The Grim Truth

Gift link, so you may read it.

There’s a 92 Percent Chance Trump Is Making It Up

When riffing, the president exhibits an unusual tell.

Yeah, he moves his lips.

In a briefing with lawmakers early last month, top officials acknowledged that they believed it was cocaine, not fentanyl, on the boats. A former senior Coast Guard official told me that in his more than three decades in the service, he has not been aware of a single instance of an intercepted load in the Caribbean or eastern Pacific containing fentanyl. In sum, the boats being struck aren’t carrying the drug that is the leading cause of overdose deaths in the U.S.—and what drugs they may be carrying aren’t coming to America. So it is hard to see how each strike saves 25,000 American lives.

Bill Baumgartner, a retired Coast Guard rear admiral who directed the agency’s operations in the Caribbean, told me that number “is just complete and pure fantasy.” The only way to arrive at that total of saved lives is if you would have rounded up 25,000 people and forced them to consume lethal doses of cocaine—a claim “just as stupid as saying that there’s a box of ammunition; if you confiscate a box of ammunition, you have saved 100 lives because there were 100 bullets there,” Baumgartner said.

It is even unclear how many of the destroyed vessels were actually carrying narcotics. The administration has not specified or released evidence of the types or quantities of drugs on them. When identifying boats ferrying drugs, “the intelligence isn’t foolproof,” and destroying a vessel with a strike—unlike boarding it during an interdiction—leaves no room to correct faulty intelligence, Baumgartner said. In the 13 months leading up to early October, 21 percent of the boats interdicted off the coast of Venezuela turned out not to be carrying any contraband, according to data shared by Coast Guard Acting Commandant Admiral Kevin Lunday in a letter to Senator Rand Paul, a Republican.

Lies, or just fucking bullshit, start to finish & top to bottom. To justify murder in your name, sheep. Whatever happens to this shithole nation of bastard war criminals, it deserves it, good & hard.