Donald Trump has imposed a reign of terror on the Caribbean by targeting supposed drug-smuggling boats, not for interdiction or arrest, but for deadly airstrikes. Yet Trump has never offered evidence that his targets are drug smugglers, and the evidence is mounting that he is just ordering the U.S. military to murder people at random.
The New York Times reports:
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the administration’s decision to exclude his party from a secret briefing on Wednesday about the campaign was “corrosive to our democracy.”
Frustration is growing among Democrats on Capitol Hill as the Trump administration refuses to provide a legal justification for attacking boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The U.S. military strikes have killed at least 61 people since early September.
Visibly agitated, Mr. Warner said that the Republicans-only meeting was a violation of a law requiring bipartisan briefings of congressional leaders on national security matters. …
On other side of the Capitol, military legal experts had been scheduled to testify in a closed-door bipartisan briefing for the House. But the Trump administration decided not to send them. …
Representative Sara Jacobs, Democrat of California… said Pentagon officials said they needed to prove only that the targeted people were connected to designated terrorist organizations, even if the connection is “as much as three hops away from a known member” of a designated terrorist organization.
If they are targeting people with three degrees of separation from known gangs, that almost certainly includes completely innocent people. But the most dangerous part is that Trump is refusing to share information about this with Congress, giving briefings only to Republicans and imposing non-disclosure agreements on military officers to restrict the flow of information to elected officials.
To be sure, Republicans in Congress are cooperating in their own irrelevance. On Oct. 16, the admiral overseeing this campaign in the Caribbean suddenly announced that he was resigning. No one knows why he resigned, leading to speculation that he did not want to be liable for war crimes—and Republicans have refused to ask him to testify before Congress.
In short, the Donald Trump is ordering people to be killed, nobody knows who or why—and Congress seems to be helpless to discover this information.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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