By Jim Jones
JJ Commontater
Donald Trump released a video on September 2 showing a boat being blown up in International Waters about 2,000 miles from America’s shores. Trump claimed the boat contained a massive amount of drugs that its 11 occupants were transporting to the U.S.
No evidence has yet surfaced that his contentions were truthful.
Trump said the attack was a clear message to drug lords to stop sending drugs to poison our people. MAGA minions began echoing that same theme. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said: “If you traffic drugs toward our shores, the United States military will use every tool at our disposal to stop you cold.”
Parnell failed to mention that the boat had turned around and was headed back to shore when it was destroyed. JD Vance chimed in: “Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.”
Like many American veterans, I have always believed that defending America against vicious dictatorships, like Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China, was the military’s highest and best use.
Senator Jim Risch said he was “extremely confident” that the target of the boat attack was “a group of narco-terrorists.” He continued: “I can’t tell you how many lives were saved by the president of the United States when he pulled the trigger on that. There were tons of drugs that went down with that that would have wound up right here in the USA.”
Risch provided absolutely no factual basis for any of his claims.
Having been a drug warrior during my eight years as Idaho’s Attorney General, I can tell you that killing low-level drug workers is unlikely to make a dent in the illegal drug trade. With the massive profits that criminals reap by feeding America’s insatiable appetite for illicit drugs, the loss of any number of drug mules is a minimal cost of doing business.
So long as there is a thriving market for their deadly product, there will be plenty of suppliers, both foreign and domestic.
Fighting the drug scourge takes significant efforts to investigate and enforce the nation’s drug laws. Trump’s diversion of 25,000 criminal law enforcement agents to assist ICE with its roundup of immigrants does not help. DEA, FBI and ATF agents should be focusing their expertise on putting the drug cartels out of business, instead of chasing workers.
Trump’s 2026 budget request, calling for funding cuts of over $1.2 billion for those federal agencies, will further impede their enforcement efforts.
On the other hand, enforcement action alone will not solve the nation’s serious drug abuse problem. Unless the United States makes a concerted effort to reduce the demand for dangerous drugs, we are not going to come close to reducing our drug dependency.
Domestic enforcement efforts can help, but effective and available drug treatment is absolutely essential. Properly-run substance abuse programs can work to reduce drug dependence, while also reducing the customer base of the cartels.
The number of deaths caused by drug overdoses is staggering. Statistics of the National Institute on Drug Abuse show that overdose deaths climbed from just under 20,000 in 1999 to over 100,000 in recent years.
Government data shows that treatment of substance use disorder helped reduce drug overdose deaths by about 27-percent last year.
Yet the Medicaid cuts imposed by Trump’s Big Beautiful Billionaire Bill will make about 1.6 million Medicaid enrollees ineligible for treatment -– a big step backwards.
Let’s get back to Trump’s elimination of the 11 people on the boat. The boat was sunk by a military drone. One or more other drones finished off the survivors in the water. Even if the survivors were drug runners, they posed no threat to anyone as they were flailing in the water.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio made it clear that the U.S. could have followed the lawful practice of searching the boat and arresting the crew, if they turned out to be criminals. He said: “Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up -– and it’ll happen again.”
Indeed, Trump killed three more alleged drug mules in a second strike on September 15. It seems that extrajudicial drug killings will be standard practice in the Trump regime.
What Next? If that practice can be employed without consequence on the high seas, could it not be used by ICE on American soil?
The plight of the drone operator(s) who pulled the trigger at Trump’s command is another source of concern.
Bringing lethal fire upon a boat in international waters, without legal justification, would likely be a violation of the rules of engagement for the drone operator(s). American military personnel can be punished for complying with an unlawful order.
They should not have been placed in that dilemma.