Numerous news reports emerged beginning mid-afternoon on Oct. 2, on a notification that U.S. President Donald Trump sent to Congress announcing that the U.S. was in a state of war with South American drug cartels deemed by the White House to be terrorist groups. Trump determined the United States “is in a non-international armed conflict with these designated terrorist organizations,” according to the notice, which was sent to the national security congressional committees and obtained by The Hill and numerous other news organizations.
“The President directed the Department of War to conduct operations against them pursuant to the law of armed conflict,” the notice adds, referring to Trump’s new preferred name for the Defense Department. “The United States has now reached a critical point where we must use force in self-defense and defense of others against the ongoing attacks by these designated terrorist organizations.”
The Intercept’s Nick Turse, a veteran critic of the U.S. military machine, reported that the memo marks the most detailed explanation of the alleged legal underpinnings offered by the administration for a series of lethal attacks on boats in the Caribbean that began in September. Turse has been a vehement critic of the U.S. military machine for at least two decades.
Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, told Turse that the Trump administration was using sleight of hand to pass off its summary executions as an extension of the forever wars. “The notice tries to apply the legal framework that the U.S. relied upon for the ‘war on terror’—self-defense following an armed attack plus hostilities in non-international armed conflicts—to unspecified narco-terrorists,” he said. “The fundamental problem with that approach is that the facts do not support it. The U.S. has not suffered an armed attack. The report does not even identify which groups the U.S. is supposedly engaged in an armed conflict with. Some of them—like Tren de Aragua—almost certainly are not organized armed groups that the U.S. even could be engaged in an armed conflict with.”
