The Office Approving Trump’s Extra-Judicial Boat Strikes; Who Is Next

One of the frightening thing about the Felon's growing authoritarian actions is that due process of law and a requirement of evidence of alleged crimes has been thrown out the window. The warrantless seizure of undocumented immigrants first commenced under the pretext that hardened criminals were being seize.  In reality, only a very small percentage of those seized and terrorized had criminal records. All that was required was an allegation that someone was a "criminal." In the indictments of James Comey and Letisha James, career prosecutors found that there was no evidence to support the indictments and when they refused to indict, these career prosecutors were either forced to resign or were fired. The indictments were ultimately delivered by the Felon's non-prosecutor former beauty queen attorney.  The rule of law matters less and less and things boil down to what the Felon demands in revenge on adversaries, real or imagined, and the cruelty he seeks to inflict on those he deems "other", which more or less includes every racial minority be they US citizens - at least 170 citizens have been seized. The most frightening development is the killing of people on boats the Felon's regime claims are drug traffickers even though no proof has been provided to substantiate the claims.  Indeed, the Felon commented  "We're just gonna kill people, They'll be like dead."  Anyone with independent thought ought to be wondering when ordinary citizens may find themselves targets for lawless criminal charges or worse.  A piece in New York Times looks at the secretive DOJ office seemingly approving these extrajudicial murders in the Caribbean and Pacific.  Here are highlights:

Since early September, U.S. forces have carried out eight strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, killing at least 34 people. President Trump says the strikes are legal, and that the boats were trafficking drugs, but he has not offered evidence to substantiate the claim. Nor has he explained how the deliberate, premeditated killing of civilians — what Columbian and Venezuelan leaders and some jurists have called “murder”— can possibly be reconciled with domestic and international law. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has reportedly deemed the strikes lawful, but its analysis hasn’t been disclosed.

A quarter-century after the Sept. 11 attacks, then, we find ourselves in a familiar place: Our government is once again committing grave human rights abuses on the ostensible authority of a legal opinion that is being kept secret.

The Office of Legal Counsel is a division of the Justice Department that interprets the law for the executive branch. It has played this role for decades, issuing opinions that bind federal agencies on matters ranging from Social Security to veterans’ affairs to immigrants’ rights.

After Sept. 11, the office was called on by both the Bush and Obama administrations to resolve questions relating to national security. It told President George W. Bush that the National Security Agency could listen to Americans’ phone calls without warrants and that the Taliban were not entitled to the protections usually accorded prisoners of war. It assured the C.I.A. that it could lawfully torture prisoners overseas. Later, it concluded that the Constitution’s due process clause was no obstacle to the government’s summary execution of an American terrorism suspect.

[S]ignificant errors in the office’s legal analyses went unidentified and uncorrected, even as agencies relied on them to carry out policies that were deeply inconsistent with American law and democratic values. Public debate on matters of profound consequence unfolded in an information environment distorted by official secrecy, misdirection and selective disclosure.

The office’s opinions about interrogation allowed some of the most egregious post-Sept. 11 abuses and were later discovered to include some of the most glaring legal errors. With the office’s blessing, prisoners in secret C.I.A. sites were beaten, forced into painful stress positions, deprived of sleep and waterboarded — a method intended, the office explained, to induce in the prisoner “the uncontrollable psychological sensation that the subject is drowning.” Military policemen and interrogators subsequently came to adopt cruel methods at Guantánamo, as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some prisoners were tortured to death.

One of the torture memos was leaked to the press in 2004, but it was only after other opinions by the office were made public in 2009 — after years of litigation by human rights groups — that the profound defects in their reasoning came fully into focus. . . . . The Senate Intelligence Committee later concluded in a monumental report that the torture program had compromised the United States’ standing in the world as well as its security.

The memo authorizing strikes on drug traffickers in the Caribbean and Pacific may very well be an outlandish extension of the memos the office wrote about drone strikes during the Obama administration, including the al-Awlaki memo. That memo was itself flawed. Human rights lawyers faulted it for taking an unjustifiably expansive view of Congress’s 2001 authorization for use of military force, and in a 2016 book I criticized its myopic analysis of the due process clause.

But [the Felon's] Mr. Trump’s strikes are being conducted without any congressional authorization at all, and few jurists accept the notion that the United States is in an armed conflict with drug cartels. Whatever their defects, the Obama-era memos do not supply authority for the strikes the United States is carrying out now.

We should not have to guess how the Justice Department concluded that these strikes on civilians were lawful. The public should be able to read the government’s legal justifications for itself — and not at some indefinite point in the future, by which time the Office of Legal Counsel’s opinion’s relevance will have faded, but now, when there’s still something that might be done to change the government’s policies and hold accountable the officials who are responsible for them.

When the secrecy of the Trump administration’s OLC memo comes before the courts, as it almost certainly will, it will be tragic if judges extend the same deference to an administration that has made plain its contempt for the rule of law.

The courts should not debase our democracy by pretending that there are good national security justifications for keeping us in the dark.