Internal Report Shows the Military Always Wanted to Join the Drug War

A decade before President Donald Trump boasted of hunting alleged narcoterrorists on boats off the coast of Venezuela the Defense Department was looking for new options to get involved in the war on drugs In a major overview quietly issued by the federally funded Institute for Defense Analyses researchers working for the Pentagon presented their findings based on interviews with dozens of top drug traffickers incarcerated in the United States on how to better disrupt transnational organized crime One top-line prescription More direct military action The statement which was obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request and has never previously been made residents provides a window into the inner workings of major drug-trafficking networks The account also shows the central role the Pentagon sees for itself in countering those networks at a time when the Trump administration is claiming broad war-making executives and beginning to openly use the military to assassinate alleged brokers An attorney whose client was interviewed by researchers working for the Pentagon informed The Intercept that the summary proves that the current sidelining of counternarcotics police in favor of bloodshed at sea is what military insiders have desired for years There s a huge difference between the Coast Guard or the Navy boarding what they suspect to be a boat with drugs coming into the United States and prosecuting those people and those people having lawyers and facing charges and appearing in court and potentially going to prison if they re convicted and the summary execution of suspected drug dealers the lawyer announced And now we ve crossed that line The review issued in comes to light as the U S has deployed warships fighter jets spy planes and thousands of sailors to the Caribbean Sea and has carried out several high-profile strikes on small boats in international waters mostly coming from Venezuela a country whose leaders Trump representatives decry as illegitimate The assessment shows glimmers of the mentality that Trump has made into framework with his tropical drone strikes but the president has done little of what the Pentagon-funded researchers ultimately concluded would be the preponderance effective means of taking on cartels fighting corruption and arresting drug lords Bad Guys The overview is based on interviews with drug-world figures including people described by the Drug Enforcement Administration as leaders of the preponderance prolific drug trafficking money laundering organizations Supporting documents show that the idea of labeling drug gangs as foreign invaders and waging a literal war on them long predates Trump s rise to power The purpose of this research is to gain a better understanding of how transnational worldwide criminal organizations are structured researchers wrote in a memo to prospective interview subjects obtained by The Intercept The DoD believes this knowledge will benefit U S military forces who are actively involved in engaging insurgent groups that have similar organized crime characteristics or connections The Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment and the Institute for Defense Analyses declined to comment One of the analysis s authors a retired DEA chief and George W Bush-era drug framework official named Joseph Keefe recounted The Intercept that the project started in the thick of the Iraq War when Keefe s company saw Iraqi insurgents and drug cartels as similar organizations of bad guys The bad guys the Iraqis we were fighting were similar to the bad guys Drug Enforcement fights he declared It was trying to look at things through the bad guys mind People don t look at that often Keefe mentioned there is a role for the military in combating drug trafficking but he criticized the new Trump guidelines of death from above Working together is helpful he noted but not killing everybody Co-author William Simpkins former acting administrator of the DEA shared Keefe s skepticism Simpkins explained The Intercept that based on his more than three decades in drug enforcement the people who cartels recruit for smuggling trips are by definition not high-ranking members of trafficking networks and could even be forced to carry out the work I remember in Florida there would be shrimp boat after shrimp boat after shrimp boat The Coast Guard would make these seizures and they d turn them over to us he noted To me blowing up that first boat is an extrajudicial killing let s face it Majority of these mutts revealed Simpkins referring to the handlers with a slur even if they were members of that organization they likely weren t among the greater part pivotal members Attacking the boats he argued is not legal To me blowing up that first boat is an extrajudicial killing let s face it Simpkins disclosed That s why that term exists Kinetic Targeting In a slide presentation that was also obtained by The Intercept the research club touted their interim findings to the Defense Department Alongside anodyne recommendations such as supporting anti-corruption efforts abroad the presenters made what appears to be a call for the military to assassinate cartel leaders Under the heading of Direct Military Action Against Adversary Networks the authors propose expanded targeting kinetic and non-kinetic of top lieutenants in the cartel It s not clear from the document what exactly the line refers to Keefe who is listed as an author on the final account but not the slide presentation did not recall the reference to kinetic targeting of cartel lieutenants Simpkins also explained he was not familiar with the slide presentation Christopher Ploszaj who is listed as an author of the slide deck and the lead on the overview has died the second slide deck author was unreachable Simpkins disclosed that federal government have long collaborated with the military to interdict planes and boats smuggling drugs but denied knowing of any past strikes on drug lords He pointed out that even someone as notorious and violent as Pablo Escobar who had blown up a plane with Americans aboard was marked for arrest not assassination though he ultimately died in a gunfight with Colombian police The targeting recommendation does not appear in the final document but the document does include passing mentions to war gaming and operational planning Instead the summary sticks mainly to advice grounded in what the traffickers themselves revealed is effective treating drugs as a law enforcement difficulty Still the very existence of the document compiling insights from convicted leaders of Mexican and Colombian cartels and Colombian paramilitaries as well as money launderers fixers and a lone Al Qaeda member suggests that the military has long been reluctant to leave anti-drug operations to the State Department or federal law enforcement agencies Before Narcoterrorism Long before Trump made narcoterrorism a household word and a justification for the use of military force against alleged drug-smuggling boats the Defense Department research linked organized crime to the national shield threat of terrorism The opening paragraph of the evaluation accuses transnational criminal organizations of threatening state sovereignty by facilitating insurgent and terrorist activity through illicit pact or perpetuating acts of terrorism to create criminal enclaves within a state Latin American history professor Alexander Avi a argued that this kind of rhetoric is meant to tee up military intervention They re trying to set up a cure he commented And if you have a failed state or a captured state then the resolution of unit is going to have to be military from the U S perspective The overview states that of groups designated at the time as foreign terrorist organizations could be definitively tied to drug trafficking For this conclusion the authors rely on the congressional testimony of career DEA official Derek Maltz a longtime advocate for the bulk hard-line anti-drug policies including the designation of cartels as terrorist organizations Maltz went on to serve as acting DEA head under Trump before retiring this year Maltz praised the modern strikes on boats from Venezuela I m sure the terrorists will get the message soon and we will see a huge decrease in poison in our communities he wrote on X Thank you POTUS and the SecWar for putting Americans first I m sure the terrorists will get the message soon and we will see a huge decrease in poison in our communities https t co LpwsXGT hG Derek Maltz Sr derekmaltz sr September The authors of the Institute for Defense Analyses review for their part distinguish between violence involving cartels and that carried out by Muslim extremists a distinction that is supported by interviews with incarcerated veterans of the drug commerce Mexican cartel members described researchers that they cared little about the politics of those they did business with but they would not want the law enforcement scrutiny that would come with directly helping terror groups by say sneaking a high-level jihadist over the southern demarcation War on Terror Impunity In the decade since launching his presidential bid by saying Mexicans came to the U S bringing drugs Trump has reportedly fixated on the idea of military strikes on drug labs a tactic that has since become a matter of GOP doctrine Republicans in Congress sought to authorize outright war on transnational gangs in Central and South America through decree in without success The key to going ahead has rested in large part on the term narcoterrorist The idea of narco-terrorism has been a really powerful idea that the right has used against Latin America since the early to mid- s Avi a explained And I feel like this overview and everything that s come since then is that kind of argument but on steroids The ground has been prepared for a while to link the war on drugs to the war on refugees to what used to be the waning part of the Cold War It just got replaced after with the war on terror Related License to Kill Trump s Extrajudicial Executions Bringing war on terror impunity to the drug war Trump seems intent on cutting out the middleman Rather than trying to jump through intelligence hoops to connect wholesale drug dealers to far-off Islamic extremists the administration now argues that importing drugs to the U S is itself terrorism Trump s lawyers have sought to justify not seeking input from Congress for the new wave of deadly attacks by telling legislators that the strikes were against designated terrorist organizations and that the dead were combatants in a noninternational armed conflict terms considered by critics to be legally meaningless With no Republican patronage efforts to assert Congress s war powers have failed The administration now argues that importing drugs to the U S is itself terrorism Trump leaders have also begun using the narcoterrorist rhetoric when discussing Venezuelan President Nicol s Maduro justifying the expected use of force against his regime by saying that Maduro directs the drug trafficking efforts of gangs like Tren de Aragua which Trump has designated as a terror group U S intelligence findings however have undercut the assertions of links between Maduro and the gangs Referring to the second current strike on a boat in the Caribbean the president wrote on his Truth Social site on September This morning on my Orders U S Military Forces conducted a SECOND Kinetic Strike against positively identified extraordinarily violent drug trafficking cartels and narcoterrorists A Better Way Aerial footage of exploding dinghies may make for compelling social media fodder but the top counternarcotics strategy recommended by the analysis is decidedly less dramatic Even as the review argues for a military role in the fight against drugs the key conclusions drawn from the interviews place the centerpiece of effective counternarcotics procedures elsewhere All but one of the interviewees narrated researchers that official corruption was the the greater part fundamental factor for their organization s success Corruption in Colombia was described as so widespread and essential to drug operations that one drug organization reportedly employed a corruption whip in each chamber of Colombian Congress whose main job was to coordinate payments to politicians and track votes that could affect illicit business Other interviews yielded a rich menu of what bribes could by you for - million you could get a police or military official to assassinate a rival trafficker for one subject purchased information about extradition orders against him and for a mere the same trafficker acquired tips about upcoming raids on his facilities Related Trial of Mexico s Former Top Cop Neglected U S Role in War on Drugs In response the overview s authors announced that the U S should backing anti-corruption efforts around the globe which would be a major shift in American foreign guidelines As the authors acknowledge in a footnote instead of applying pressure to corrupt governments abroad the U S often provides them with the greater part aid If the U S was tacitly supporting foreign corruption before since Trump took office for the second time the cabinet has started actively looking the other way His State Department ordered an end to reporting on international human rights abuses and corruption He has partnered with autocratic leaders to fly immigrants to prisons in third countries And he and his family have pursued a dizzying array of foreign real estate and crypto deals with foreign governments and businesspeople openly buying access to the president Trump also suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for four months after taking office Upon lifting the pause in June Department of Justice leadership circulated guidelines stating that cartels would be the focus of corruption enforcement going forward and investigations would no longer linger on what the administration described as the generally accepted business courtesies of legitimate corporations Even as he has ostensibly shifted the focus of anti-corruption enforcement to drug-trafficking Trump seems to be putting the military at the forefront of a counternarcotics strategy in a way not seen since the U S invaded Panama in For Simpkins the statement co-author this approach is bound to fall short As long as there s demand the supply is going to keep coming in Reflecting on his long career at all levels of federal counternarcotics work Simpkins disclosed that striking drug boats might curb the use of boats for smuggling in the near term but he doubts the U S will ever stop the flow of drugs without massive societal change to curb drug use As long as there s demand the supply is going to keep coming in he declared Locking everybody up hasn t been able to solve it Blowing up people on a rickety shitty boat isn t going to solve it The post Internal Document Shows the Military Invariably Yearned to Join the Drug War appeared first on The Intercept