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 study of hundreds of federal defendants, and a former prosecutor.

Many drug smugglers 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 claims 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 quickly find another way to send drugs to the U.S., he said.

“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 said.

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 statement to The Intercept.

“It’s shameful that The Intercept is running cover for evil narcoterrorists trying to poison our homeland as over 100,000 Americans die from overdoses every year,” said 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,” said Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, “and he is delivering on his promise to take on the cartels and eliminate these national security threats from murdering more Americans.”

“Poorest and Weakest Link”

Murphy, who also handled January 6 insurrection cases and resigned earlier this year while criticizing the direction of the Justice Department under Trump, said most of the defendants he prosecuted were poor, uneducated........

© The Intercept