\n<\/p>\n
Facing mounting criticism from their Democratic rivals and rights advocates, allies of United States President Donald Trump are increasingly invoking the so-called \u201cwar on terror\u201d to justify his deadly strikes on boats around Latin America.<\/p>\n
But legal experts have stressed that the analogy between the bombing of alleged drug boats and the post-9\/11 US attacks on suspected al-Qaeda fighters has no basis because Washington is not in armed conflict in Latin America.<\/p>\n list of 3 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n \u201cWe have to acknowledge that these strikes are expanding on those abuses of power that we saw in the \u2018war on terror\u2019,\u201d Annie Shiel, US advocacy director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n \u201cThese strikes are also breaking completely new, very dangerous ground.\u201d<\/p>\n Shiel underscored that the ongoing US bombardment in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, which has killed nearly 100 people since September, also lacks congressional authorisation.<\/p>\n To fend off scrutiny, lawmakers from Trump\u2019s Republican Party have drawn parallels between the vessel bombings and the drone assassination campaign waged by former Democratic President Barack Obama against suspected \u201cterrorists\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThroughout the Obama years, we used this targeting system to find and kill a lot of bad guys all over the world,\u201d Senator Tim Sheehy told reporters on Tuesday.<\/p>\n Senator Markwayne Mullin echoed that assessment, stressing that drug smugglers are \u201cterrorists\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s the difference between Obama attacking these individuals when they were deemed terrorist organisations in the Middle East versus the ones that are here right now poisoning our streets?\u201d Mullin said.<\/p>\n While rights groups have criticised Obama\u2019s drone policy over the years, advocates and experts say Trump\u2019s boat strikes are far more brazen in defying laws and norms.<\/p>\n \u201cExperts are unanimous that there is no armed conflict in the Caribbean and that drug traffickers are civilians, not legitimate military targets,\u201d said Shiel.<\/p>\n Analysts told Al Jazeera that, despite the US officials\u2019 assertions that suspected drug smugglers are \u201cterrorists\u201d, they are civilians.<\/p>\n The Pentagon has argued that the strikes are lawful, and they target \u201cdesignated terrorist organisations\u201d to \u201cprotect the homeland\u201d in accordance with the Law of Armed Conflict.<\/p>\n But critics have stressed that the Law of Armed Conflict does not apply to the strikes because there is no armed conflict in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.<\/p>\n On Thursday, 10 Senate Democrats wrote in a letter to the Republican chair of the chamber\u2019s judiciary panel, \u201cfabricate an armed conflict or falsely label people \u2018combatants\u2019 to kill them\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThese strikes are extrajudicial killings and shocking violations of fundamental principles of due process and the right to life under US and international law,\u201d the lawmakers wrote.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Administration\u2019s claims that the people it is killing are guilty of crimes, affiliated with a criminal or terrorist organisation, or \u2018combatants\u2019 in a nonexistent armed conflict, do not render these extrajudicial killings any less unlawful.\u201d<\/p>\n John Walsh, director for drug policy and the Andes at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), said drug cartels lack the organisation, armaments and political motives to be considered \u201ccombatants\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThe frame of drug trafficking as \u2018narcoterrorism\u2019 already is an obfuscation of the reality,\u201d Walsh told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n \u201cThose drug traffickers are trying to sell a product that can create addiction and generate profits. They\u2019re not interested in going to war with governments.\u201d<\/p>\n But the Trump administration appears to be applying the \u201cwar on terror\u201d language of the Obama and George W Bush era to the militarisation of Washington\u2019s drug policy.<\/p>\n Trump has designated drug organisations as \u201cforeign terrorist\u201d organisations and classified the synthetic drug fentanyl as a \u201cweapon of mass destruction\u201d (WMD), echoing Bush\u2019s false claim that Iraq possessed WMDs to justify the 2003 US-led invasion.<\/p>\n \u201cThe WMD designation is meant to underscore the administration\u2019s narrative that these are fearsome armies and invading forces that have weapons of mass destruction at their disposal. But again, I think that doesn\u2019t have any basis,\u201d Walsh said.<\/p>\n He raised concerns that the designation could be used to \u201cunlock authorities\u201d for the administration to conduct strikes inside the US.<\/p>\n Walsh said the Trump administration is declaring power to strike anyone associated with designated \u201cterrorist\u201d groups \u2013 alleged drug traffickers in the case of the boat strikes \u2013 anywhere.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a flawed legal reasoning all across the board,\u201d he said. \u201cBut my point here is that there\u2019s no limiting principle on where and when that authority could be asserted by President Trump. So it could be in Caracas tomorrow. It could be in Chicago the next day.\u201d<\/p>\n Rights advocates have been pushing for the release of the administration\u2019s formal legal justification for the US Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) strikes, which remain classified.<\/p>\n Experts say the OLC memo likely echoes the legal rationale behind assassinations and drone strikes during the \u201cwar on terror\u201d.<\/p>\n Sheehy, the Republican senator, said in bombing the boats, the Pentagon is using \u201cthe exact same process\u201d it has used in targeted killings since 2021.<\/p>\n \u201cTo go after the brave men and women in uniform who are conducting these attacks is to indict the very system that was used bipartisanly for the last 24 years,\u201d he told reporters.<\/p>\n Jessica Dorsey, assistant professor of international law at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, suggested that the issue lies with the process itself.<\/p>\n \u201cPlacing too much faith in internal processes without meaningful external accountability reversed cause and effect, treating process as a constraint when it actually enabled expansion,\u201d Dorsey told Al Jazeera in an email.<\/p>\n \u201cIn practice, elastic legal interpretations and the absence of real oversight meant those safeguards did little to restrain the executive\u2019s use of lethal force, and set the stage for these even more aggressive policies we see today.\u201d<\/p>\n For his part, Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale University, slammed relying on Obama\u2019s drone legacy to justify the current attacks, saying \u201ctwo wrongs don\u2019t make a right\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a fact that the Obama administration killed more people in more places, at least up to now, and did so on dubious legal authority. That doesn\u2019t mean that what Trump is doing is sanctified. It\u2019s a pattern of expansion of US warmaking,\u201d Moyn told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the American executive giving itself more permission slips to do more things over time. And those expansions are never checked or reversed.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Facing mounting criticism from their Democratic rivals and rights advocates, allies of United States President Donald Trump are increasingly invoking the so-called \u201cwar on terror\u201d to justify his deadly strikes on boats around Latin America. But legal experts have stressed that the analogy between the bombing of alleged drug boats and the post-9\/11 US attacks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5994,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-us-canada-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Recommended Stories <\/h2>\n
Invoking Obama<\/h2>\n
\u2018Obfuscation of the reality\u2019<\/h2>\n
\u2018Same process\u2019<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"