Following up on the post below, here’s the New York Times on the illegality of Trump’s killing spree:
Since he returned to office nine months ago, President Trump has sought to expand executive power across numerous fronts. But his claim that he can lawfully order the military to summarily kill people accused of smuggling drugs on boats off the coast of South America stands apart.
A broad range of specialists in laws governing the use of lethal force have called Mr. Trump’s orders to the military patently illegal. They say the premeditated extrajudicial killings have been murders — regardless of whether the 43 people blown apart, burned alive or drowned in 10 strikes so far were indeed running drugs.
The administration insists that the killings are lawful, invoking legal terms like “self-defense” and “armed conflict.” But it has offered no legal argument explaining how to bridge the conceptual gap between drug trafficking and associated crimes, as serious as they are, and the kind of armed attack to which those terms can legitimately apply.
The irreversible gravity of killing, coupled with the lack of a substantive legal justification, is bringing into sharper view a structural weakness of law as a check on the American presidency.
That’s certainly true. It’s very hard to stop an ignorant sociopath with immunity and pardon power from doing anything he wants. The presidency has a tremendous amount of power that most presidents have to use judiciously or risk losing the support of their party and the American people. Trump has no such restraint. He cares little for public opinion having found that he can just lie about it to soothe himself and his loyal followers and the Republican party establishment is his most eager enabler. He does what he wants and the law is basically irrelevant:
Today, the Trump administration is mostly behaving with audacious transparency about its boat attacks. Mr. Trump has posted surveillance videos of the deadly strikes, talked with relish about how “it is violent and it is very — it’s amazing, the weaponry,” and even acknowledged that he had authorized the C.I.A. to take covert actions in Venezuela.
But administration officials have clammed up when asked for the legal analysis to support their assertion that there is a legal state of armed conflict that makes the killings lawful.
Even in closed-door congressional briefings, according to people familiar with them, officials have provided no detailed legal answers. They are said to have cited drug overdose deaths of Americans, and stated that Mr. Trump decided the country was in an armed conflict with drug cartels. They are also said to have pointed to the part of the Constitution that makes the president the commander in chief of the armed forces, without much further elaboration.
Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former top Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, said Mr. Trump’s actions demonstrated an indifference to law that threatened to hollow it out.
“Nixon tried to keep his criminality secret, and the Bush administration tried to keep the torture secret, and that secrecy acknowledged the norm that these things were wrong,” Professor Goldsmith said. “Trump, as he often does when he is breaking law or norms, is acting publicly and without shame or unease. This is a very successful way to destroy the efficacy of law and norms.”
This is the systemic weakness Trump has exposed. If one is completely shameless and has the support of a cult-like following, there really are no barriers. Who is going to stop them?
In peacetime, targeting civilians — even suspected criminals — who pose no threat of imminent violence is considered murder. In an armed conflict, it is a war crime. International law accepted by the U.S. military says that, as do U.S. laws.
That seems pretty clear cut to me. He is murdering civilians and bragging about it. He nods to some kind of legal rationale by saying they’re drug dealers but it isn’t and he doesn’t care about that anyway. He is so drunk with power, as are his henchmen, that he believes he can kill anyone he chooses for whatever reason he sees fit.
In the case of the Venezuelans, he is trying to drive Nicolas Maduro from office because Marco Rubio and his Venezuelan exiles are promising him access to Venezuelan resources. The CIA is targeting Colombians in order to destabilize the Petro government and Trump doesn’t like him because he has a “fresh mouth.” And mostly, Trump just wants to demonstrate his willingness to kill anyone he chooses in the belief that that will make the world bow to his will. That what “peace through strength” means.
The law cannot restrain someone like him and now that he’s proved that it’s hard to imagine that he will be the last to use these powers for their own corrupt ends.
Here’s a gift link to the full legal analysis. It’s very thorough and very interesting. But it doesn’t leave a lot of hope that the law will be able to save us.