As part of Democrats’ smear campaign to brand War Department Secretary Pete Hegseth as a war criminal for ordering a lethal strike on a boat suspected of bringing deadly drugs to the U.S., Representative Adam Smith (D-WA) went so far as to claim that Caribbean drug runners carrying cocaine are not a direct threat to Americans.
Despite the fact that cocaine is involved in more than 20,000 overdose deaths in the U.S. annually, Rep. Smith attempted to dismiss the threat during an interview with MS Now (formerly MSNBC) on Tuesday.
Smith said that he could sympathize with The U.S. military if they killed people they mistakenly thought were carrying bombs during the Biden administration - but not with the Trump administration’s deadly strike on a boat suspected of running drugs:
“When you're in the middle of an insurgency with roadside bombs and car bombs and all of that, even in the aftermath of the Afghanistan pullout, when we had that suicide bomber killed 13 service members and hundreds of people in Kabul, and we did that strike against a car that we thought was a threat that turned out not to be a threat. I have some sympathy for that.
“But, people on a boat in the middle of the Caribbean carrying cocaine are not a direct threat to the lives of our service members or Americans, and there's certainly not a direct threat once that boat has been blown out of the water and two survivors are clinging to it.
“So it's important to draw that distinction.”
At issue is a September strike on a boat suspected of running drugs, where the second hit killed two of those on board. The strike was part of the Trump Administration's ongoing effort to stop the flow of deadly, illegal drugs into the U.S.
