Trump Fabricates a War to Cover Up Murder

The president made up some more lies about his murder spree in the Caribbean.

The president made up some more lies about his murder spree in the Caribbean:

President Trump has decided that the United States is engaged in a formal “armed conflict” with drug cartels his team has labeled terrorist organizations and that suspected smugglers for such groups are “unlawful combatants,” the administration said in a confidential notice to Congress this week.

There is no such armed conflict. The president has dressed up his summary executions of alleged criminals by pretending that the U.S. is fighting a war with these groups, but these groups are not engaged in hostilities with our government. They aren’t carrying our armed attacks on our country or our military. Calling them terrorist organizations doesn’t authorize or legitimize the killing Trump has ordered. Branding noncombatants as combatants doesn’t make them lawful targets.

The administration has dubbed this a “non-international armed conflict” for the purposes of creating a fig leaf for the president’s murders. That is another lie. A non-international armed conflict is one where a state or a non-state group is fighting with an armed non-state group. To qualify as a non-international armed conflict, the non-state party or parties to the conflict must be organized and the violence between them and the state must be intense.

As we can see, there is no conflict of any kind happening. There is no one fighting back. Our military is simply blowing up boats full of civilians because the president feels like it.

Trump wants to use the language of the “war on terror” to excuse his serial murders of Venezuelan fishermen, but he doesn’t have a leg to stand on:

Noting that it is illegal for the military to deliberately target civilians who are not directly participating in hostilities — even suspected criminals — Mr. Corn called the president’s move an “abuse” that crossed a major legal line.

“This is not stretching the envelope,” he said. “This is shredding it. This is tearing it apart.”

Even if there were a conflict between the U.S. and an armed group taking place, the attacks on the boats would still be illegal.

Labeling the president’s victims as “unlawful combatants” is nonsense. They weren’t combatants of any kind. At most, they were pawns in a drug smuggling operation. It is also possible that some of them weren’t involved in the drug trade at all. Reporting from Venezuela suggests that at least some of the victims had nothing to do with trafficking:

In an interview, one woman who identified herself as the wife of one of the dead men said that her husband was a fisherman with four children who left one day for work and never came back.

Americans are all too familiar with presidents lying to get the U.S. into wars, but in this case Trump is lying about the existence of a war to provide cover for his murders of civilians. He needs us to buy that there is a war to give his summary executions a veneer of legitimacy, but it is such a transparent lie that it isn’t fooling anyone.

The president is effectively declaring that he can have the military kill people anywhere because he deems them to be a threat. He is inventing a conflict out of thin air to provide cover for his murders of almost two dozen civilians. He is also doing this so that he can order more attacks on civilians. This is lawless tyranny at its most dangerous. It is likely just a matter of time before he tries to do the same thing against what he called “the enemy within” here in this country.

The only appropriate response to the president’s murder spree is to impeach and remove him from office. Failing that, Congress must block further use of the military to commit these crimes. The president must not be allowed to commit mass murder with impunity.