Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) blasted his fellow Republicans during an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, posted on Jan. 13, for not caring about what happens to the people targeted by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s boat war in the Caribbean and in the eastern Pacific. “They’re accused of running drugs, but nobody knows their names and nobody’s putting up any evidence,” he said. “When we had them Sept. 2nd, two of them were still clinging to the wreckage. They’re shipwrecked. They blew them up. And so what I think is bizarre is I hear mostly my Republican colleagues say, ‘Well, um, we shouldn’t have to. How do we know they’re not armed?’ And it’s like, but there’s this thing called presumption of innocence. They say, ‘It doesn’t apply.’...
“So I look at my colleagues who say they’re pro-life and that they value God’s inspiration in life, but they don’t give a shit about these people in the boats. ... And really, they say, ‘Well, we’re at war with them. They’re committing war by bringing drugs into America.’ They’re not even coming here. They’re going to these islands in the south part of the Caribbean,” Paul continued. He argued that the boats don’t have the range to get to the U.S., and the cocaine is going to Europe anyway.
“But I guess what I don’t feel connected to my Republican colleagues is that those lives don’t matter at all and we just blow them up. And against all justice and against all laws of war, all laws of just war, we never have blown up people who were shipwrecked. It’s against the military code of justice to do that and we’re doing it and everybody just says, ‘Oh, well, they’re drug dealers.’ Why do you think they were attacking those people? Because I’ve heard a bunch of different theories, and one of the big theories was they were trying to get the cartel upset at Maduro in order to get him out of office.”
Paul charged that the boat strikes were a pretext to be used to justify the kidnapping of Venezuelan Nicolás Maduro. “So, we have to set up the predicate,” he said. “We got to show you that we care about drugs. And but the weird thing about it is they really care about drugs except for the former president of Honduras, Hernández, who was given a 40-year sentence, was tried, was found guilty, he was given 40 years in a U.S. jail, and he’s let go at the same time we’re arresting Maduro because he’s attacking the United States with drugs.”
