This admin is really going down a deep dark hole with these extrajudicial killings / murders / executions or whatever you might call it. Completely illegal and lawless, and not answering to the very Republicans and Democrats they are required to. This is not going to end well. I hope someone loses their prosecutorial immunity. "I was just following orders" is not an acceptable defense, just ask the Germans who were at Nuremberg.
Top Senators Say Pentagon Has Not Shared Legal Justification for Boat Strikes
The Republican chairman and senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee said on Friday that the Pentagon had not handed over information about the attacks despite repeated requests.
nytimes.com
The top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee said on Friday that the Pentagon had refused for weeks to share with Congress key information about its strikes on marine vessels that the Trump administration says are carrying drugs, despite repeated requests that it divulge the directives initiating the operation as well as its legal justification.
In a brief statement on Friday, Senator Roger Wicker, the Republican chairman of the panel, and Senator Jack Reed, the senior Democrat, made public two letters that they jointly sent to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the past several weeks requesting the information.
“To date, these documents have not been submitted,” Mr. Wicker and Mr. Reed wrote.
The senators’ decision to publicize their requests and Mr. Hegseth’s failure to meet them reflected growing bipartisan alarm on Capitol Hill about President Trump’s expanding and open-ended military campaign, undertaken without consultation with or approval by Congress. It also reflected deepening frustration with the administration’s lack of transparency about an operation whose legal justification is in question.
The senators shared two separate requests made to the Pentagon. In one letter, in late September, they asked for a copy of the president’s orders to carry out the military strikes. By law, that letter noted, the Pentagon is required to provide Congress with copies of “execute orders” within 15 days of the president’s issuing of them, a deadline the senators said the Trump administration had missed.
In a second letter, in early October, they again sought the execute orders, as well as the Justice Department’s legal justification for the attacks and a “complete list” of designated terrorist organizations and drug trafficking organizations “with whom the president has determined the United States is in a noninternational armed conflict and against whom lethal military force may be used.” Top House Democrats sent a similar request earlier this month for the list of targets but have not received any information from the White House.
</snip> Read the rest here: nytimes.com |
