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WASHINGTON (AP) — Under President Donald Trump, the drug war is looking a lot like the war on terror.
To support strikes against Latin American gangs and drug cartels, the Trump administration is relying on a legal argument that gained traction after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which allowed U.S. authorities to use lethal force against al-Qaida combatants who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The criminal groups now being targeted by U.S. strikes are a very different foe, however, spawned in the prisons of Venezuela, and fueled not by anti-Western ideology but by drug trafficking and other illicit enterprises.
Trump’s use of overwhelming military force to combat such groups and authorization of covert action inside Venezuela, possibly to oust President Nicolás Maduro, stretches the bounds of international law, legal scholars say. It comes as Trump expands the military’s domestic role, deploying the National Guard to U.S. cities and saying he's open to invoking the nearly 150-year-old Insurrection Act, which allows for military deployment in only exceptional instances of civil unrest.
So far, the military has killed at least 28 people in six strikes on boats that the White House said were carrying drugs.
The latest occurred Thursday, when American forces struck a suspected drug-carrying vessel and seized survivors, who are being held by the U.S. military.
Thursday's action brings the death toll from the Trump administration’s military action against vessels in the region to at least 28.
Trump justified the strikes by asserting that the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, relying on the same legal authority used by the Bush administration when it declared a war on terror after the Sept. 11 attacks. That includes the ability to capture and detain combatants and to use lethal force to take out their leadership.
The strikes have occurred without any legal investigation or a traditional declaration of war from Congress. That raises questions about the justifications for Trump's actions and the impact they could have on diplomatic relations with Latin American nations who recall with deep resentment repeated U.S. military interventions during the Cold War.
The U.S. intelligence community has also disputed Trump's central claim that Maduro’s administration is working with the Tren de Aragua gang and orchestrating drug trafficking and illegal immigration into the U.S.
‘You can’t just call something war'
Trump’s assertion that the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels is based on the same legal authority used by the Bush administration when it declared a war on terror after the Sept. 11 attacks. That includes the ability to capture and detain combatants and to use lethal force to take out their leadership.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/...l?guccounter=1
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