Charlie Savage

is a crime a serious crime but it is dealt with as a law enforcement measure and for many years the way united states and other countries have dealt with the problem of drug smuggling in the caribbean sea and elsewhere is that the u.s coast guard with assistance from the u.s navy interdicts these boats boards them searches them if it turns out the suspicions are accurate it seizes the drugs

and arrests the crew for prosecution.

And if it turns out the suspicions are not accurate, it lets the people go.

It doesn't kill them on suspicion.

Traditionally, an administration doing something this edgy and novel would seek to justify itself by putting out a long legal memo, probably written by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.

And you may or may not agree with it, but at least you would have something to talk about.

You could sink your teeth into it and people could say, well, this is where they're really pushing it.

And we disagree, but there would still be something there.

In this case, they haven't really put out anything like that.

There's some straight comments and a terse statement the White House put out a couple sentences of after people like me pushed them to say something.

And so we are sort of left to fill in the blanks for them.

And their argument seems to hinge on the idea that they can expand who counts as a terrorist and expand what a government can do to someone it has deemed a terrorist.

So in everyday language, a terrorist group is an organization that is using violence to advance some kind of ideological agenda.

religious, political goal.

They're trying to coerce a government into changing its policy.

They're trying to overturn a government and replace it with something new.

They're trying to intimidate a population into changing its attitude towards something.

And because that seems so insidious and sort of different than ordinary crime,

It is treated differently by the law.

One of the ways it's different is that Congress has empowered the executive branch to designate foreign organizations as terrorist organizations.