For a Lack of Intelligence

Mystery surrounding the killing of 32 people in the Caribbean is only one sign that Trump relies on faith-based intel.

October 21, 2025

It was a shock, though as so often with Trump, not a surprise to learn that Dutch intelligence agencies are withholding information from their American counterparts, on the grounds that it might be mishandled or misused.

Donald Trump has a spotty history with classified information that goes back to intel divulged in a public conversation with the Russian foreign minister in 2017 that outed Israeli assets. He cannot be trusted to not fumble it.

But can the Administration be trusted to not intentionally misuse information they receive? This also seems to be up for grabs, as well. Dutch News reports:

Their caution towards Washington is linked to what they describe as the increasingly autocratic course of president Donald Trump, who has dismissed senior officials for lacking loyalty and used lawsuits to pressure journalists, judges and universities.

The directors said this is the first time developments in the US are directly shaping Dutch intelligence ties, marking a break with decades of close cooperation with the CIA and NSA.

“That we sometimes don’t tell things anymore, that is true,” Reesink said, while Akerboom added that sharing is now considered case by case. “We are very alert to the politicisation of intelligence and to human rights violations.”

Newsweek reports that intelligence concerning Russia is considered particularly sensitive. “That gets weighed carefully,” [MIVK Director Peter] Reesink said

What surprises me is that these agency heads would publicly admit that they are holding back. After the Lavrov incident divulging Israeli secrets, after Trump waving classified materials around in a meeting with political campaigners, after the boxes of classified documents poorly stored in his Mar a Lago resort, and given the degree to which he seems to jump when Putin calls, it seems very likely that every allied intelligence agency thinks very carefully about what information they share with the U.S. today. But I would not think they would be open about this fact. Perhaps the Dutch are deliberately trying to put pressure on the U.S. to recommit to traditional alliances.

But does it matter whether other nations share with us or not?

One might think that American intelligence services are capable on their own of finding out what we need to keep the nation safe. But that isn’t the sense in which I think a catastrophic loss of allied intel is something that the U.S. will shrug off.

It seems as though intelligence, plain and simple, is no longer considered that important.

For nearly two months now, the U.S. has been launching military strikes on small vessels in the Caribbean, on the grounds that those boats are piloted by drug runners intent on bringing shipments of fentanyl and other dangerous narcotics into the U.S. There is no basis for this in international law, though the government has tried to invent one. But more than this, there is increasingly little reason to think that the government, in targeting these ships, has solid intelligence to confirm that the boats they are striking are even involved in drug trafficking.

Last week, the story broke of a Trinidadian man living in Venezuela who was taking a boat for a visit home. He never arrived, and his family believes he was on the vessel that American forces sank on October 14. Another strike on a semi-submersible vehicle led to the capture of two individuals, an Ecuadorian and a Colombian, both of whom were repatriated. The Ecuadorian man has been released for lack of evidence, and the Colombian remains in critical condition.

Then, Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced that one strike, in September, killed an innocent fisherman whose boat was disabled, and who had sent out a distress signal:

“U.S. government officials have committed a murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters,” Mr. Petro wrote on social media. He said the man killed in the mid-September attack, Alejandro Carranza, was a “lifelong fisherman” whose boat had experienced damage and was adrift, probably in Colombian waters, at the time of the attack. His description of Mr. Carranza and his boat could not be immediately confirmed.

This did not sit well with Mr. Trump:

Mr. Trump responded by accusing Mr. Petro of not doing enough to curb the production of illegal drugs, calling him an “illegal drug dealer” with “a fresh mouth toward America.” Mr. Trump also said that the United States would halt aid payments to Colombia, which has long ranked among the largest recipients worldwide of U.S. counternarcotics assistance.

It got worse. “Trump loosely claimed President Petro was a ‘drug leader’ and threatened to bomb Colombia,” while misspelling the country’s name four times.

Lashing out like this when confronted with a factual claim seems a sign of magical thinking under strain. What evidence did the Administration have that the boat was running drugs? And if there was a distress signal, is there not objective proof to be found that the boat was disabled? Under what circumstances would the mighty U.S. Navy need to shoot missiles at a small craft in international waters with no working engine?

These three cases side-by-side, combined with the lack of any real evidence made public by the administration and the fact that the killings serve a performative function as much or more than a law enforcement one, make a strong case that the 32 people killed in patently unlawful strikes in the Caribbean may not all have been the hardened “narco-terrorists” that the Administration claims.

This should, again, not be surprising even if it is shocking. It is a sign that the United States now relies on faith-based intelligence.

The consequences of making decisions like this without empirically solid evidence are likely to intensify in the future, if indeed other nations begin to hold back on sharing intel with the U.S.

This paints a bleak future for an autocratic United States. But it is the shared fate of all dictatorships. When too much power is handed to one man, or to a cabal or a Politburo, facts become dangerous to share openly and freely. The disciplines that depend on an accurate reading of the world we live in, disciplines that include national security, agriculture, and many more that are essential to our safety and wellbeing, begin to crack.

Today, the U.S. is possibly killing fishermen plying their trade off our shores. Tomorrow, politicized and bowdlerized intelligence may lead us to miss signs of greater danger to the American people.

This is yet another way that disregard for others’ human rights puts us all at risk.