A Truly Lawless War By a Lawless White House

I can't see how U.S. relations with other countries will ever get better whenever trump and his Republican lackeys are driven from power, as long as this corrupt administration is openly committing war crimes like bombing fishing boats in international waters (via Heather Parton at her Digby blog):

(Quoted from the Task And Purpose website) “Don’t let them make you break the law,” read new digital billboards on expressways near U.S. Southern Command headquarters in Doral, Florida, where the U.S. military’s ongoing operations in the Caribbean Sea are being overseen

The billboards were put up in response to the ongoing military strikes ordered by President Donald Trump’s administration, in what the White House and Pentagon have described as a concerted campaign against “narcoterrorists.”

The strikes are illegal and immoral. They aren’t even war crimes because there is no war. They’re just straight up mass murder.

The veterans behind the billboards at Win Without War and About Face: Veterans Against The War, describe it differently, calling them “ongoing lawless strikes on boats near the South American coasts...” 

It’s even worse than we knew. Per Politico:

Defense Department officials do not know precisely who they have killed in multiple military strikes against alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean that have claimed the lives of at least 57 people, according to Democratic lawmakers who attended a classified House briefing on the issue Thursday.

The meeting with members of the House Armed Services Committee — which comes amid bipartisan requests from members of Congress for more legal justification for the deadly strikes — was conducted by department policy officials but no military lawyers, who were pulled from the briefing shortly before it started.

Lawmakers at the briefing said they were not given an explanation for the change and were left frustrated over the lack of clarity on the justifications for the military actions...

They don’t know who they are murdering and they don’t care. And now we know that they’re killing them on the basis of some “connection” to a “terrorist organization or affiliate.” We have no idea how they define any of that. What’s a connection? What’s an affiliate? And what fucking authority allows them to kill people based on any of this???

I’ve seen the government use the U.S. military to do some heinous things in my time, but this may be the most blatantly illegal without even the fig leaf of a believable rationale.

We've had our leaders lie us into wars before - as far back as the Mexican-American War over the Texas border with Mexico - and we're still coping with the dissemblers from the 2003 Iraqi Occupation never held to account for lying about WMDs and then lying about their torture regime. 

But we're at the point where trump and his Far Right warhawks don't care what the facts are regarding anything. All they want is to justify their war on Latino immigrants, by tying it to a 50-year-old War On Drugs that would involve violating other nations' sovereignty - either with illegal missile/bomb strikes across their borders, or escalating further with "regime change" via a ground war - in such ways that even our closest allies in NATO and North America - if any remain by that point - would side against us.

Adding to the madness is how trump is doing this without the constitutional requirements that Congress has to sign off on any extended military action. Even Dubya had to lie to the legislature to get authorization to invade and occupy Iraq. With government officially in Shutdown mode thanks to Republican incompetence (AND arrogance, AND unwillingness to fund SNAP to feed our families, AND terrified of a pending House to release the Epstein Files exposing a lot of trump's sins) trump and his warmongering buddies like Hegseth and Miller believe they can do anything they want with our armed forces.

This is not a good thing if we're heading into war with Venezuela - or Nigeria, or Mexico, or Canada, or Denmark - much like the dangers of going into a war with Iran: Again, our nation is not unified to fight an overseas war (and with the Far Right insisting on absolute loyalty, they will turn violent against any anti-war protests that will rise up); we will not have allies siding with us and in fact will see other nations side against us; and the leadership that will put themselves in control of any planned war are buffoons and idiots who've convinced themselves they're military geniuses when they pretty much can't even plan out parades.

We're being led into an illegal unjust war at this point, where the only thing stopping trump is his own inability to focus on anything at any particular time. But sooner or later, that chaotic bubble he and his lackeys are in will pop, and then everything else will explode.

Gods help us.