US Gov’t Caught Operating Floating Black Site Prisons, Torturing People in Int’l Waters—Outside US Law
The US government is holding hundreds of people without trial, shackled to the decks of Coast Guard boats for months, all to enforce the drug war.
By Matt Agorist
TheFreeThoughtProject.com
November 28, 2017
The war on drugs has produced the vilest police state one can imagine. From secret black site prisons—operating in Chicago—with no due process, to midnight raids in which babies faces are blown off by police grenades, attempting to stop Americans from self-medicating has proven to be a disastrous failure. Now, however, it seems to have gotten worse as an ad-hock US detention system has recently been discovered — floating in the Pacific Ocean in international waters as to exist outside the realm of the US justice system.
These secret prisons, floating in international waters, to avoid the US justice system, exist because, under the guise of protecting you from yourself, the US government spends billions on enforcing the failed drug war—all at the expense of freedom.
A jaw-dropping report from the NY Times exposes these prisons, dubbing them “floating Guantánamos.”
According to the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act of 1986, drug smugglers caught in international waters are considered to be committing a crime against the United States, even when there was no proof that the drugs, often carried on foreign boats, were bound for the United States. The Coast Guard was conscripted as the agency empowered to seek out suspected smugglers and bring them to American courts, the Times reports.
In their increasing effort to prove they are needed to stop the flow of drugs, the Coast Guard has continued to go further and further out into these international waters. When they capture these boats, the people on the boats—who are often indentured servants to drug lords trying to feed their families—are brought aboard these floating prisons and shackled to the deck outside, in the elements.
However, they aren’t shackled to the deck of a ship for a few hours or even a few days. These torturous waits can last for weeks or months, according to the Times.
The Coast Guard claims they can keep these folks in such torturous conditions because they aren’t under arrest until they get back to the United States. In the NY Times article, Seth Freed Wessler reported this story and covered the case of one person who happened to endure time on one of these floating prisons.
Wessler explained that Jhonny Arcentales, a fisherman who was paid to drive a boat South America and Central American, was caught up in one of these busts.
He is a fisherman from a coastal town in Ecuador and was having a particularly, economically, rough year and made a decision to take a job smuggling cocaine off of the coast of Ecuador. He really didn’t know all that much about what he was doing.
As he was driving the boat with an arbitrary substance deemed illegal by the state, Arcentales was intercepted by a coast guard vessel.
For the next 70 days, Mr. Arcentales and the other man he was detained with were held — always chained by their ankle to the deck of a ship or to a cable running along one of these large Coast Guard or Navy ships — for 70 days.
The Rest…HERE
