Drug Runners on Boats Used to Get a Few Years In Prison. Trump’s Drone Strikes Are Executions Without Trials.

President Donald Trump has hailed the U S military s missile strikes on suspected drug smuggling boats from Venezuela as a blow against narcoterrorists trafficking cocaine and fentanyl For this they deserve death The sinister imagery conjured by the language however is starkly out of step with the picture of typical smuggling crews in the Caribbean painted by accounts from court records a research of hundreds of federal defendants and a former prosecutor A multitude of drug handlers in the Caribbean Sea are impoverished fishermen hailing from small villages a profile that lines up with local reports about the crew of the first boat targeted by Trump Then there are Trump s suggests about the drugs themselves If the U S strikes are aimed at stopping the flow of fentanyl into the U S he targeted the wrong country Venezuela is neither a major source nor distributor of fentanyl and its citizens are typically caught with cocaine Trump s boasts about the strikes outraged Sean Murphy a former federal prosecutor in Puerto Rico who handled dozens of smuggling cases Traffickers view the crews of smuggling boats as expendable and will rapidly find another way to send drugs to the U S he reported They are going to be sitting around their gold-plated table in a mansion with a bunch of hippos and tigers and whatever and say What now Trump is blowing up boats in the south Caribbean What now And they will figure out something else he reported So far the Trump administration has offered no evidence that the speedboat attacks killed high-level traffickers One Pentagon official speaking on condition of anonymity to The Intercept previously described the first strike as a criminal act The White House defended the strikes in a report to The Intercept It s shameful that The Intercept is running cover for evil narcoterrorists trying to poison our homeland as over Americans die from overdoses every year mentioned Anna Kelly a White House spokesperson The President acted in line with the laws of armed conflict to protect our country from those trying to bring poison to our shores mentioned Anna Kelly a White House spokesperson and he is delivering on his promise to take on the cartels and eliminate these national defense threats from murdering more Americans Poorest and Weakest Link Murphy who also handled January insurrection cases and resigned earlier this year while criticizing the direction of the Justice Department under Trump mentioned the greater part of the defendants he prosecuted were poor uneducated fisherman His firsthand experience is backed up by a large-scale academic inquiry of hundreds of boat defendants An average of suspected traffickers are detained by the U S at sea each year three-quarters of them in the Pacific according to the May article in the Federal Sentencing Reporter The bulk were caught on to -foot open boats with three or four occupants They were on average years old They were almost perpetually unarmed While the boats are often caught with large amounts of drugs kilograms during an average cocaine bust the men on board usually are not the owners They may have been hired by agents for expected payouts of as little as Related Pentagon Official Trump Boat Strike Was a Criminal Attack on Civilians Summing up the cohort on his docket one federal judge mentioned preponderance were these perfectly unsophisticated desperately poor fishermen or peasants who are recruited to participate in these matters Phil Gunson an expert on the Andes region for the International Situation Group put it even more bluntly They are the poorest and weakest link he revealed They are completely pawns in the operation Federal judges frequently acknowledged the bit part that boat crews play in the drug pact by dipping below sentencing guidelines according to the academic investigation of such cases On average since a change to sentencing laws they gave middlemen an eight-year prison sentence Now the sentence is death even though the profiles of facilitators on the boats struck by the U S military seems to closely match the defendants previously hauled into court Although the Venezuelan leadership promptly moved in to seal off the coastal village where multiple of the alleged traffickers hailed from after the first strike on September local outlets communicated on social media posts that at least several were ordinary fishermen Since then Trump has directed two more strikes on speedboats in the Caribbean Sparse details about the crew of either boat have emerged Leaders from the Dominican Republic stated over the weekend that they had recovered roughly pounds of cocaine from one of the boats hit by a U S airstrike Wrong Country Wrong Drug Trump and other officers have made much of Venezuelan President Nicol s Maduro s alleged complicity in the drug agreement but experts say the country plays at greater part a small role in trafficking and almost none in the distribution of fentanyl A latest State Department document discovered that Mexico is the only crucial source of illicit fentanyl and fentanyl analogues significantly affecting the United States Cocaine is by far the most of typical drug trafficked across in the eastern Caribbean according to experts Fentanyl is sometimes cut into the cocaine after it reaches the U S but Venezuelan crew members would have no firsthand role in that process In the south Caribbean cocaine is king Murphy the former federal prosecutor explained Trump may have other goals in focusing on a country that neither produces nor transports large amounts of fentanyl according to experts on the region Related The Rift in Trump World Over Venezuela John Walsh the director of drug policies at the nonprofit Washington Office on Latin America stated he saw two factors at play One is to put pressure on the leadership of Maduro an American adversary in the hope that internal advocacy crumbles The other is to buttress Trump s claim that Maduro has directed an invasion of drugs and people at the U S territory line Big domestic priorities mass deportation and emergencies that justify tariffs somehow link to this narrative of an invasion Walsh commented Venezuela comes in handy in that scenario if the scenario can be made that these drugs are flooding in they re coming from Venezuela and the Venezuelan ruling body at the behest of President Maduro is orchestrating it I don t think any of that adds up but I think that is why Venezuela Fleeting Changes Lasting Damage The Trump administration s legal justification for the strikes on suspected smuggling boats has been panned by scholars of international and maritime law Murphy called it murder Colombian President Gustavo Petro has used the same word Related Pentagon Barred Senior House Staffers From Briefing on Venezuela Boat Strike The administration says the old model of law enforcement interdiction was not working Experts on narcotrafficking however reported the strikes are not likely to have much practical effect on the drug arrangement either Traffickers are extremely adaptable and they are very resourceful and they have various options They can change the trail reported Gunson of the International Situation Group In an interview with CBS on Tuesday Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that the strikes were having the intended deterrent effect on trafficking shipments The way it s been handled in the past hasn t worked And boy let me tell you something you re not seeing nearly as a great number of boats right now as you were a couple weeks ago So it has worked and will continue to work Rubio explained He s not going to continue to allow these drug cartels to flood America with poisonous drugs that are killing our people indefinitely There are already reports however that trafficking organizations are routing more drugs through the Pacific to avoid the U S military Gunson commented For Walsh the strikes underscored once again the futility of drug prohibition As long as demand for drugs exists in the U S drug traffickers will have the incentive to provide supply What about this new U S strategy of kill-first ask-questions-never is going to change that to fundamentally deter and transform the underlying structure and dynamics Walsh mentioned I don t think anything It s going to kill more people as far as the big fish and kingpins of the drug contract are concerned they couldn t give a damn about The post Drug Runners on Boats Used to Get a Limited Years In Prison Trump s Drone Strikes Are Executions Without Trials appeared first on The Intercept