Trump is claiming the authority to tell the military to summarily kill people
By ordering the U.S. military to summarily kill a group of people aboard what he said was a drug-smuggling boat, President Trump used the military in a way that had no clear legal precedent or basis, according to specialists in the laws of war and executive power.
Mr. Trump is claiming the power to shift maritime counterdrug efforts from law enforcement rules to wartime rules. The police arrest criminal suspects for prosecution and cannot instead simply gun suspects down, except in rare circumstances where they pose an imminent threat to someone.
By contrast, in armed conflicts, troops can lawfully kill enemy combatants on sight.
Because killing people is so extreme — and doing it without due process risks killing the wrong people by mistake — the question of which rules apply is not simply a matter of policy choice. Domestic and international law both set standards constraining when presidents and nations can lawfully use wartime force.
After breaking new ground by labeling drug cartels as “terrorists,” the president is now redefining the peacetime criminal problem of drug trafficking as an armed conflict, and telling the U.S. military to treat even suspected low-level drug smugglers as combatants.
But the trafficking of an illegal consumer product is not a capital offense, and Congress has not authorized armed conflict against cartels.
That raises the question of whether Mr. Trump has legitimate authority to tell the military to summarily kill people it suspects are smuggling drugs — and whether the administration allowed career military lawyers to weigh in.
“It’s difficult to imagine how any lawyers inside the Pentagon could have arrived at a conclusion that this was legal rather than the very definition of murder under international law rules that the Defense Department has long accepted,” said Ryan Goodman, a New York University law professor who worked as a Pentagon lawyer in 2015 and 2016. [Continue reading…]
The United States is not talking about regime change in Venezuela, President Donald Trump said on Friday, as the United States ordered an additional 10 stealth fighter jets to a growing military buildup in the Caribbean.
“We’re not talking about that, but we are talking about the fact that you had an election which was a very strange election, to put it mildly,” Trump said.
He had been asked by reporters about a claim made by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro this week that the United States was “seeking a regime change through military threat.”
Reuters reported earlier on Friday, citing sources, that the Trump administration had ordered the deployment of 10 F-35 fighter jets to a Puerto Rico airfield to conduct operations against drug cartels, sources say.
The new deployment comes on top of an already bristling U.S. military presence in the southern Caribbean as Trump carries out a campaign pledge to crack down on groups funneling drugs into the United States. [Continue reading…]