America’s War on Terror Comes to the Caribbean

Opinion|America’s War on Terror Comes to the Caribbean

America’s quarter-century-old global war on terrorism took on a whole new dimension this week. President Trump on Tuesday announced that U.S. forces conducted an airstrike on an allegedly drug-laden boat traveling in the south Caribbean, killing 11 people suspected of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang and raising immediate questions about the legality of the attack.

Since then, senior administration officials have said little else about the strike or the intelligence that apparently underpinned the action. They haven’t said what legal authorities they were acting on. They haven’t identified exactly who or what was on the vessel. Secretary of State Marco Rubio first said the boat, which was traveling in international waters, was probably headed toward the Caribbean, then said it was bound for the United States.

The administration’s explanation essentially boils down to this: Trust us.

That’s unacceptable. The administration appears to be betting partly that Americans are so inured from two decades of U.S. military kill-or-capture missions against terrorists in the Middle East that they’ll be indifferent to extrajudicial executions in their proverbial backyard.

The problem with that outlook is that the executive branch had the power to carry out those missions through two open-ended legal authorizations granted by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The measures — one passed in 2001, the other in 2002 — gave sweeping authorities to the president to use military force against a wide array of militant groups, which ultimately served as the basis for action in at least 22 countries.

It’s difficult to see how that broad authorization would apply to the lethal action taken this week in the Caribbean. Yes, the administration has formally labeled a handful of gangs and drug cartels, including Tren de Aragua, as terrorist organizations. But none of these groups have clear links to Al Qaeda or a related brand of violent extremism. The White House is apparently basing its action on a wholly unrelated new directive that’s yet to be publicly spelled out.

Jameel Jaffer, a human rights lawyer who worked on several legal challenges to overseas drone strikes carried out by the Obama administration, told me Tuesday’s strike was “flagrantly unlawful,” even if you accepted the Obama team’s defense of its drone strikes. “In this case, there’s no congressional authorization of force,” he said. “There was no pre-existing armed conflict. Nor is there any non-frivolous argument that these men posed an imminent threat, even under an elongated definition of imminence. Killing these men in these circumstances looks like outright murder to me.”