Trump’s Already Used the Military To Break the Law, He Informs Congress

This is Donald Trump’s latest escalation into the bizarre. We’re all used to Trump firing people by tweet. That’s “normal” in the day and age in which we live. Now Trump has taken it upon himself to inform Congress via memorandum that we’re in an actual, not metaphorical, war with drug cartels. Why did he do that? Because he ordered three U.S. military strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea last month, killing all 17 people aboard them. That’s murder, unless we are or were at war with the people killed, in which case it’s justifiable homicide. Trump’s legal theory of us being at war didn’t fly last month, according to the New York Times. So unless Trump can sell this novel legal theory of his ex post facto, the military followed an illegal order and frankly? It was only a matter of time.

Mr. Trump’s move to formally deem his campaign against drug cartels as an active armed conflict means he is cementing his claim to extraordinary wartime powers, legal specialists said. In an armed conflict, as defined by international law, a country can lawfully kill enemy fighters even when they pose no threat, detain them indefinitely without trials and prosecute them in military courts.

Geoffrey S. Corn, a retired judge advocate general lawyer who was formerly the Army’s senior adviser for law-of-war issues, said drug cartels were not engaged in “hostilities” — the standard for when there is an armed conflict for legal purposes — against the United States because selling a dangerous product is different from an armed attack.

When you read stuff like this, in the New York Times no less, you wonder if ANYbody is advising this man? How can he be doing these things, and using these cockeyed rationales after the fact? Trump is unmoored from reality and right now he’s sailing us all into dark and choppy waters, as a nation.

Noting that it is illegal for the military to deliberately target civilians who are not directly participating in hostilities — even suspected criminals — Mr. Corn called the president’s move an “abuse” that crossed a major legal line.

“This is not stretching the envelope,” he said. “This is shredding it. This is tearing it apart.”

Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in an email that “the president acted in line with the law of armed conflict to protect our country from those trying to bring deadly poison to our shores, and he is delivering on his promise to take on the cartels and eliminate these national security threats from murdering more Americans.”

The Trump administration has called the strikes “self-defense” and asserted that the laws of war permitted it to kill, rather than arrest, the people on the boats because it said the targets were smuggling drugs for cartels it has designated as terrorists. The administration has also stressed that tens of thousands Americans die annually from overdoses.

However, the focus of the administration’s attacks has been boats from Venezuela. The surge of overdose deaths in recent years has been driven by fentanyl that drug trafficking experts say comes from Mexico, not South America. Beyond factual issues, the bare-bones argument has been broadly criticized on legal grounds by specialists in armed-conflict law.

There you have in a nutshell the way our current *government* works. Trump

1. Does something stupid and/or illegal;
2. His squad of sychophants get out there and bray about what a heroic and protective act that in fact was;
3. The rule of law is assaulted once again and the guardrails of separation of powers begin to sway under the stress;
4. Rinse and repeat.

This is how we live nowadays. Get used to it. Nice of him to tell Congress, though. I’m waiting for the day when that is no longer deemed a necessity and he just gets the military to do something else illegal.

The notice to Congress, which was deemed controlled but unclassified information, cites a statute requiring reports to lawmakers about hostilities involving U.S. armed forces. It repeats the administration’s earlier arguments but also goes further with new claims, including portraying the U.S. military’s attacks on boats to be part of a sustained, active conflict rather than isolated acts of claimed self-defense.

Specifically, it says that Mr. Trump has “determined” that cartels engaged in smuggling drugs are “nonstate armed groups” whose actions “constitute an armed attack against the United States.” And it cites a term from international law — a “noninternational armed conflict” — that refers to a war with a nonstate actor.

“Based upon the cumulative effects of these hostile acts against the citizens and interests of the United States and friendly foreign nations, the president determined that the United States is in a noninternational armed conflict with these designated terrorist organizations,” the notice said.

There are different kinds of wars, and the concept of a “noninternational armed conflict” developed in 20th-century law to mean a civil war in one country, as opposed to a war between two or more nation-states.

After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, when the United States went to war against Al Qaeda — a nonstate actor operating across multiple countries — some legal scholars objected that the Bush administration was stretching the rules to justify using wartime powers against a group they likened more to a criminal band of pirates.

But the Supreme Court found that the conflict with Al Qaeda was a real war. It blessed as lawful the Bush administration’s use of the wartime power to hold captured Qaeda members in indefinite detention without trial, while also saying the government was bound by the Geneva Conventions to treat such prisoners humanely and not torture them.

Yes, the war with Al Qaeda was real and it was started when they flew hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center and other places, killing thousands of people. But it’s a different kettle of fish altogether to conflate “the trafficking of an illicit consumer product and associated crime with an armed attack,” which is what Trump did. His notice said that cartels “illegally and directly cause the deaths of tens of thousands of American citizens each year.” But it has not explained how selling a dangerous substance constitutes a use of force, and Congress has not authorized the use of any type of military force against cartels, says the Times. And those issues, alas, are biggies.

The U.S. government has routinely said it is engaged in a metaphorical “war on drugs,” meaning aggressive law enforcement. Mr. Trump’s claim that he can and has put the country into a literal state of war against drug cartels is important for legal reasons. Police arrest suspected drug dealers; it would be a crime to instead summarily gun them down. But in an armed conflict, it is lawful to kill combatants for the opposing force on sight.

And Trump would be fine with gunning people down in the streets, like in the Wild West. He’s salvating for the day that we get there. It can’t be soon enough for him.

The notice to Congress also justified the most recent publicly disclosed attack on a boat — in which U.S. Special Operations Forces killed all three people about the vessel on Sept. 15 — by calling the crew “unlawful combatants,” as if they were soldiers on a battlefield.

“The vessel was assessed by the U.S. intelligence community to be affiliated with a designated terrorist organization and, at the time, engaged in trafficking illicit drugs, which could ultimately be used to kill Americans,” the notice said. “This strike resulted in the destruction of the vessel, the illicit narcotics, and the death of approximately three unlawful combatants.”

The notice to Congress did not specifically name any of the drug cartels with which Mr. Trump claims the United States is engaged in an armed conflict. It also did not specify any standards the administration is using to determine whether particular suspects have sufficient links to such groups for the military to kill them.

Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, accused Mr. Trump of deciding that he could wage “secret wars against anyone he calls an enemy.” The president “offered no credible legal justification, evidence or intelligence” for the strikes, Mr. Reed said.

“Drug cartels are despicable and must be dealt with by law enforcement,” he said. “But now, by the president’s own words, the U.S. military is engaged in armed conflict with undefined enemies he has unilaterally labeled ‘unlawful combatants,’ and he has deployed thousands of troops, ships and aircraft against them. Yet he has refused to inform Congress or the public.”

The problem here is that Trump wants to label vague groups like Antifa or Tren De Aragua as the enemy but declaring war on “loosely organized cells of localized individual criminal networks” is so “decentralized” that it makes it almost impossible to identify the combatants. And Trump is fine with that. He simply wants somebody to name as The Other and shoot The Other down in the streets. That’s the goal here, dictatorship and authoritarian rule. Somebody tell me where I’m wrong about this. Any MAGA trolls reading who want to kick an opinion in?

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