Why should we trust these guys? Why should we believe these guys?
So far, more than 20 boats and more than 90 lives later, just the standard statements no one can verify.
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Why, after the U.S. has sunk more than 20 boats and killed more than 90 alleged narco-traffickers in what the Trump administration calls a “non-international armed conflict” with “terrorist organizations,” why is there still so much doubt? Why are so many Americans still so skeptical, not just about the rationale the president and his team have offered for these attacks, but about their very assurance that the 90-plus people they’ve killed, with no due process, were all narco-traffickers and not something else?
There is more than one answer, because with its defiant dearth of transparency, the government has left so many questions to ask.
One answer is, we are skeptical because the administration hasn’t offered evidence, virtually any evidence, to confirm its claims. Whenever asked about them in the past five weeks since the attacks began, the president and the defense secretary and the press secretary and every other spokesperson has simply told us, “Trust us.” As in the case of the latest strike Thursday: “Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed.”
In other words, take it on faith that American intelligence knew every time what was in the boats, who was in the boats, and which drug gang had sent the boats toward American shores. To be fair, maybe they did. But maybe they didn’t. U.S. intelligence, for all its talent and all its triumphs, has gotten a few things very, very wrong. But if they knew what they say they knew, why wouldn’t they level with the American people, if only to put out the fires of distrust that they themselves set?
Color me suspicious.
When American forces rooted Saddam Hussein out of an underground tunnel in Iraq in the George W. Bush era, did the American people question whether it was true?
When an American SEAL team in the Obama era killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, did the American people question whether it was true? When U.S. forces in the first Trump era killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr in Syria, did we wonder whether it was true? Earlier this year when we dropped bombs on a nuclear facility in Iran, did we wonder whether it was true? No, because we saw evidence and got our answer.
But now, when we blow these boats out of the water in the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean, there are more questions than answers.
Begin with the number of people in each boat. In the very first attack— technically two attacks, the first strike and then the second even more controversial strike, what’s called the “double-tap” against the survivors of the first— eleven people died. When I shot a documentary about the drug war, U.S. officials told me that the boats dispatched from South America toward the United States had only one or two crew, to maximize space for the drugs and minimize the number of people who would have to escape arrest. So why would there be eleven in that first boat we blew up? Not to make a pun, but it smells fishy.
Of course in the alternative explanation of skeptics that some of these were fishing boats, not drug boats, a passenger load of eleven doesn’t add up either.
Then look at the boats themselves. If you measure the distance from the very northern edge of Venezuela to the southern tip of Florida, it is about 1,500 miles. Are these boats seaworthy for a journey like that? From the photos released by the Pentagon, they look like open-top boats. Even at a high performance speed of 60 mph— again, in an open-top boat— that would take more than 24 hours, and burdened with the weight of several human beings and several tons of drugs, probably longer. Not to mention the volume of fuel that such a run would require. Is it likely?
Now, look at the conflicting versions we’ve heard from the administration about the attack on the first boat on September 2nd, the one that took two strikes and four missiles to sink. Originally, when The Washington Post broke the story about a second strike to kill the two survivors of the first strike, the secretary of defense called it “fabricated, inflammatory and derogatory,” his Pentagon spokesman following up with, “the entire narrative was false.” That might have stood up until none other than the White House press secretary— not exactly a paragon of truth herself— undercut him and said it wasn’t false, it was true. Now the secretary admits that there was a second strike to kill the last men alive.
The next question is, were the two survivors in that first attack capable of righting the damaged boat and resuming their mission to deliver drugs to their destination? That one hardly needs an answer because the answer is, obviously not. The first missile split the boat in half. Although the administration has claimed that the men were legitimate targets because they might have called for reinforcements, the admiral in charge of Joint Special Operations Command, Mitch Bradley, told Congress on Thursday that they couldn’t, because they didn’t appear to have any kind of devices to make such a call for help.
The last question is, where were the boats going? Obviously with strikes in both the Caribbean and the Pacific, the destinations varied. But the party line from the Trump administration has been that they were moving drugs to the United States. That is, until Admiral Bradley told Congress that the first boat— the one that got “double-tapped”— was on its way to a rendezvous to transfer its drugs to a larger boat that would take them to a small country southeast of Venezuela called Suriname. In other words, not to the United States.
It has been hard for the administration to get its story straight. On the day of that first attack, Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered that the boat was “probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean.” But President Trump said the drugs “were heading to the United States.” So Rubio changed his story. Version 2 became, the boat was “headed towards, eventually, the United States.”
Put it all together and I have to ask, why should we trust these guys? Why should we believe these guys? Even if what they assert is true, they are killing people with no due process, and waging these attacks in violation of a constitutional obligation to involve Congress.
Senator Rand Paul, one of the Republican critics in Congress, wants the video that the military has recorded of the attacks to be released. His reasoning is, “If the public sees images of people clinging to boat debris and being blown up, I think that there is a chance that finally, the public will get interested enough in this to stop this.” The president said yesterday on releasing the video, “Whatever they have, we’d certainly release, no problem.” But then Hegseth said yesterday, “We’re viewing the process, and we’ll see.” Yeah, we’ll see. Hegseth is a man who covers his you-know-what. Trump is a man who says a lot of things he doesn’t mean and makes a lot of promises he doesn’t keep. Have we seen the Epstein files yet? Have we seen his tax forms yet?
Maybe, finally, the administration will give us some evidence to justify its attacks on the high seas, notwithstanding the opinions of some legal experts that they are nothing short of murder. But so far, more than 20 boats and more than 90 lives later, it hasn’t. Just the standard statements no one can verify. And maybe it won’t. With this corrupt crowd, anything is possible.Upgrade to paid
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
You can learn more at GregDobbs.net