OPINION — “Currently, the administration is waging a secret war against a secret list of unnamed groups that they will not tell us about. There have been four lethal strikes against [alleged Venezuelan narco-trafficking] boats in the Caribbean. The administration wrote us [the U.S. Senate] a letter…about what they were doing in September. They said they considered themselves to be in a ‘non-international armed conflict’ -- that means a war -- against a secret list of ‘designated terrorist organizations.’ I received a briefing last week on the administration’s strikes in the Caribbean. During that briefing, Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, from both sides of the aisle, asked a Senate-confirmed official whether the Department of Defense could produce a list of the organizations that are now considered terrorists by the United States. They said they could not provide that list.”

That was Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), speaking on the Senate floor last Wednesday during the debate on a War Powers resolution that would have blocked U.S. military strikes in the Caribbean. It lost 48-to-51.

Slotkin, a former CIA analyst who also served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, gave a clear analysis of the several steps the Trump administration has taken that could eventually lead this country to a situation which, as Slotkin put it, “creates an excuse [for President Trump] to unilaterally use the military inside our cities, similar to the way he used them in the Caribbean.”

Other Senators provided additional information about today’s current extraordinary situation, which I will discuss below, but it was Sen. Slotkin who put it in the clearest context.

First, she established her own credentials, saying, “I am a CIA officer. I am a former Pentagon official. I did three tours in Iraq – armed -- alongside the military. I participated in the targeting of terrorist groups. I actually have no real problem going against [drug] cartels, given what they have done in their inserting drugs in our community and with the death of so many Americans. But as a nation, I think we should have as a basic principle that you can’t have a secret list of terrorist organizations that the American public and, certainly, the U.S. Congress don’t get to even know the names of.”

She referred back to the 2001 Global War on Terror saying it was, “kind of my era,” and spoke about how new foreign terrorist organizations were declared to Congress and then “our intelligence community, the military, and law enforcement would spin up to go after information about that group and prosecute -- you know, target against that group.”

Slotkin went on to explain how the Trump administration had late last month expanded the terrorist threat to include individuals and groups in this country.

Speaking about Trump’s September 22, Executive Order, “Designating Antifa As A Domestic Terrorist Organization,” Slotkin said the administration was “going to, again, make secret lists of ‘terrorist groups’ inside the United States and send the full force of the U.S. Government against those terrorist organizations. They are not telling anyone the name of these organizations, but they are authorizing law enforcement and the intelligence community to double down and come up with that list.”

This is a problem, Sen. Slotkin said, “because the Trump administration in that document [the Executive Order] defined ‘terrorist organization’ or ‘domestic terrorism’ incredibly broadly. It suggests that any group that talks about anti-Christian values, views they don’t like on migration or race, differing views on the role of the family, religion, or morality could all be grounds for labeling an organization ‘domestic terrorists.’’’

In fact, the reference to anti-Christian values appeared in a little-publicized follow-up to the September 22 Executive Order -- a September 25, National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7. An NSPM is a presidential directive that specifies and communicates national security policy to executive departments and agencies.

Citing “the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America,” and signed by Donald J. Trump, NSPM-7 gives directions to the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and Homeland Security as well as the Attorney General on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.”

Building on the assassination of Charlie Kirk and attempts against Trump and others, NSPM-7 unites “this pattern of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described ‘anti-fascism,’” or Antifa. NSPM-7 goes on to say, “Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

NSPM-7 gives responsibility to the National Joint Terrorism Task Force and its local offices (JTTFs) to “coordinate and supervise a comprehensive national strategy to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt entities and individuals engaged in acts of political violence and intimidation designed to suppress lawful political activity or obstruct the rule of law.” In addition, JTTFs are to investigate “institutional and individual funders, and officers and employees of organizations, that are responsible for, sponsor, or otherwise aid and abet the principal actors engaging in” the above criminal conduct.

In addition, NSPM-7 says that the Attorney General “may recommend that any group or entity whose members are engaged in activities meeting the definition of ‘domestic terrorism’…merits designation as a ‘domestic terrorist organization.’ The Attorney General shall submit a list of any such groups or entities to the President through the Assistant to the President and Homeland Security Advisor [Stephen Miller].”

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In her Senate speech, Sen. Slotkin continued, “If this administration is not telling us who is on their secret designated terrorist list for groups in the Caribbean, they are definitely not going to tell us who is on their list of domestic terrorist organizations.”

Finally, Sen. Slotkin spoke out about her future fear -- that President Trump may claim in some American city “if the violence has gotten to a level of an insurrection, it means that the U.S. military can now be used [under the Insurrection Act] as law enforcement in our cities. It means the U.S. military can raid; they can arrest; they can detain. You can easily see a world where the President of the United States labels protest groups ‘terrorists,’ doesn’t tell anyone, and creates an excuse to unilaterally use the military inside our cities, similar to the way he used them in the Caribbean.”

I agree Trump is headed in that direction, and past and present members of the military must also be aware of what’s going on.

Meanwhile other Senators during last Wednesday’s debate raised other issues needing public consideration.

For example, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said, “There is no question that drug traffickers, criminal gangs, and other criminal enterprises engage in horrific and violent acts. Murder is murder, whether committed by a human trafficker, a drug trafficker, or a member of al Qaeda. But there are fundamental differences in their motivation, which legally distinguishes a drug trafficker from a terrorist. It is common knowledge that a drug trafficker’s purpose is financial enrichment, while the definition of a ‘terrorist’ is a person who uses violence or the threat of violence to instill widespread fear to achieve a political or ideological goal.’’

Schiff raised another point related to the current situation. He said, “Other governments are using the label ‘terrorist’ to defame and criminalize social activists, political opponents, and journalists who engage in peaceful dissent. This is common practice in Iran, Russia, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, where dissidents are imprisoned and even executed for being so-called ‘terrorists.’’’

In a challenge to Republicans, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said, “If my [GOP] colleagues, as they have stated, believe we should be at war in the Caribbean or at war with nations in the Americas or with the narco-traffickers, they have had the ability the entire time to bring a resolution before us and have that debate in front of the American public. I have a feeling that debate would produce some positive votes if it were limited enough, but to allow a President to do it by secret, without Congress having the guts to have the debate and vote about whether the war is worthwhile, is contrary to everything this country stands for.”

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Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) raised a broader issue. “The notion that we can bomb our way out of a drug trafficking crisis is not a strategy,” Reed said, “it is wishful thinking. Using the U.S. military to conduct unchecked strikes in the Caribbean risks destabilizing the region, provoking confrontation with neighboring governments, and drawing our forces into yet another open-ended conflict without a clear mission or exit strategy.”

Reed continued, “Conflict in the Caribbean or with Venezuela is entirely avoidable, but the risk that we stumble into war because of one man’s impulsive decision-making has never been higher. Our troops deserve better—much better.”

President Trump has been after Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro since 2018, including a failed, White House-driven, 2019 regime-change attempt to restore democracy in that country by replacing Maduro with opposition leader Juan Guaidó. John Bolton, National Security Advisor at the time, said in his book, The Room Where It Happened, that Trump assured Guaidó that he (Trump) would, in Bolton’s words, “pull off Maduro’s overthrow.”

Who knows what Trump is saying privately today about Maduro and planning for Venezuela?

But the Caribbean activities are but a sideshow to what the Trump administration has quietly underway in this country.

Again I refer to Sen. Slotkin’s words on the Senate floor last Wednesday: “The President is looking for an excuse to send the U.S. military into our streets, to deploy the U.S. military against his own people, to prompt confrontation, and to hope that confrontation justifies even more military force and military control. This is a well-worn authoritarian playbook. It is one that quite literally the United States of America was founded on rejecting -- the idea that British soldiers, when they occupied American cities, abused American citizens to the point where Americans turned against them.”

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OPINION — “In the 12-month period ending in October 2024 [Fiscal Year 2024], 84,076 Americans died from a drug overdose, according to the most recent available provisional statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), underscoring the devastating effect these cartels have on our country.

Although these numbers show a 25 percent decline since the same 12-month period last year [Fiscal Year 2023] – when the country lost 112,910 people to drug poisonings – demonstrating positive momentum in the fight against these drugs and the organizations trafficking them, the threat remains grave. The trend is hopeful, however. October 2024 was the eleventh consecutive month in which the CDC reported a reduction, and the current statistics represent the largest 12-month reduction in drug overdose deaths ever recorded.”

The above was excerpted from the 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment, an annual report from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which was published May 12, 2025, by the Trump administration’s Department of Justice and the DEA.

I refer to that 84,076 American death-by-drug overdose figure because – although it is far higher than acceptable -- it is much lower than figures used recently by President Trump to justify his recently stepped up U.S. military operations against drug cartels and particularly alleged narco-traffickers off the Venezuelan coast.

Back on September 5, when President Trump was defending the September killing of 11 alleged Venezuelan narco-traffickers, he said, “We’re strong on drugs. We don’t want drugs killing our people. I believe we lost 300,000. You know, they always say 95[,000], 100,000. I believe they’ve been saying that for 20 years. I believe we lost 300,000 people last year.”

On September 15, during an Oval Office meeting, President Trump said of drug cartels, “They killed 300,000 people in our country last year and we're not letting it happen anymore.” Later that same day, at an impromptu airport press conference, President Trump mistakenly said, “the fact that 300 million people died last year from drugs, that’s what’s illegal.”

Only President Trump knows why he inflates the number of American drug deaths in this country that his own DEA officials have provided to the public. But to me, it shows he wants to justify this recent tactic of blowing up Venezuelan speedboats on the Caribbean Sea.

The September 2, September 15, and September 19 attacks reportedly have killed 17 individuals without the U.S. military first stopping any of the speedboats to determine whether they are narco-trafficking or not – as they did with a Venezuelan fishing boat on September 13.

However, for the three attacks, President Trump provided video tapes which he said showed the speed boats each being destroyed. In addition, both he and Department of War Secretary Pete Hegseth said with the first two, there are voice intercept tapes proving drugs were involved and that they were destined for the U.S. “We have recorded proof and evidence,” Trump told reporters on September15, “We know what time they were leaving, when they were leaving, what they had, and all of the other things that you'd like to have.”

But neither those voice tapes nor any other specific evidence has been made public.

In his September 4, letter to Congress, required by the War Powers Act after the September 2 attack, Trump wrote, “I directed these actions consistent with my responsibility to protect Americans and United States interests abroad and in furtherance of national security and foreign policy interests, pursuant to my constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive to conduct foreign relations.”

Meanwhile, many legal experts, including retired Pentagon lawyers, have questioned the legality under the law of wars, maritime law or human rights conventions for these U.S. attacks. Such attacks also contradict longtime U.S. military practice.

My further concern is that at his September 15, Oval Office exchange with reporters, President Trump mused that “there's no drugs coming by sea, but they do come by land. And you know what? We're telling the cartels right now, we're going to be stopping them, too. When they come by land, we're going to be stopping them the same way we stop the boats.”

The notion that Trump would order such an attack on another country’s land is not far-fetched.

Back in the summer of 2020, during his first term in office, Trump privately asked his then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper, about launching missiles into Mexico to destroy drug labs, according to Esper’s 2022 memoir A Sacred Oath.

Early last month, both NBC and The New York Times reported that Trump had reportedly sent a secret directive to the Pentagon asking for options to attack Latin American drug cartels after they had been named as terrorist organizations.

Last Friday, The New York Times published a story that said, “Draft legislation is circulating at the White House and on Capitol Hill that would hand President Trump sweeping power to wage war against drug cartels he deems to be “terrorists,” as well as against any nation he says has harbored or aided them, according to people familiar with the matter.”

That Trump and Republicans on Capitol Hill are contemplating legislation to justify what they are already doing shows they recognize some legal authority is needed. However, what’s also missing from much of the current media coverage is what the U.S. had initiated during the Biden administration to counter hemisphere drug cartels.

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Back in February 2025, The New York Times disclosed that the CIA under the Biden administration had, as part of bilateral cooperation with Mexico, begun secret drone flights well into Mexico to hunt for fentanyl labs, and that the Trump administration was increasing them.

CIA officers in Mexico passed information collected by the drones to Mexican officials, according to the Times, but the Mexican government was slow to take action against the labs, although the Mexican authorities did use some of the CIA information to make arrests.

During a February 19, 2025, news conference, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum described the CIA drone program as part of Mexico’s longstanding cooperation with U.S. forces. However, on September 10, Reuters published a more extensive story about CIA’s counter-drug activities in Mexico, its reporters having spoken to more than 60 current and former U.S. and Mexican security sources, including former CIA officers and diplomats and military officers from both countries.

With the permission of the Mexican government, Reuters said, the CIA had, in a previously covert, years-old program, individually vetted, trained and equipped two Mexican military units – a Mexican Army group and a special Mexican Navy intelligence outfit. The Army outfit is comprised of hundreds of CIA-trained special forces and, Reuters said, “is seen as the military force in Mexico most capable of nabbing heavily armed drug lords holed up in fortified mountain hideouts.

For example, Reuters reported, “The CIA’s Mexican Army group in January 2023 nabbed Ovidio Guzmán López, the son of the imprisoned cartel kingpin Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán.’”

More recently, CIA under the Trump administration, has created a new Americas and Counternarcotics Mission Center, Reuters has said, with top counterterrorism officials reassigned to work on Mexican cartels. The agency also has increased its already existent drone surveillance flights south of the border.

However, I join Washington Post Columnist David Ignatius when he questions: “Why has the [U.S.] military been so silent as the Trump administration has pushed the bounds of law by…attacking alleged Venezuelan drug-smuggling boats abroad?”

As I have noted in previous columns, on February 21, Hegseth, at a time when the top Navy Judge Advocate General (JAG) had just retired, fired the top Army and Air Force JAGs giving as his only stated reasons that he considered them not “well suited” for the job. Hegseth also said he wanted to avoid “roadblocks to orders that are given by a Commander-in-Chief.”

Ignatius pointed out, “The Trump team has gutted the JAGs — judge advocate generals — who are supposed to advise commanders on the rule of law, including whether presidential orders are legal. Without these independent military lawyers backing them up, commanders have no recourse other than to comply or resign.”

President Trump, who wanted to win a Peace Prize, it seems is now firmly on a war path.

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OPINION / EXPERT PERSPECTIVE – When the U.S. launched a military attack against a speed boat traveling in international waters between Venezuela and Trinidad-Tobago, President Trump told reporters that the operation happened "over the last few minutes, (we) literally shot out a boat, a drug-carrying boat, a lot of drugs in that boat." While few may mourn the alleged 11 narco-traffickers who perished in the attack, all Americans should be concerned about how our military is being cut loose from its legal moorings by what appears to be the abandonment of the rule of law from the very top of our national chain of command.

What is equally – and perhaps even more troubling – is how an order to employ U.S. military power - arguably beyond the bounds of international and domestic law – made its way down a chain of command staffed with military commanders and legal advisors who are obligated to comply with these laws.

There is nothing surprising about a military operation generating significant legal and policy criticism. Critiquing such operations has, since September 11th, become a veritable cottage industry. What is however, surprising is the near-uniform consensus among former military legal experts that this operation violated both international and domestic law, a critique exemplified by retired JAGC Commander Mark Nevitt’s excellent commentary.

This was a lethal strike conducted outside the context of an ongoing armed conflict (distinguishing it from attacks like those directed against high-level al Qaeda or ISIS operatives) and without the justification derived from the exercise of self-defense in response to an imminent unlawful armed attack against the United States (or any other nation). And, as Nevitt notes, this attack deviated from decades of operational practice employed in response to such narco-trafficker activity (seize, detain, and prosecute).

Those supporting the administration will inevitably say that this legal handwringing misses the point; that these were ‘bad’ people who deserved the fate that befell them. But it is the failure to acknowledge the abandonment of the rule of law that really misses the point. More fundamentally, it is deeply concerning that military legal advisors at every level of the chain of command may have provided the proverbial green light for this attack, and perhaps even more concerning if they were cut out of the decision-making process (concerns exacerbated by Section 7 of the recently promulgated Executive Order 14215).

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Military lawyers are integrated into the chain of command for the vital purpose of ensuring that the leverage of U.S. military power complies with international and domestic legal obligations. As commissioned officers, they bear a singular loyalty to the Constitution. And as members of the bar, they bear an ethical obligation to "exercise independent professional judgment and render candid advice" on behalf of their client – the institution – not any particular commander.

Some may interpret that these obligations mean obedience to the orders of the President is absolute. This is mistaken. While such orders carry a powerful presumption of legality, loyalty to the Constitution and the rule of law it represents trumps personal loyalty to the President or any individual within the chain of command.

When an order from any commander (even the President) is assessed as clearly unlawful, the military lawyer’s duty is clear: advise his or her commander to disobey, and if that advice is ignored, elevate the issue to the military or civilian lawyers at higher command levels.

Of course, when the order emanates from the President, there is no higher command, but there remains a continuing constitutional obligation that transcends the chain of command. While highly unusual and perhaps a chilling scenario, the lawyer – even one in uniform - has the legal, ethical, and constitutional obligation to advise commanders of the obligation to refuse to obey any order assessed as clearly violating domestic or binding international law, and the consequences of failing to do so.

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The lawyer’s ethical obligation is completely aligned with this constitutional loyalty. While it may seem that a command legal advisor’s client is the commander, it is not. Instead, it is the ‘command’, then the military service, and ultimately, the nation that the lawyer represents. A commander is presumed to represent those entities, but the command lawyer does not owe a duty of loyalty and zealousness to the commander per se, but only as such a representative.

When the commander commits to a course of action inconsistent with the interests of the organization and the nation, the lawyer’s duty is clear: prioritize the latter. In more concrete terms, this means that a command legal advisor must object to any command decision inconsistent with binding legal obligations.

This points to the most troubling aspect of this recent attack: what happened to what is supposed to be ‘principled counsel’ (a term coined by the former Army Judge Advocate General to define the essential function of the military lawyer) at every level of command? Were there legal objections? And if there were, what happened in response? Were dissenting opinions ignored? Marginalized? Or perhaps even sanctioned?

These are questions every American should be asking. Why? Because if ‘principled counsel’ is steamrolled in this new Department of War, what will constrain the future abuse of military power?

Whether bolstering border security, backing up ICE agents, patrolling city streets, augmenting immigration courts, and now interdicting drugs with lethal force, it is increasingly apparent that this President sees the military as his favorite hammer, and every problem starts to look like a nail. That alone is reason for concern. When that tool can be employed with little to no regard for the law, there is really no telling where this road will take us.

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