Weeks after ordering the U.S. military to kill 17 people in boats off Venezuela, the Trump administration justified the much-criticized strikes by telling Congress this week it believes the United States is in a formal “armed conflict” with drug cartels, which—if not checked by Congress or the courts—would grant him “extraordinary wartime powers,” the New York Times reported Thursday.
Why it matters: “In an armed conflict, it is lawful to kill combatants for the opposing force on sight,” Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt write for the Times. And that means from the White House’s perspective, “the laws of war permitted it to kill, rather than arrest, the people on the boats because it said the targets were smuggling drugs for cartels it has designated as terrorists” because thousands of Americans die each year from overdoses.
WH to lawmakers: “Based upon the cumulative effects of these hostile acts against the citizens and interests of the United States and friendly foreign nations, the president determined that the United States is in a noninternational armed conflict with these designated terrorist organizations.” The notice did not specify which cartels, nor explain how it confirms that its targets are indeed cartel members.
Loose ends: “The surge of overdose deaths in recent years has been driven by fentanyl, which drug trafficking experts say comes from Mexico, not South America,” the Times reminds readers. Further, the White House “has not explained how selling a dangerous substance constitutes a use of force, and Congress has not authorized the use of any type of military force against cartels.”
Lawmaker reax: “Declaring war and ordering lethal military force without Congress or public knowledge—nor legal justification—is unacceptable,” said Sen. Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island, and ranking member on the Armed Services Committee. “Drug cartels must be stopped,” Reed said, but “Every American should be alarmed that [President Trump] has decided he can wage secret wars against anyone he labels an enemy.”
“Trump’s actions are illegal, unconstitutional, and dangerous,” said Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass. “He is leading us willy-nilly into war with Venezuela. I have ‘determined’ that this is a terrible idea,” he added.
Expert reax: The White House’s claim “that the U.S. is somehow in an armed conflict does not do the trick because it’s not supported by the facts,” said Brian Finucane, former State Department counsel on counterterrorism and military rules of engagement, speaking to CBS News. “What this boils down to is the President of the United States asserting a prerogative to kill people based solely on his own say so,” he told NPR Friday.
“There is a world of difference between al Qaeda murdering almost 3,000 people on 9/11 by crashing airliners into buildings (an actual armed attack) and people dying from ingesting illegal drugs (not an armed attack),” Finucane wrote on social media Thursday. He adds, the U.S. government’s “position on cyberspace provides a useful touchstone for non-traditional uses of force. Drug smuggling does not meet this threshold.”
Some questions Trump’s claim raises include: “Is a coca farmer a military target now? Someone who sells gas for the boats? Someone who happens to live in a crime-controlled town? A lieutenant or sergeant who is on the take?” asked Adam Isaacson of the Washington Office on Latin America. “With so little clarity about who the enemy is, the chance of innocent civilians being killed is enormous.”
Also: why didn’t Trump invoke an armed-conflict rationale earlier? None was mentioned in the president’s Sept. 4 War Powers Resolution report to Congress about the first Caribbean strike, notes Marty Lederman, a Georgetown law professor and Just Security executive editor, in “Legal Flaws in the Trump Administration’s Notice to Congress on ‘Armed Conflict’ with Drug Cartels.”
Coverage continues below…
Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2015, the U.S. military killed 42 people and injured more than 30 others when an Air Force AC-130U gunship opened fire on a hospital run by Doctors without Borders in Kunduz, Afghanistan.
In Chicago, at least three federal agencies stormed an apartment complex at 1 a.m. local Tuesday with drones and helicopters overhead, and used flashbang grenades to burst through the building as they pulled sleeping people out of their apartments and zip-tied their children—some without any clothes on—outside for several hours, the Chicago Sun-Times reported Wednesday. “Agents approached or entered nearly every apartment in the five-story building,” and left residents’ homes trashed upon their eventual return between three and five hours later.
Sizzle reel: Homeland Security officials turned footage of the raid into a sort of highlight video posted online Thursday.
Officials arrested 37 people at the apartment, which they claimed was “a location known to be frequented by Tren de Aragua members and their associates.” However, those Homeland Security officials “gave no evidence to support the assertion, and authorities did not confirm that any of the people arrested were members of the Venezuelan gang,” the Sun-Times reports.
The people brought outside “looked very distraught,” an eyewitness told local ABC7 News. “I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too—had them zip tied to each other. That’s all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where’s the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, ‘f*ck them kids.’”
“Even if you’re not a mother, seeing kids coming out buck naked and taken from their mothers, it was horrible,” a neighbor said.
Said one detained U.S. citizen: “I asked [agents] why they were holding me if I was an American citizen, and they said I had to wait until they looked me up. I asked if they had a warrant, and I asked for a lawyer. They never brought one.”
Historian and author Garrett Graff called it not just “a dark and almost certainly illegal escalation of the out-of-control agency’s war on the American people,” but also “a portrait of an authoritarian secret police that seems set to model itself on history’s worst fascist enforcers.”
He continued: “There is no warrant any judge could give—or at least, in theory, that any reasonable judge would ever sign!—that gives federal authorities the right to break down the doors of every apartment in a building in search of undocumented immigrants. That is almost exactly the definition of the so-called ‘general warrants’ or ‘writs of assistance’ that the British used against US colonists that helped spur the Revolution—warrants then very specifically outlawed by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.” (Graff goes into greater detail about precedents of this sort, like the so-called “Palmer Raids” of the country’s first Red Scare, here.)
Legal reax: “There is a gulf in America,” said attorney Ken White, writing Thursday on social media. “The gulf is not just between people who oppose this and people who are indifferent to it or reluctantly accept it in support of immigration policy or see it as collateral damage.”“The gulf is between people who see this as brutal and inhuman, and people who see the victims of this as inhuman,” he said. “The other side of this is not merely saying ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ it‘s people who say ‘lol fuck those eggs.’ It’s between decency and thuggish, swaggering, nihilistic evil. This is not merely about indifference to the brutality against the least of us that is characteristic of our system; that happens under every administration. This is about brutality being the goal, because it makes evil people happy to see others brutalized.”
Around the world
Inside the emergency effort to create a European drone wall: As Russian drone incursions across Europe spike, the European Union committed Wednesday to one of the most ambitious multi-nation defense projects in history: a Europe-wide “drone wall,” envisioned as a network of new sensors, artificial intelligence software, jammers, cheap missiles, and more to thwart small-drone attacks, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported Thursday from Estonia.
The concept is still in its infancy. But dozens of Estonian defense tech startups working in autonomy, drone detection and defeat, and other areas related to drone defense gave Defense One a glimpse of how autonomous vehicles, inexpensive short-range missiles, hunter drones and AI concepts are laying the groundwork for the future of defeating drone swarms. And nearly all of them highlighted ongoing partnerships with Ukrainian front-line commanders as part of their development process.
While the drone wall concept belongs to the European Union, it overlaps in geography, technology, and objectives with a separate NATO effort called Eastern Shield, a push to increase eastern-flank area defense under NATO command and control. Continue reading, here.
And in partner-nation developments, we have several new reports from Reuters:
Commentary: “Shadow economies” are growing, and it’s past time for U.S. military planners and operators to take into account these black markets that help rogue states and actors and fray alliances, argues Army Maj. Benjamin Backsmeier, writing Thursday in Defense One.
And lastly this week: An Army battlefield network upgrade led by Anduril and Palantir was described as “deeply flawed” and viewed by Army officials as “very high risk” due to an alleged “likelihood of an adversary gaining persistent undetectable access,” the Army’s chief technology authorizing official said recently, Reuters reported Friday—two days after Breaking Defense initially reported that some“deficiencies” had been “mitigated.”
The network is the Army’s NGC2 platform, which “connects soldiers, sensors, vehicles and commanders with real-time data,” but an Army review last month “paints a bleak picture of the initial product,” Mike Stone of Reuters reports. “We cannot control who sees what, we cannot see what users are doing, and we cannot verify that the software itself is secure,” the Army memo said.
Notable: Breaking Defense reported “that in the three-plus weeks since the document was written and subsequently circulated within industry, the problems have been addressed.” And the Army’s chief information officer Leonel Garciga told Reuters the memo helped in “triaging cybersecurity vulnerabilities” and mitigating them. However, “Other deficiencies highlighted in the memo include the hosting of third-party applications that have not undergone Army security assessments,” and “One application revealed 25 high-severity code vulnerabilities,” while “Three additional applications under review each contain over 200 vulnerabilities requiring assessment, according to the document.” Read more, here.
Additional industry-related reading: “Elon Musk’s SpaceX took money directly from Chinese investors, company insider testifies,” ProPublica reported Thursday.
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