The Trump administration reportedly wants Congress to rubber stamp the president’s murder spree in the Caribbean and to endorse possible attacks on other countries:
Draft legislation is circulating at the White House and on Capitol Hill that would hand President Trump sweeping power to wage war against drug cartels he deems to be “terrorists,” as well as against any nation he says has harbored or aided them, according to people familiar with the matter.
When Congress approved the 2001 AUMF, it made the mistake of giving the president extraordinary, open-ended authority to wage war against Al Qaeda, which then morphed into a unending global campaign. Ever since then, every administration has abused that authority to target a number of armed groups that had nothing to do with the original attacks on the United States. The bill described in this report would be far worse than the 2001 AUMF by endorsing a much more wide-ranging campaign when there is absolutely no military threat to this country. Congress was wrong to endorse endless war in 2001. It would be insane to endorse an even worse version of endless war when there is no reason for it.
The Trump administration seeks to merge the “war on terror” with its new campaign against cartels by pretending that the latter are terrorists, but all of this is a lie. The drug trade is a serious problem, but it is not one that can be solved by the military. It is not terrorism, and drug traffickers aren’t terrorists. All that involving the military will do is kill a lot of civilians by design.
Drug traffickers aren’t lawful targets. Congress can’t give the president the authority to murder civilians. Trump’s barbaric boat attacks are illegal under U.S. and international law no matter what Congress does with this bill.
We need to reject the administration’s war framing in its entirety. While they may want to claim that there is an armed conflict that lets them kill these civilians, no such conflict exists. None of the groups that they have wrongly designated as terrorist organizations is engaged in an armed conflict with the United States. There is no war to be fought. When the administration uses force against alleged cartel members, they are just summarily executing suspected criminals outside the law. This is as illegitimate and despicable as it gets.
There is already an overwhelming consensus that the president’s attacks on these boats are extrajudicial killings. Sarah Yager, the Washington director at Human Rights Watch, summed it up very well when she said, “US officials cannot summarily kill people they accuse of smuggling drugs. The problem of narcotics entering the United States is not an armed conflict, and US officials cannot circumvent their human rights obligations by pretending otherwise.” As a group of U.N. experts said earlier this week, “International law does not allow governments to simply murder alleged drug traffickers.”
