| | | Trump expands war powers to fight Venezuelan gangs. Critics say that mirrors 9/11 playbook.using Yahoo! News landing page headline for title above
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Source: Associated Press
A war on drugs or a war on terror? Trump's military pressure on Venezuela blurs the lines
7 min read
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.
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Read more: yahoo.com
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then again, President Shrub's war on terror declaration was substantially copied and pasted from the war on drugs |
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