The title of an article in the Washington Post says it all: “Deadly U.S. Boat Strikes Have Failed to Curb Cocaine Supply, Pentagon and DEA Officials Say.”
Imagine that. Shocking! Who would have ever thought that would be the result of the Pentagon’s murder of more than a hundred innocent people in little boats on the high seas thousands of miles away from American shores?
Well, pretty much anyone who has been paying attention to the drug war for the past 50 years. No matter what US officials have done to crack down in a never-ending effort to win their beloved drug war, the result has always been the same — failure to win their war.
The mandatory-minimum sentences. The stealing of massive amounts of money through civil-asset forfeiture from poor people traveling down the highway. The harassment, abuse, humiliation, and even killing of Blacks while walking, sleeping, or driving. The inordinately high jail sentences, especially to Blacks. The no-knock raids. The unethical cooperation of federal judges and federal prosecutors to get drug-war convictions. The record drug busts. The incarceration or killing of drug lords. The busting of drug cartels. The planting of drugs on people to get convictions. Mass incarceration, especially with respect to Blacks. The destruction of civil liberties and privacy. The military raid on Venezuela that killed dozens of innocent people. And, of course, the state murder of those innocent people on the high seas near South America.
All to no avail. The drugs have just kept coming. And Americans have just continued consuming them. It’s all been a giant waste of time, energy, and money that has accomplished nothing but the destruction of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And make no mistake about it: The Pentagon’s killing of those boat people does in fact constitute murder. Under our system of criminal justice, everyone is presumed innocent of a crime until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Every one of those dead boat people was as innocent as you and I.
Oh, sure, I know what defenders of these murders say. They say that our beloved government officials had secret information that they can’t share with us that those boat people were carrying illegal drugs and planning to bring them into the United States in violation of US drug laws. We just need to trust our daddy, they say, who would never lie to us and who is just interested in keeping us safe from the boogeyman.
But that secret information isn’t worth anything. For one thing, US officials could easily be lying about having that secret information. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time they lied, especially in the drug war. More important, however, is that under our system of justice, secret information that indicates that a person is committing a crime does not furnish a justification for killing him.
Instead, what officials are required to do upon acquiring information, secret or not, that a person is committing a crime is arrest him, indict him, and bring him to trial.
After all, let’s not forget an important point: The accused might be proven to be innocent. That’s why we have trials rather than extrajudicial murders of people who government officials suspect are committing crimes.
Keep in mind also that just because it’s the military doing the murdering, the criminal-justice principles do not change. In enforcing the drug war, the military is simply acting in a police capacity, no different from the DEA.
Maybe some good will come from these military murders. Maybe the American people will finally come to the realization that the drug war is nothing more than a decades-old, ongoing, never-ending deadly, destructive, and corrupt racket that has brought nothing but death and the destruction of liberty and privacy, while making the federal government ever more powerful. Maybe — just maybe — Americans will finally, after decades of drug-war failure, pressure US officials to terminate the abomination of the drug war. In that way, those innocent people who have been murdered at the hands of US military personnel will not have died in vain.
Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.
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