Important Message and Alert About the Boat Strikes

Dear Reformer,

Last February I warned President Trump might attempt Duterte-style extrajudicial drug war killings in the United States. In a different way, Trump is now doing extrajudicial drug war killings.

I'm referring to the drone strikes on alleged "drug boats," most of them near the coast of Venezuela. Since September, the US military on the president's order has carried out such strikes in 25 separate incidents, killing 95 people without warning. An infamous "second strike" on September 2^nd, which killed survivors who were clinging to the wreckage of a boat, heightened congressional scrutiny. But as Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has explained, the initial strikes are illegal too.

The president and his enablers claim to have authority for this, and that they are blowing up boats in the Caribbean to prevent fentanyl from killing people in the United States. But both of those claims are fictional. The reality is that President Trump is attempting to secure an unchecked right and ability to kill. As he said when asked in October, "we're just going to kill people."

A term for that is extrajudicial killing. In international law, the term is "crimes against humanity." Another word for it is "murder." For the sake of our future – the world's future – the perpetrators of these crimes must eventually face justice. And the killings must be stopped – before Trump feels emboldened enough to take them to the streets of the US itself, and before unprincipled leaders in some other countries decide to follow Trump's example.

You can hear some of my thoughts on these matters in presentations I gave recently for the Human Rights Council and the American Bar Association. You can also find reporting our writer Phillip Smith has done about the boat strikes in our newsletter, Drug War Chronicle.

For now, our jobs are the ones that our Filipino allies fighting Duterte had during the height of his drug war: stopping the killings; explaining what good drug policy is; reminding people that murder is wrong – even if the murderer claims to be fighting drugs; and gathering the evidence needed for future prosecutions.

If you see this message over the next few hours, and if you're a US voter, I hope you will take action on the first of those right now. This afternoon, (Wednesday 12/17), the House of Representatives is expected to debate and vote on H.Con.Res.61, a bill "[d]irecting the President… to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities with presidentially designated terrorist organizations in the Western Hemisphere" unless Congress authorizes the use of military force.

Please call your US Representative's office, and ask that your Rep. vote yes on H.Con.Res.61. If you agree with our characterization of the boat strikes as murders, please also ask your Rep. to state for the record that the strikes are extrajudicial killings, for which another word is murder. You can call your Representative's office (or find out who your Rep. is) by calling the Congressional Switchboard at (202) 224-3121. Because a vote is expected today, only a phone call will get through in time, unless you happen to be on the Hill to pay a visit.

We are also supporting H.Con.Res.64, bipartisan war powers legislation "[t]o direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities within or against Venezuela that have not been authorized by Congress." While this resolution is not directly about the boat strikes, the strikes and the possibility of the US initiating a regime change effort using our military are intertwined. If you agree with this legislation, please also ask your Rep. to vote yes on H.Con.Res.64.

Note that our support for H.Con.Res.64 in no way reflects support or approval for the Maduro regime, a repressive and brutal dictatorship that stole the most recent election. Indeed, one of the tragedies of Trump's saber-rattling is it's enabled the regime in Venezuela to further intensify its repressive measures. One of the ways it's done so is coercing their families and community members into taking down social media postings and not speaking out about their loved ones or what people on the boats were doing, which in turn hinders investigative efforts. Despite the need to restore democracy and human rights in Venezuela, it is questionable whether a military-based regime change operation would be the best way to accomplish that, and the Trump administration has not engaged in a serious process of analysis or discussion on this matter.

More about this soon. In the meanwhile, thanks for reading and being here.

- Dave

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We could really use your help at this time for our work on extrajudicial drug war killings, to fully restart our newsletter, for our work on marijuana policy, for evidence-gathering to help future boat strikes trials, and more. You can help by making a tax-deductible grant or donation to our 501(c)(3) nonprofit, DRCNet Foundation; or a non-deductible donation to our 501(c)(4) public welfare nonprofit, Drug Reform Coordination Network.

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Sincerely,

David Borden, Executive Director
StoptheDrugWar.org
P.O. Box 9853, Washington, DC 20016
https://stopthedrugwar.org