Baumgartner Pounding the War Drum

Remember Iraq and Bush/Cheney’s ‘WMD’?

Eastern Washington’s U.S. Representative Michael Baumgartner is on the Trump regime’s band wagon pounding the war drum for intervention in Venezuela—and the parallels to the Bush/Cheney bogus declaration of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq couldn’t be clearer.

On December 4 the Spokesman carried an article by Orion Donovan Smith detailing three northwest Republicans’ support for intervention in Venezuela. The article extensively quoted U.S. Rep. Michael Baumgartner, U.S. Senator Jim Risch (ID), and U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke (MT). All three went to great lengths trying to justify the Trump/Hegseth military buildup in the Caribbean, threatening Venezuela, and the extrajudicial killings of men in boats accused of drug trafficking. Risch, completely over the top, claims equivalence of trafficking drugs and trafficking explosives. You have to hand it to him. If you’re going to make trafficking drugs into “terrorism”, what better way than to visualize drugs as explosives? All of them ignore or struggle with the fact that if any these boats were even carrying drugs, the drug is cocaine, not fentanyl.

As if to point out that sinking boats and killing the passengers is performative rather than necessary, a little-noticed bit of news recounted that the U.S. Coast Guard last week intercepted and took control of a drug boat carrying more than 20,000 pounds of cocaine without killing anyone.

It didn’t add up—and still doesn’t. Perhaps the most telling, and most ludicrous, was Baumgartner’s fanciful response to a question about the apparent disconnect between Trump’s “war on drugs” justification and Trump’s inexplicable pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández, the former President of Honduras, who was serving a 45 year sentence in a U.S. penitentiary for drug smuggling and weapons convictions:

After bringing up Honduras, Baumgartner said he hadn’t been briefed by the administration on Trump’s pardon on Monday of Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former Honduran president of the Central American country who was convicted by a U.S. jury of using his position to help import more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.

Baumgartner conceded that “in isolation, it would be very confusing and counterproductive” for Trump to grant clemency to a former Latin American president guilty of drug trafficking when the U.S. president is accusing Maduro of precisely the same thing, but the congressman said he suspects that the pardon is a strategic move by Trump to encourage Maduro to step down by hinting that the U.S. criminal justice system may look the other way.

Got that? According to Baumgartner, Trump is playing some sort of three-dimensional chess, sending encouraging signals to Maduro to step down, by pardoning Hernandez. In contrast to Baumgartner’s citing Trump’s supposed “strategic move”, here’s what Trump had to say:

“Well, I don’t know him,” the president said, referring to Hernández. “And I know very little about him other than people said it was like an Obama/Biden-type set-up, where he was set up.”

The Republican added that “very good people” (whom he did not name) asked him to pardon the convicted drug trafficker, “and I said I’ll do it.”

At this point, one could talk about how utterly ridiculous it is to see a sitting American president argue that he had effectively no idea whom he was letting out of prison. One could emphasize that Hernández’s prosecution was not a “set-up.” In fact, the prosecution was led in part by Emil Bove, a former member of Trump’s legal team who is currently a Trump-appointed federal judge.

All three, Baumgartner, Risch, and Zinke, were anxious to put forward the central Republican talking point: that the speedboats in the southern Caribbean that our military has summarily destroyed, killing the passengers, are carrying drugs that would, were it not for their destruction, kill thousands or even millions of Americans. This dubious assertion, that these people are engaging in an act of war against the United States, is supposed to justify their summary execution. Claims of drug struggling are meant to justify our massive buildup of military power in the southern Caribbean.

All three of these Republicans ignore the facts that we, the citizens who are paying for all this with our taxes, have never been presented the evidence that these boats are actually carrying drugs, much less that they are destined for the United States. They fail to justify that on September 2 two survivors of one of the attacks were killed in a second strike based on dubious claims that they were still a threat; that on a different occasion another two survivors were returned to their countries of origin rather than brought to the U.S. to face prosecution for drug trafficking in the U.S. courts—where discovery procedures might have turned up evidence of Trump regime lies; and, finally, that drug trafficking is not punishable by death in our legal system.

Baumgartner, even more than the other two, is beating the drums of war, drawing a parallel to Islamic terrorism:

Baumgartner, who worked at the U.S. embassy in Iraq and as a government contractor in Afghanistan before entering politics, compared the Trump administration’s approach to combating drug trafficking to the George W. Bush administration’s response to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“After 9/11, what the Bush administration did – largely Dick Cheney and the folks that worked with him – was to create a legal toolkit and a security toolkit that allowed us to deal with the threat of Islamic terrorism proactively, and as a military matter,” Baumgartner said.

Narco-terrorism, he said, is killing more people than Islamic terrorism has killed, while also undermining “key U.S. security interests in the Western Hemisphere” by increasing “migrant flows, criminal lawlessness and lack of good governance.” But despite tens of thousands of Americans dying of drug overdoses each year, he said the country is more politically divided over the response because there hasn’t been “a galvanizing event” like 9/11.

Which brings us back to the bogus and non-existent “Weapons of Mass Destruction” that the Cheney/Bush administration invented to justify the invasion of Iraq after 9/11, even though Iraq had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden and Islamic terrorism. Here we have Rep. Baumgartner trying to justify a push toward regime change in Venezuela by drawing a tenuous parallel between drugs (in this case cocaine) and blowing up the World Trade Towers. You would think that after his time in the Middle East mostly as a “consultant” he would think twice about advocating for more war.

I leave you with the last paragraph of the Orion Smith article—and Baumgartner’s full-throated endorsement of military intervention:

“So if you accept the premise that I do, that it’s [i.e. the threat of drugs] every bit as significant if not worse than Islamic terrorism, and you accept that the only practical way to deal with this is to expand the toolkit – that it’s not a law enforcement issue; it’s a national security, full-use-of-force-and-America’s-assets issue – then you can follow the logic and the reasoning to the legality and the appropriateness of what’s going on.”

Here’s Baumgartner’s D.C. number 202-225-2006 and his local office number 509-353-2374. (Risch 202-224-2752; Zinke 202-225-5628)

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry