Donald Trump maga Republicns must expose, reject and end illegal orders to attack Venezuelan boats- Murder At Sea

 Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Jey Johnson, a lawyer, was a secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration, and, before that, general counsel of the Department of Defense.: 

With its strikes on suspected drug couriers (withour any evidence❗)  in the Caribbean, our U.S. government is conducting extrajudicial killings on the high seas — plain and simple. Some Americans may wonder how this is any different from the targeted killings of other bad guys around the world by previous administrations, including that of Barack Obama, in which I served.

There is a world of legal and moral differences.

First, Donald Trump has effectively unilaterally declared war against Mexican and Venezuelan drug cartels, without authorization from Congress. 

In contrast, following the September 11, attacks, Congress authorized President George W. Bush and his successors to treat terrorist members of Al Qaeda as enemy combatants in war and to use lethal military force against them.

Second, implicit in Congress’s 2001, authorization was the understanding that terrorist members of Al Qaeda and its affiliates were hiding in places such as Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen, beyond the reach of law enforcement. But drug smuggling and drug cartels, even those international in scope, are routine targets for law enforcement. The Mexican drug kingpin known as El Chapo, Joaquín Guzmán, was arrested and brought to justice in a U.S. court.

Before Donald Trump pardoned him last week, the former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández was convicted in a U.S. court and was serving a 45-year sentence in an American jail for drug trafficking. The Coast Guard, supported by the U.S. Navy, routinely interdicts and arrests drug couriers on the high seas.

Our military’s new precision weaponry allows for targeted lethal force with the single tap of a device. But that capability should never become a convenient and expedient substitute for law enforcement. That is the very definition of “extrajudicial killing.”

Third, there is a huge difference between the approaches of the President Barack Obama and the evil DonaldTrump administrations about the use of lethal force. The President Obama administration viewed lethal operations as necessary to protect American lives; officials in the Trump administration seem to revel in them.

Before I became the secretary of homeland security in President Obama’s second term, I was general counsel of the Department of Defense in his first term, overseeing the work of thousands of lawyers. That included providing the legal sign-off for lethal counterterrorism operations before they went to the secretary of defense and the president for approval. I’m sure the repeated experience over four years took a significant toll on me. I thought to myself, if I ever became accustomed to these, it was time to get out.

With these operations we thwarted scores of terrorist plots on America and the American people. We were not perfect; we heard the critics, and we worked hard to continually re-evaluate and improve our conduct of this awesome duty with which we had been entrusted.

I learned the law in this area, asked questions, guided my subordinates with internal memos, and even solicited, in a general way, the views of legal scholars outside the Pentagon. Once a year I summoned nonpartisan groups of national security legal experts — groups that would perhaps include a federal judge, a civil liberties lawyer, a former attorney general, a sitting senator — to ask them the basic question: “How are we doing?”

I sometimes gave a legal “no” for a proposed operation. I believe the disapprovals strengthened the process, as the military staff then knew they had to work harder to justify a strike as it worked its way up the chain of command.

I was not the only senior lawyer in this process. The Obama administration was filled with bright lawyers with a range of views, and President Obama encouraged robust legal debate to arrive at the most sustainable legal answers. He encouraged his national security lawyers, where possible, to provide public explanations of the legal basis for our counterterrorism efforts. Attorney General Eric Holder, the State Department legal adviser Harold Hongju Koh, the C.I.A. general counsel Stephen Preston and I all did so in speeches before audiences.

Books have been written describing the contentious internal legal debates I had with Harold, a liberal Yale Law School professor in his nongovernment career. Harold persistently inserted himself into my legal world at the Pentagon and made my job a lot harder. But, as Daniel Klaidman put it in his book “Kill or Capture,” our “rivalry reflected a healthy government dialectic that led to smarter and better justified policies.”

Sadly, I detect none of this rigor within the legal circles in the current Trumpzi administration. To the contrary, one month into the Trump administration, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the top judge advocates general of the Army and Air Force, signaling that he was not interested in the wealth of military law experience they brought to the table, and unnerving the thousands in the JAG communities beneath them.

We are told there is a legal opinion from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel justifying the lethal boat strikes, but the opinion is classified and the public has heard about its contents only through second- or thirdhand reports. Any such opinion must discuss constitutional law, and constitutional law is not classified. If the Trump administration has confidence in its legal position, it can and should declassify the legal analysis that supposedly supports the strikes. In the absence of this, our government creates the impression that it is shooting first and backfilling the legal reasoning later.

The general tenor of Hegseth’s comments suggests that he relishes, rather than agonizes over, the approval of these lethal operations, and that others below him should do the same. In his September 30, speech at a large gathering of the military’s top brass, he called for creating a “warrior ethos,” promoting “maximum lethality,” and untying “the hands of our war fighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country.” He also ranted about “overbearing” and “stupid” rules of engagement. Such rhetoric encourages abuses of authority, and makes incidents like the “double tap” attack on Sept. 2 — in which our military struck a speedboat said to be carrying drugs a second time, killing the survivors of the first blast as they clung to the boat’s wreckage — almost inevitable.

In its aftermath, Pete Hegseth’s best explanation for the multiple strikes that day was the “fog of war.”

Congress needs to assert its oversight responsibilities. It is frustrating but predictable to hear politicians who saw the video of the Sept. 2 strike characterize it as “righteous” or “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my public service” depending upon whether there is a D or an R next to their name.

Congress should demand public release of the video of the second strike on Sept. 2. The House and Senate Armed Services Committees should demand public, sworn testimony from those in the chain of command about the events of that day and the boat attacks generally. Lawmakers should not be content with closed-door, unsworn briefings by select administration officials. The public has a right to hear the explanations for the extrajudicial killings the Trump administration is committing on our behalf.

Extrajudicial killing is something our government condemns when it is conducted by other nations with deplorable human rights records. We must now summon the strength of our convictions to look in the mirror and hold ourselves to the same standards.

Jeh C. Johnson is a lawyer who was a general counsel of the Department of Defense in Barack Obama’s first term and director of homeland security in his second term.