Trumps Homeland Security Pick Falsely Claimed Narcoterrorism Has Killed 500,000 Americans
Source: The Intercept
While Trump continues to regularly contradict his own supposed views on U.S. foreign policy, his approach to the U.S. southern border is clear. He talked a lot about building a wall while running for president. Since winning, he’s repeatedly emphasized the seriousness of his promise.
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John Kelly, the retired Marine general who Trump has chosen to lead the Department of Homeland Security, has his own pattern of exaggerating the border threat. Between 2012 and his retirement in early 2016, Kelly served as head of U.S. Southern Command. In this role, he coordinated all U.S. forces in the Western Hemisphere south of Mexico, including the Caribbean and Guantánamo, which is home to the hemisphere’s largest overseas U.S. military base. As Obama trimmed the military’s budget with the sequester, and prioritized Asia and the Middle East over the relatively peaceful Western Hemisphere, Kelly complained that the budget cuts were undermining regional security.
In a 2014 interview, he said that the flow of drugs and instability in Latin America posed an “existential” threat to the United States. During a March 2015 hearing before the Senate Armed Service Committee, Sen. Mike Lee. R-Utah, asked him to explain why the southern border posed such a large threat. Kelly responded with these words:
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Kelly’s second claim to the Senate committee, that 500,000 Americans “have died from narcoterrorism” since 9/11, is a significant exaggeration. The real number of Americans who have died of post-9/11 terrorism in all its forms is well under 1,000, according to a 2014 study that was supported by the Department of Homeland Security. And at least one-third of the 40,000 killed by drugs annually do not die, as Kelly claimed, from drugs coming into the U.S. across the southern border, but from overdoses of legally prescribed opioids. Almost all of the profits from those addicts flow not to drug cartels but to pharmaceutical companies. Sales of legal opioids have quadrupled since 1999, particularly in those white, rural areas of the country where Trump’s support is strongest.
Read more: https://theintercept.com/2016/12/27/trumps-homeland-security-pick-falsely-claimed-narcoterrorism-has-killed-500000-americans/
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