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Jacob Sullum & Ammon Blair: Should the U.S. Treat Cartel Boats as Military Targets?
00:33:16
On this episode of Future of Freedom, host Scot Bertram is joined by two guests with different viewpoints about recent actions taken by the United States against cartels. First on the show is Jacob Sullum, senior editor at Reason. Later, we hear from Ammon Blair, a Senior Fellow for the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s ‘Secure & Sovereign Nation’ Initiative. You can find Jacob on X at @JacobSullum and the Texas Public Policy Foundation at @TPPF.
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Foreign.
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Welcome to FUTURE of Freedom. I'm your host, Scott Bertram. Future of Freedom is a production of Franklin News Foundation. To support this show, go to franklinnews.org donate we bring you interviews today from different sides of the debate over actions taken by the United States against cartels. In a little bit, we'll be joined by Emmon Blair, senior fellow for the Texas Public Policy Foundation's Secure Sovereign Nation initiative. More@texas policy.com first we talk with Jacob Sulum, senior editor at Reason. You can read more@reason.com Jacob, thanks so much for joining us.
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C
Sure. Thanks for having me.
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B
Talking today about these drone strikes on boats in the Caribbean that President Trump has ordered. Russia recently killing at least 27 people that he describes as narco terrorists and bringing drugs into the country. What exactly how would you describe what President Trump has authorized here and how has it changed from past anti drug operations?
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C
Well, to put it succinctly, I would describe it as murder. I'm trying to explain why that assessment is justified. Ordinarily, when you interdict drugs in the absence of violent resistance, you would not fire on a boat, you would not blow it up and kill everyone on board. You would stop it and you would make arrests. This is what the Coast Guard routinely does. And the difference now is that Trump is saying, we're going to summarily execute these people that we've identified as drug smugglers, which means you don't have to bother to arrest them, take them to court, file charges, present evidence, or go through any semblance of due process. He's tried to justify this by saying the smuggling of drugs amounts to violent aggression, which I think is a dubious proposition. What's happening here is that Americans want these drugs and there are criminal organizations that are happy to provide them. The government obviously doesn't want those organizations to supply the drugs. But that is not the same as violently assaulting someone or attempting to murder them. And the administration has said drug cartels are essentially murdering Americans because of the number of drug related deaths each year, which last year totaled about 82,000. More than twice that number of people die as a result of alcohol consumption every year. By the same reasoning, your average distiller or brewer or vintner and all the people in the distribution system, including liquor stores and bartenders, would also be guilty of murder. I don't think that that's a reasonable argument. And under the law, certainly we don't treat people who distribute alcohol as murderers. But even during alcohol prohibition, they were not treated that way. And under current law Generally, the death penalty is not available in drug trafficking cases. So even if you arrested people and charged them and convicted them after a trial, you still would not be able to simply kill them. So this is quite revolutionary compared to past drug policy. It totally overrides long standing principles of criminal justice, and it also corrupts the function of the military, because the military historically has made a distinction between civilians and combatants. And Trump is totally obliterating that distinction by saying, treating this as a warlike operation in which anyone who is suspected of smuggling drugs can simply be killed. Whether or not they're actually engaged in a violent attack, whether or not they're offering any sort of violent resistance, the President can simply order their deaths. Now, you have the added complication, which is one of the reasons why we have due process, that we don't know for sure who these people are. I'll grant you that many of them, most of them, probably actually are smuggling drugs. But the President of Columbia said that one of the people who had been killed was an attack on September 15 was not, in fact, a narco terrorist, as Trump described him. Trump said that these were all confirmed narco terrorists from Venezuela. According to the President of Colombia, one of those people was actually a fisherman who had no connection to the drug trade. Is that true? I don't know if that's true. It's possible, though, right? So if you look at what happens when the Coast Guard stops a boat and searches it because they think it might be carrying drugs, well, most of the time those boats are carrying drugs, but about one quarter of the time they're not. So the Coast Guard thinks they have drug smugglers, but they turn out to be wrong a substantial percentage of the time. We have no idea what sort of evidence the President is relying on to identify people as drug smugglers. Even if he were 100 certain, about 100% certain about that identification, and he could provide evidence that would convince everybody, he still would not be justified in simply killing them. So that's a violation of standard practice, whether you look at what the military does or how the criminal justice system works.
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B
All right, let's unpack things a little bit. What do we know about the amount of drugs or the percentage of drugs that are coming into America via boat or over the seas? What kind of a problem, quote, unquote, is this addressing?
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C
Well, I don't think it's really addressing the problem at all. In terms of the traffic, by Trump's own estimate, the vast majority is not coming by sea. And of the drugs that are coming by sea, most of the traffic is actually in the Pacific Ocean, not in the Caribbean. So he is attacking one particular method of smuggling by one particular route. And his telling, if he destroys a boat that's carrying drugs, that eliminates those drugs from the supply and reduces the total supply available to Americans by that amount. That's not how this works. The way interdiction has always worked is.
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That.
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C
Drug warriors try to impose costs on traffickers by interdicting seizing the drugs they're shipping. And if that, the most you could reasonably expect from that if it were successful, is that it would raise retail prices. It does not reduce the total supply available to Americans. And that strategy is complicated by the fact that drugs acquire most of their value close to consumers, which means that if you seize them on the ocean, if you seize them in the source country, the cost of replacing them is relatively low. So that strategy has never worked very well. And it's not going to work any better now that Trump is simply killing people instead of arresting them. So when he says something like, each boat we destroy that we're saving 25,000 lives. Totally absurd. That's based on taking the total weight of the drugs, dividing them by the estimated lethal dose. By his account, There have been seven attacks so far, killing, by the way, 32 people last count I saw. So it's up since they were saying 27. By his account, he did that seven times. Then he saved, you know, seven times 25,000 people, which is, you know, far in excess of the actual total number of annual drug related deaths. So that obviously can't be true. This is similar to the reasoning that the Attorney General applied when she claimed that the Trump administration, by seizing fentanyl, had saved, you know, a number of people that was substantially larger than the US population. So, so this is just. That's complete nonsense in terms of the efficacy of this, which is one of his arguments is interdiction hasn't worked in the past. He says it's been totally ineffective, which is true. But this strategy is not gonna change that reality. You still will seize a certain percentage of drugs being shipped to the U.S. there are lots of different ways to get those drugs to US consumers, and the government can't possibly stop all of them. The government can't even keep drugs out of prisons, which is pretty controlled environment. So there's no realistic hope of actually stopping the flow of drugs into the U.S. no matter how many times politicians promise to do that.
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B
You mentioned in this piece President Trump's praise for Rodrigo Duterte, and he's facing charges over extrajudicial killings. Could US Officials risk similar legal exposure?
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C
Realistically, probably not. But it is telling that Trump admired Duterte. He said he was doing a great job of fighting drug abuse. And Duterte compared himself to Hitler explicitly while urging the murder of drug offenders, including users as well as dealers. It's not an example that should be emulated, but that fits with Trump's general attitude that, you know, we should kill all drug dealers. He would like to see expanded use of the death penalty. I don't think that's justified, first of all, for a crime that doesn't involve violating anybody's rights. But secondly, it hasn't been done. Right. Those penalties have not been, in fact, been authorized by Congress. And if they were, you would still have to go through due process to convict people of those crimes before you can impose a sentence. So he wants to jump over all of that and just take the shortcut of, let's just kill people. And I don't think that's morally justified or legally justified.
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B
Is there any precedent for this? Meaning, has the US Ever before used military force in this way against alleged smugglers or criminals who are not actively engaged in combat?
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C
No, it's completely unprecedented to simply kill people who are not putting up any sort of violent resistance. I mean, think about if there's a police officer who is arresting somebody who he suspects is a drug dealer, and instead of taking him into custody, he decides, I'm just gonna shoot him dead on the spot without any, you know, any sort of violent resistance, that police officer would be guilty of murder very clearly. He would face criminal charges. That's what Trump is doing.
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B
You mentioned earlier, President Trump was explaining this in a way that said the past method simply had been ineffective. What if Congress were to agree and say, you know what? President Trump's right. We have to get tougher, and this is something we should carry out. What is the legal method or what is the method that would make this, I guess, okay under U.S. law?
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C
Well, I mean, they could institute the death penalty for a wider range of drug offenses. That's something that Trump has recommended. But even then, you would still have to go through due process. I don't think it would be justified to do that, and I don't think it would be effective either. I mean, the root of this problem is that prohibition creates a risk premium, meaning that people who are willing to defy it and supply illegal drugs can earn lots of money by taking those risks. And because of that, very powerful incentive traffickers are highly motivated to find ways around any barriers that the government manages to create. And that's why for over a century, even though politicians have been constantly promising that we're going to cut off the flow of illegal drugs into the US that that's never happened. So no matter what additional penalties Congress might approve, no matter how violent interdiction becomes, they're not going to be able to accomplish that goal because it's impossible.
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B
Let's flip that around. Congress says this is outrageous. What is the mechanism for reeling in President Trump and stopping these actions in the Caribbean?
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C
Well, I mean, they could pass a resolution saying they don't approve of this use of the military. There was Rand Paul attempted to do something like that, but failed to get enough supporters. This is something that really should be of concern to people across the political spectrum. Reportedly, in addition to Paul and the Democrats obviously are raising concerns publicly, other Republicans have privately complained that they don't really know what's going on here. That even in private they can't get full videos of the attacks. For example, they can't even get the names of the people who are killed. These are people who supposedly were confirmed as narco terrorists. Well, who are they and what organizations do they belong to? You know, Trump has argued we're engaged in an armed conflict with drug cartels. Which drug cartels? In what sense is this an armed conflict? I mean, I think that that doesn't make sense logically unless you buy the equation of drug smuggling with violent aggression. He also says these are terrorists. And a couple of things about that. You know, the designation of a particular cartel as a terrorist organization, foreign terrorist organization by the State Department does not mean it's okay to just kill anybody who you think belongs to those groups. It means it authorizes economic sanctions, it authorizes penalties for supporting those groups. But it does has nothing to do with transforming murder into self defense. That's the first point. The second point is that it's counterintuitive to say that these are terrorist groups. Yes, they use violence for sure, but they're not using violence to affect political change. They're using violence to make money, to resolve black market disputes, to take some of the market from competitors, to resist the government's attempts to suppress the drug traffic. So for sure they're violent, but they're not using violence to accomplish a political goal, which is how terrorism is usually understood.
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Jacob Sullim is senior editor at Reason. You can read his writing@reason.com Jacob, thanks so much for joining us here on Future of Freedom. Thank you now to hear another side of the argument about actions taken by the United States against cartels. We talk with Ammon Blair, senior fellow for the Texas Public Policy Foundation's Secure Sovereign Nation initiative. More Texas Policy.com Amit, thanks so much for joining us.
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Thank you for having me talking today.
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B
About the Trump administration specifically, but also the overall approach to drug cartels by the United States. You describe in a piece you wrote over Texas policy what's happening as not a metaphorical war, but a real war. And that's a delineation that is difficult for some to understand. What does this look like in practice? What does a real war with cartels look like in practice?
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A
Yeah, sure, great question. So you made an interesting turn term when you introduced this situation. You said drug cartels and unfortunately that's the problem with the American viewpoint in regards to the Mexican cartels. Many view the cartels as only a drug cartel or those that profit from the illicit trade of narcotics, whether from from Mexico or the Southern hemisphere into the United States. However, the cartels have taken over many parts of the society, not just in Mexico. So like in the early 1990s when the Mexican government went from one party rule and started losing that, the cartels rose up as an insurgency. And that's where we and then fast forward to today. That's where we see the we saw the rise of the major cartels within that Sinaloa, the Gulf Cartel, Cartel, Jaliscano generation. That time period, they took over every form and facet of society, whether that is from agriculture, whether that is from any natural resources that took over that trade, whether that is also logistics, the supply chain, whether that is also in oil, in every facet of your life or livelihood as a Mexican citizen. The cartels sought control over as well as politics. So if you look at the last election cycle, it was the most violent election cycle in Mexican history where 37 elected officials were assassinated or candidates. There were over 500 known assaults on elected officials. However, when you look at the breakdown the data, almost 80% of them were for local like mayors and whatnot. Mayor is actually one of the most dangerous jobs in Mexico. When you look at that, you look at how the cartels operate inside of Mexico. Not only do they control the politicians, they are politicians themselves. They also are far surpassed in insurgency that it was only in the 90s and early 2000s. They're actually far surpassed terrorism. They are now a parallel governance with Mexico. And so understanding what the threat is the first part in understanding how we can actually solve that or as Secretary of War Pete Hexseth says, match capabilities with the threats. So if we continue as a nation to see these cartels as only one that smuggles narcotics, then we will only apply law enforcement tools to go after them. However, they have far surpassed that, even in the 90s. It's this administration currently that has actually taken a first look at how the cartels actually operate inside Mexico and inside the United States. And because of that, and how they actually raise run their operations, not just in our countries, but in 65 countries. That's why you're seeing what we're seeing now.
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B
You highlight that some of the strength of the cartels come from elements within the Mexican state. As you lay out, should the United States treat Mexico as complicit in these activities and not as much as a partner in trying to fight these activities?
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100%. We're not dealing with the 1990s era Colombia, where we're going after the Medellin or Cali cartel, where the Colombian government allowed us to intervene and assist their military and law enforcement. In Colombia, President Scheinbaum has made it known that we're not allowed to breach inside of Mexico. The cartels have a symbiotic relationship with the federal government as well as the local governments. And so not just a symbiotic relationship. Some of them are actually politicians, as I said earlier. And so really what you're dealing with is more or less a rich Afghanistan where unfortunately, we lost a lot of our strategic value in Afghanistan because we never separate or we didn't separate the Taliban from the federal government and the corruption. If you read the cigar reports, the inspector reports from Afghanistan, you'll see that that's ultimately what led us to failure, is our failure to recognize the security of the situation and the amount of corruption in Afghanistan and how they are completely symbiotic in relationship. Same thing is with Mexico. We must treat Mexico as a government that 100% sponsors and allows the cartels to have sanctuary status within their country to operate in not just the US but 65 other countries.
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B
You write that the US now has the legal authority to fight through Title 10 powers and foreign Terrorist organization designations. We ask, in the wake and in the continued, among the continued drone strikes on some of these boats in the waters off the coast. What exactly is title 10 and the FTO designation mean when it comes to US capabilities to fight back?
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Great question, and that's really hot. That's actually contested right now. Even Republicans are somewhat unaware as to our duties under Title 10 before the FTO designation, we were operating under Title 50 or U.S. code 50, which is more investigative. So your DEA, your Department of Justice. Right. So long term investigations. To give you an example, there was a, a five year long investigation in Houston in regards to cartel new generation. Five years where nothing happened instead other than just investigating while hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying. So what happened after the FTO designation is they are now under Title 10 authority which allows us to have military action against our enemies and the FTO designation fully designated them as enemies. And then later he mentioned that we are in a non international armed conflict by Geneva Convention Code 3, meaning that it allows us to also protect through proactive measures against enemies from coming into the United States and enacting a drug warfare or warfare using the chemical known as narcotics. And so that's what you're seeing now. You're seeing a proactive approach using the FTO designation, Title 10 authority, which allows us to have military action and then also the formal declaration that we are in a non international armed conflict as coded by the Geneva Convention.
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I want to ask about those drone strikes. If we agree to the point that they are legal, that the US has legal authority to do so, are they still at a fair, efficient use of power? I don't mean to downplay what might come over on those boats, but if the problem is as deep and wide as you've described with us today, is that an efficient use of our power in fighting back?
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Yeah, it depends if you're using just regular consumer off the shelf drones. If you're not utilizing a lot of like what the cartels use. Right. The cartels bomb even farmers. And we see the use of consumer off the shelf drone with warfare in the Ukraine and Russia battle right in their war. And so I think it's a great deterrence. When you as a cartel, whether that's from Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, realize that the federal government, if you're in the Caribbean, you're not going to be seized, you're going to be attacked as if you were an enemy. There's somewhat of a deterrence from coming to that, that region. So that deterrence, yes, I agree that Pete Hexseth, it is worth going after them with drones and drone warfare. The cost to benefit ratio I believe is sufficient. Now as I said before, utilizing other Title 10 authorities, such as our intelligence community within our military and going after them in every other asymmetric ways and means to go after the cartel, since they are in every single form facet of these countries. And then I also realized that they are sponsored by our adversaries. Venezuela is a state sponsor of terrorism, whether that is the cartel of the Suns or whether that is Trinid Aragua. Colombia is now a state sponsor of terrorism through ELN as well, and so is Mexico. And so you need to see that they're utilizing these entities, whether the cartels like Sinaloa, CGNG Cartel, Golfo, Trendiragua, they're using them as proxies in their gray zone conflict against the United States. The cartels are also being used by proxies in this proxy warfare by ccp, by China. China seeks to destabilize our neighborhoods, our society, through the use of narcotics and also at the same time, receive massive amounts of financial gain. So you're seeing that there are multiple adversary states that are utilizing the cartels, regardless of what country they're from, as proxies in their unrestricted warfare against the.
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B
U.S. i want to ask just one more question about those strikes. Are you confident enough in our intelligence that we are targeting the quote, unquote, bad guys that we know who are on those boats and we know what they're trying to do?
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A
Yeah, 100%. And if I at Texas Public Policy foundation, even though I have over 20 years in the military, over 10 in DHS, over 10 years in DHS, if I through open source intelligence can figure out who they are, then the Department of War, the Department of State, through law enforcement sensitive information, or through secret information, can completely understand who is going to be on those boats. And that's going to be through all sources of intelligence, not just through OSINT like you and I can have, but through every other ways and means, whether that's human sigint, that they're collecting, signals intelligence, human intelligence, all forms of intelligence that I said also was opened up through the FTO designation under Title 10. All those forms of intelligence in crafting or understanding what threat is coming our way, 100%. And so if I can do it, that means 100% that they can identify them.
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B
There is a history in this fight, at least on the drug front specifically, that if one route is shut down, other routes will open up. There's a way for what is desired in the United States to make it across the border in some way, shape or form. What does success look like as far as you can tell?
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A
Great, great question. Success looks like that all. Like you said, everyone that is tied to this unrestricted warfare in this gray zone conflict must be held accountable. It's not the guys that are smuggling the narcotics or smuggling the weapons or ammunition, those are the bottom feeders. It is not just the sicarios. It is, it is everyone involved, whether that is also your elected officials, your state governments, every single person involved in this asymmetric warfare on the United States must be held accountable. And like you said, they are going to go around. Right now, before we started speaking, I talked to you about how I was up in Ottawa just recently talking to their emissaries and their law enforcement and military because the Mexican cartels are completely taking over Canada as well as the CCP backed triads. And so they're going to go around into other areas, just as you said, and so going at where they're actually being, where they actually have sanctuary. And that's going to be inside the countries where they operate their headquarters. That's going to be Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia. They need to be held accountable as well.
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B
In the past, this has been the purview of ordinary law enforcement. Dea, if it becomes a US Military jurisdiction, what does that approach and what does putting it inside the Department of Defense allow us to do? What are the new tools that we have at our disposal?
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Yeah, great question. One is knowledge and understanding in leadership. You're seeing that change, I don't know if you saw that recent change with Border Patrol leadership now taking over certain ISIS field offices. It's all about leadership. Leadership really determines the success of whether that's a battle or a war campaign. It's leadership first. We have those, we have those, especially in Special Operations Command to go after the unrestricted warfare inside the United States and throughout all the other countries. But also it opens up the intelligence community that I stand stated before, as well as kinetic action against them. Now when we're in other contingency operations worldwide, we do the exact same thing, but we call it a foreign internal defense where Special Operations Command, like your Green Berets, your NBCs and everyone else will go in there and work with all the way bottom up. So your law enforcement, your federal law enforcement and their military as well, to conduct counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations and eradicate that from those countries. Same thing here. DEA is still a major part of this process. Our federal law enforcement is still a major part. It just needs to be held under a command structure from those who actually know how to conduct internal defense or defense operations. Really that's the big ticket item is, is a task authority where you now have all these organizations, whether it's dea, hsi, FBI, you now have the units under the Department of War with us, the Navy, the US Coast Guard, the Marines and whatnot, now all falling under a command of someone that has task authority. So we're no longer operating in silos, whether that's silos of intelligence and silos of operation, where it's now completely seamless under one unified command. And that is the biggest ticket item, is that unified command and shared understanding of intelligence and operations.
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B
And one final question, is there any congressional action needed to codify this or is title 10 powers FTO designations? Is that enough?
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No, it needs to be codified. That's why Chip Roy has the bill to codify the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Every one of these executive actions and decisions by Trump needs to be codified in Congress. Also, each state, a lot of the state legislatures are coming up here at the beginning of the year. And so they also should codify at the state level the threats that are impacting inside their own states, whether that's the Mexican cartels, Trindi and Agua, whether that's the ccp, whether Hamas, Hezbollah, Haqqani network, them actually have a tie to the Mexican cartels. So everything that Trump is doing, everything that the Secretary of War is doing, needs to be codified in Congress and at your state legislature.
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Ammon Blair is senior fellow for the Texas Public Policy Foundation Secure and Sovereign Nation Initiative. You could also find more@texas policy.com Ammon thanks so much for joining us here on Future of Freedom.
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Thanks so much for having me, sir.
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We thank both of our guests for joining us. Jacob Sulum, senior editor@reasonreason.com and Ammon Blair, senior fellow for the Texas public policy foundation. TexasPolicy.com to find additional episodes of Future of Freedom, go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your audio. Thank you for listening to Future of Freedom, a production of Franklin News Foundation.