The Trump administration is waging a secret war against undisclosed enemies without the consent of Congress, according to a confidential notice that was sent to several congressional committees this week and obtained by The Intercept. It marks the most detailed explanation of the legal underpinnings offered by the administration for a series of lethal attacks on boats in the Caribbean that began last month.
President Donald Trump has decided that the United States is engaged in a declared state of “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations” or DTOs, according to the notice. It describes three people killed by U.S. commandos on a boat in the Carribean last month as “unlawful combatants,” as if they were soldiers on a battlefield. This is a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement arrest suspected drug dealers as opposed to summarily executing them.
“The President directed the Department of War to conduct operations against [DTOs] pursuant to the law of armed conflict,” reads the notice. “The United States has now reached a critical point where we must use force in self-defense and defense of others against the ongoing attacks by these designated terrorist organizations.”
Trump has justified the strikes by asserting on social media that the United States is attacking “terrorists.” But the notice from the Department of War to the Congress committees marks a fundamental change in official policy, which states that Trump has unilaterally “determined” that cartels are “nonstate armed groups” whose transportation of drugs constitutes “an armed attack against the United States.”
Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, told that the Trump administration “has offered no credible legal justification, evidence, or intelligence for these strikes,”
“Drug cartels are despicable and must be dealt with by law enforcement. 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,” Reed told The Intercept. “Yet he has refused to inform Congress or the public. Every American should be alarmed that their President has decided he can wage secret wars against anyone he calls an enemy.” inucane continued: “To get around these fundamental problems, the administration relies on the President making both factual and legal determinations by sheer fiat. In doing so, POTUS is giving himself a license to kill based on his own determinations and designations.”
“The Trump administration is saying that one person — the president — now decides if the United States is going to war. And also, by himself, decides the reason,” said a government official familiar with the notice who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
