Posted on 10/02/2025 10:39:50 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
A notice calls the people the U.S. military recently killed on suspicion of drug smuggling in the Caribbean Sea “unlawful combatants.”
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.
The notice was sent to several congressional committees and obtained by The New York Times. It adds new detail to the administration’s thinly articulated legal rationale for why three U.S. military strikes the president ordered on boats in the Caribbean Sea last month, killing all 17 people aboard them, should be seen as lawful rather than murder.
Mr. Trump’s move to formally deem his campaign against drug cartels as an active armed conflict means he is cementing his claim to extraordinary wartime powers, legal specialists said. In an armed conflict, as defined by international law, a country can lawfully kill enemy fighters even when they pose no threat, detain them indefinitely without trials and prosecute them in military courts.
Geoffrey S. Corn, a retired judge advocate general lawyer who was formerly the Army’s senior adviser for law-of-war issues, said drug cartels were not engaged in “hostilities” — the standard for when there is an armed conflict for legal purposes — against the United States because selling a dangerous product is different than an armed attack. 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.”
The White House did not...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
They had to dig deep to exhume this guy for his "Orange Man Bad" proclamation.
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Poisoning large numbers of people is about as hostile as you can get.
He says all they’re doing is selling a dangerous product. In the opinion of that ass clown he sounds like he thinks they should be referred to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. I guess the assault rifle guys are just their security department. Damn fool.
Leadership. HOORAY President Trump!
Sounds like Trump actually knows what “war on drugs” actually means.👍
Killling over 295,000 Americans for profit isn’t a “thinly articulated legal rationale.” it’s the reason government exists in the first place.
Could be he is on the board of some companies heavily involved in products that make up “Standard American Diet, aka SAD”. You can understand then that raising the alarm about poisoning large numbers of people would be against his best interests.
I hate to be a downer, but unless something changes demand for drugs, we are playing whack-a-mole again.
Yes, the cartels are incredibly evil.
I was putting soldiers in Leavenworth for dealing and zipping ODs into body bags fifty years ago. In my state booze is cheap and weed is everywhere, but they are still using meth and fentanyl.
I don’t have a good answer.
Free fentanyl for all and let Darwin sort it out.
Only half-joking.
Until 1915 you could buy Laudanum, morphine, legally.
We had over 5 million addicts, mostly women.
Making it illegal did not solve the problem.
I would favor putting homeless addicts in a shelter where they would receive free drugs from medical professionals. Fewer ODs and street crime.
Rehab would be available to any at any time.
It’s sad that so many have chosen such an existence.
Flame away!
Charlie Schmitt is a putz of epic proportions.
Wonder how many deals were made when Biden & Co. were in business??.
People in dark places have a lot of connections with people in high places.
The so-called war on drugs has always been a joke no matter what administration was in power.
The Narcos shows on Netflix although fiction documented the reality of the heavily tax payer funded charade.
And it also documented the CIA as an impediment as well as the “bad guys” which was credible as it is difficult to find many instances at least in our southern hemisphere where the CIA weren’t the “bad guys”.
Now of course China has become a player.
Trump is more serious than past Presidents as war is a term he takes seriously and is not a marketing buzz word as his latest actions make clear.
Looks like he truly means to be the “drug czar”, a term that meant virtually nothing in past administrations.
“selling a dangerous product is different than an armed attack”
Only when you are legally making, selling, and shiiping a dangerous product.
When you are violating the law to do these things, you are attacking others. There also isn’t a drug cartel out there that isn’t armed and won’t kill to sell their product.
“Snowfall” more or less documented the role of the CIA/Contras in the creation of crack cocaine.
The Cartels have been waging war on and in the U.S. for a very long time. It’s about time the government awakened to that fact.
As a Mexican co-worker told me 'don't think that it is so much different in your country.'
One thing about corruption is that it flourishes in the fertile ground inside of big bureaucracies and powerful governmental control structures. In short, the bigger government gets the more opportunities there are for corruption, which explains why so many politicians continually vote to expand it.
Your Mexican colleague gets it.
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