Outside the Beltway

Criminals or Enemy Combatants?

I guess if we fail to vaporize you, you get treated like a criminial.

Steven L. Taylor · Sunday, October 19, 2025 · 5 comments

In a story related to the ongoing tensions with Venezuela and now Colombia, the NYT reports: U.S. Is Repatriating Survivors of Its Strike on Suspected Drug Vessel.

The Trump administration is repatriating two survivors of a deadly U.S. strike this week on suspected drug runners in the Caribbean Sea rather than prosecute them or hold them in military detention, President Trump announced on Saturday.

The men who survived were being returned to their home countries, Colombia and Ecuador, “for detention and prosecution,” the president said in a posting on his Truth Social account.

Mr. Trump also posted a 29-second video showing a semi-submersible vessel that was traveling partially below the water being blown up. He said two other suspected drug smugglers, whom he called “terrorists,” had been killed in the attack.

[…]

The decision to transfer the two survivors, however, was in line with the Coast Guard’s practice of repatriating or handing off to friendly countries people who were intercepted outside the United States as suspected traffickers.

So, which is it? Are these people “terrorists”/”enemy combatants” that the Trump administration has deemed worthy of summary execution, or are they merely criminals who are to be sent back to their home countries for likely prosecution?

Of course, this is the administration trying to elide the complicated, and almost certainly illegal, mess they have created with these attacks.

Holding them as indefinite wartime detainees at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, could have opened the door to a court’s reviewing whether this really is a war as part of a habeas corpus lawsuit.

Prosecuting the men in U.S. civilian court would have raised other problems. For one, it was not known if any courtroom-admissible evidence was available to demonstrate that the survivors of the attack engaged in criminal wrongdoing.

Still, avoiding legal and logistical headaches by sending the men home seemed to contradict the administration’s stance that suspected drug smugglers pose such a severe danger that Mr. Trump can have the military summarily kill them.

There is no “seem” about it, I would note.

By the way, this is utter bullshit.

Mr. Trump asserted in his post that intelligence had “confirmed” that the semi-submersible craft had been “loaded up with mostly fentanyl and other illegal narcotics” and that “at least 25,000 Americans would die if I allowed this submarine to come ashore.”

How do you confirm the contents of a vessel that has been destroyed in this manner? More to the point, fentanyl dosages are so small that you would not have a submersible of this type “loaded…with mostly fentanyl.” Further, we know that these subs are almost certainly trafficking in cocaine and that fentanyl typically comes across land borders into the US from Mexico. This is all murder on the high seas to gaslight the public and to give Trump a shot of dopamine from seeing something explode that he ordered destroyed. It is what big, tough presidents who don’t at all want to feel like a king does, don’t you know.

Colombia is a major player in the drug trade because of geography, both in terms of being a logical nexus point for smuggling from Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, and because, like those countries, it is a suitable place to grow coca bushes. It makes little business sense to base synthetic drug manufacture and distribution out of Colombia and its environs when Mexico is so close to the US. As such, we have long seen the cartels in Mexico be far more invested in synthetic drugs, like meth and now fentanyl, than their Colombian counterparts. It is just basic comparative advantage at work.

If anyone is interested in actual information on Fentanyl and South America, see this 2024 Brookings paper: Fentanyl Markets, Distribution, and Consumption in South America.