The U.S. Navy saved two loathsome drug dealers from drowning recently.
Trump proudly ordered the Navy to fire on small boats leaving Venezuela. As Rand Paul notes, about a quarter of the time authorities think someone is carrying illegal drugs, they’re wrong. So destroying four boats leaving Venezuela (where we lack a police presence) it’s likely one or two of those murdered crews wasn’t transporting drugs.
Amazingly, the Navy rescuing two men from a boat the Navy had just destroyed. Given the reasonable possibility that those guys wouldn’t be guilty of anything, I figured the standing order might be to let ‘em drown. Executing all the folks you branded “criminals” would be effectively scare the pants off drug dealers without some embarrassing acquittal of a fisherman.
Quite likely Donald Trump was amazed to hear of the rescues, too. “Dead men tell no tales.”
Trump bragged that 25,000 Americans would have died if those drugs had gotten through to the U.S. How absurd is that? In 2023, 108,000 died of drug overdoses in this country. So 25,000 would be a quarter of the nation’s annual total for a year. (That 108,000 figure decreased to about 80,000 in 2024, a statistic Mr. Trump would be waving around like a pardon, if he’d been president then.) Those 81,000 last year included both illegal drug overdoses and prescription drug overdoses. (Usually, 75% involve illegal drugs, so 60,000.) Trump’s 25,000 would be 42%. From one boat. Not blood likely. Further, fentanyl is responsible for 70-75% of the deaths. Venezuela is just not a major producer, exporter, or transit country for fentanyl. The large-scale flow is from China and Mexico. But you can’t massacre their fishermen so casually.
So Trump wanted to threaten Venezuela. He didn’t want his scheme disrupted by unsuccessfully trying some poor fisherman. Note that the rescued men were sent home to their countries, not tried or imprisoned.
I’d bet this irritate Trump.
The overall Navy commander for that area was a four-star admiral with a sterling record. That very same day – not even, say, a week later! – he was fired for no known reason. (I figured Hegseth fired him for being Black.) He was just 60. He’d taken over that job less than a year ago, and reportedly was doing it competently. We may never know, but I gotta wonder if Mr. Trump was so furious about the rescues that he lashed out. When reporters found that one man killed in one of these attacks was a lifelong fisherman, with no known drug involvement, and the disabled boat had sent a distress signal and was waiting (in Colombian waters) for rescue, and Colombia’s president complained, Trump called him a drug dealer, cut off aid to Colombia, and hit Colombia with a new tariff. (Impulse control, anyone? Can the Supreme Court impose “time outs?”)
So, yeah, we’re killing people without trial. Normally, the U.S. doesn’t execute criminals without first establishing that they are criminals, and guilty of a worse crime than drug-dealing. But Mr. Trump has been ordering our sailors to do just that. His story that a small boat leaving Venezuela carried enough of some drug to kill 40% of the people who die this year of illegal drug overdoses? Does he believe that nonsense, or has he such contempt for voters that he figures we will?
Worse than extrajudicial killings is being defended by an infant lacking the least impulse-control.
– 30 --
[The above Las Cruces Sun-News column will presently be on the newspaper’s website and KRWG’s website (under Local Viewpoints). A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). That website also contains station show archives.]
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