My goodness gracious. This is a bombshell, a small one, but nevertheless, it is. The experts are telling us the whole story about those boat strikes. It’s very unlikely that the administration will notice, and if they do, it will be disregarded, and the boat strikes will continue. Even if they are drug smugglers, that’s not the way you treat this. You arrest them and take them in to see if you can dismantle even a small part of the smuggling rings. And you don’t kill people who are out fishing to get food for their families. That *really* is murder. But what options do we have to try to stop the killings of small, defenseless boats? Much obliged to Raw Story:
The Trump administration continued its illegal bombing of small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific on Friday, killing two and leaving one survivor in its third such strike in five days.
US Southern Command announced the attack on social media, claiming that “intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations.”
“Under [President Donald] Trump’s illegal orders, the US military conducted its third boat strike in five days against supposed drug smugglers, killing at least two. Each of these is a murder.
Drug suspects should be arrested and prosecuted, not summarily executed,” former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth wrote on social media Saturday in response to the news.
He knows that, and we know that. The problem is multifold. We need the boat strikes to stop. We need people prosecuted in a military or a civilian court. And we need to know *why* the military is following these orders. This is blatantly obvious. The boats are sitting ducks against our armament, and that’s no contest at all. It never has been. But the orders have been given by Hegseth, and the military is following them. *That* is a big part of the puzzle. Just … why?
The administration has not provided evidence for its claims that the boats belong to drug traffickers, and relatives of the victims say at least some of those killed were simply on the water to fish.
Friday’s strike was notable in that it left behind a survivor and that US Southern Command said it had activated the US Coast Guard to conduct a search and rescue operation.
The announcement may reflect a response to backlash after news broke last year that, in the administration’s first such strike, commanders had ordered a vessel bombed twice when it became clear there were survivors, in keeping with Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth’s directive to “kill everybody.”
Despite scrutiny, the campaign has continued and even escalated in the past few weeks.
There were people fishing. Everyone has to know about the [expletive] boat strikes by now. Hunger is a powerful impetus for someone’s family. They had to have been desperate to go out on the water to fish, with the knowledge that they might not come home. Their families wait back on land and hope they come home. People were fishing. It wasn’t drug smuggling at all. But these days, according to Hegseth, everyone on the water is a narco-terrorist. They should be intercepted, not killed! Well, I can rant and scream all I want, but it’s not going to make an [expletive] bit of difference. It hurts. We should all be hurting for these people who are getting killed for a nonsensical reason by Petey Boy.
While the Trump administration claims the strikes have dramatically reduced the flow of illegal drugs into the US, evidence reveals this is not the case, according to an Intercept analysis published May 4.
Adam Isacson, the director for defense oversight at human rights group Washington Office on Latin America, said, “Really absurdly, there’s been no impact on flows of drugs toward the United States,” noting that Customs and Border Protection seized 6,000 pounds more cocaine at all US borders in the seven months following the strikes than in the seven months before.
As Sanho Tree, who directs the Institute for Policy Studies’ Drug Policy Project, put it, “It wouldn’t be the first time this administration just made up something out of whole cloth.”
BOOM. It hasn’t made a difference. Whether or not the people on the water are “narco-terrorists”, as Petey Boy likes to brag about, you don’t murder them. You capture them. It feels as if the administration is making a video game about this, except your opponents have nothing to fight with and nothing to protect themselves. It makes you wonder if the people doing the shooting are keeping track of their “kills”. They could be. There could be a tally board. We have to keep track of them because they were (are) defenseless. Completely defenseless.
See you soon!
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