Congress Must Not Rubber Stamp Trump's Murder Spree

Congress can’t give the president the authority to murder civilians.

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.”

It is a measure of how debased and vicious this administration is that they take pride in the murders they have committed. The vice president was celebrating the murders again the other day, and he said, “I am proud to have a president who is sending our military to light up the cartels that threaten our people in our own backyard.” At one point, he joked that he “wouldn’t go fishing right now in that area of the world.” Get it? Because the U.S. military is arbitrarily murdering people in boats and might very easily slaughter some fishermen in the process. Vance thinks murder is funny and wants more of it. That is what these ghouls are praising.

Expanding this campaign to include attacks inside other countries would add more crimes to the list. The president has so far chosen to murder people in international waters. Launching attacks inside the borders of other states would also be illegal aggression and violations of their sovereignty. The U.S. would be declaring itself to be a lawless rogue state, and relations with all countries in the hemisphere would suffer accordingly.

The “war on terror” has been a disaster for both the U.S. and the countries where it has been waged. The administration’s campaign against cartels promises to be even worse because it is targeting nothing but civilians from the start. The Trump administration isn’t waging a war. It is committing atrocities against civilians and then pretending that the atrocities are fine because they have labeled the victims as “terrorists.”

Congress should reject this disgraceful legislation and instead vote for a war powers resolution blocking the president from any further military action against these groups and other countries.