meanwhile, the assassinations—which even America’s closest allies, such as the UK and Canada, believe to be illegal under international law—continue apace.
SFR
This weekend, the Pentagon announced that the American military had destroyed the 21st boat in this campaign, bringing to 83 the number of known victims. The videos that the Pentagon releases after each strike show small boats, of the sort used by fishermen throughout the region, being latched onto by a drone’s targeting mechanism and then being destroyed. In the curated productions, these strikes look like sterile hits in video games. No names of the dead men are listed, no photographs, no humanizing details of any sort. Left unsaid, of course, is that each bombing is orphaning children, widowing wives, terrorizing fishermen who depend on the sea for their meager income away from their jobs, and generating a vast amount of resentment against the United States. In islands off of Venezuela and Columbia, the mangled, dismembered remains of the victims are, apparently, washing up on shore.
Casting aside both international and domestic laws, and the bedrock principle of the presumption of innocence, Trump has said, “I think we are just going to kill people who are bringing drugs into this country.” For small-c conservatives, who have long warned of the encroachment of Big Brother, such a statement should represent a five-alarm fire. So far, however, from within the administration there has been absolutely no push-back. In fact, Trump’s moral-midgetmen have contorted themselves into every pretzel shape imaginable to justify the unjustifiable.
The Justice Department has, apparently, put together a secret legal finding that the United States is, indeed, in armed conflict with "narcoterrorists,"—thus putting drug-smuggling gangs in the same category as international terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and Isis, the members of which have long been targeted by US drone operations—and disingenuously arguing that the boat bombings are perfectly legal because the US military is targeting the cargo rather than the crews.
This is utter nonsense. Most experts in international law are clear that there is a distinction between a criminal enterprise and an ideologically motivated terrorist group.
But even if one accepts that the military has a lead role in tackling international drug smuggling, there are other ways to do so than summarily executing dozens of low-end smugglers. Look at the snuff-video footage: the boats that the most powerful military on earth is blasting out of the water are about the size of tourist pedal boats. They don’t come equipped with sophisticated surface to air missile systems, torpedoes, or large-caliber guns. In other words, they are the sorts of ships that would be easy to intercept and board, at minimal risk to US lives. That is what is normally done; in any given year, US Coast Guard vessels intercept hundreds of ships, suspected of carrying drugs—and, as Republican Senator Rand Paul has pointed out, in more than a quarter of these instances no drugs were found. If that ratio holds for the ships being summarily destroyed under Hegseth’s and Trump’s illegal orders, that probably means at least 20 of the dead had nothing to do with the drug trade.
In other words, even if you buy the entirely odious argument that the US has the right to summarily execute low-end drug mules in the Pacific and Caribbean—the open ocean’s equivalent of the two-bit street hustlers who overwhelmingly made up the hundreds of thousands of men and women sentenced to years in prison during the country’s last ill-starred effort at a War on Drugs, and whom Trump apparently also wants to set the US military on in US cities—the odds are that you are also signing off on the execution of dozens of entirely innocent people.
I suspect that most Americans aren’t yet paying attention to these atrocities. I also suspect that, in time, we, as a country, will come to bitterly oppose this murder campaign and the international pariah status it will earn us. We will oppose America’s good name being so dishonored by these orders. And we will oppose making young Navy and Air Force personnel complicit in these crimes. We will, I suspect, come to feel deeply shamed as people from around the world remind us that the Nuremberg trials, after World War II, explicitly ruled out as a defense for the committing of illegal acts the words “I was only obeying orders.”
Trump makes every institution and individual he interacts with complicit in his sordid, frequently illegally, actions and orders. Using the US military to kill scores of fishermen simply to flex America’s muscle is just the latest example of this vicious pattern.
