Trump’s legal justification for his Venezuela adventure is so powerful that he’s keeping it a secret. From Kelly Beaucar Vlahos at theamericanconservative.com:
The latest scandal engulfing the Pentagon highlights questions that have been there since the beginning of Caribbean operations.
A firestorm over whether the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a second strike on survivors after their “drug boat” was bombed back in September has brought the legality of the entire campaign out of the so called “fog of war” and more widely into the public court of opinion. And that’s a good thing.
“Hopefully, members of Congress will take this opportunity to reexamine the entire boat bombing scheme as a whole,” said Brian Finucane, a former counterterrorism legal advisor for the U.S. State Department. “The White House has been using military force at sea without congressional authorization and in defiance of the War Powers Resolution. More lawmakers should join the bipartisan pushback against this unauthorized killing spree as well as a potential unauthorized war with Venezuela.”
The episode involving the killing of survivors has also spurred investigations, led by top Republicans on each of the armed services committees—a rare breaking of ranks. They have been publicly questioning Hegseth’s behavior and culpability in what is widely considered by legal experts to be a violation of international human rights law—that is, if you believe that the U.S. is engaging in a legal armed conflict with drug cartels. If you do not believe the United States is in an armed conflict (Finucane’s position), killing the survivors would still be a violation of the U.S. Code of Military Justice—premeditated “murder on the high seas.”
“You don’t have to have served in the military to understand that that was a violation of ethical, moral and legal code,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), said this week. Admiral Frank Bradley, head of U.S. Special Operations Command, who was in charge of the September strike in question, briefed senators in a closed door meeting on Thursday. It is the second with senators since they have asked the administration to explain their strategy and authorities for the strikes overall. They left that one unimpressed, too, according to reports. In making the case, the administration has referred to a still-secret memo that assures that the U.S. is legally in a formal state of armed conflict with “narcoterrorist” drug cartels and their boats are carrying drugs to finance that conflict.
The Bolshevik Mockingbird enemedia said they seized a tanker?
It was on in background while walking past.