Charlie Savage

And so the precursor to this eruption of violence in the Caribbean Sea is that several months ago,

After the Trump II administration came into office, it began designating drug cartels and Latin American gangs as foreign terrorist organizations.

And that had never been done before.

Because these are not groups that are motivated by religion or politics.

They are groups that are motivated by the pursuit of illicit profit.

Right.

It's a major escalation.

And these are not what we think of as terrorists.

And they're not actually trying to kill Americans with their products, even though that clearly does happen, especially with fentanyl.

They want people to keep buying their product, and therefore they don't prefer to kill them.

That is not to say that these are good people.

These are obviously not moral, upstanding people who are making positive contributions to human society.

No, and this is part of what is fundamentally a disconnect here with the extent to which the administration has offered any kind of legal theory.

They have suggested that the act by the executive branch of designating an organization as a foreign terrorist group

brings with it legal authority to attack that group militarily.

And it's just not true as a description of legal reality.

That authority is limited to imposing economic sanctions, freezing accounts, making it a crime to provide material support to such an organization.

It does not come with the authority to attack them as if it were a war.

And I think it's worth pausing here to recall, since we've had 20, 25 years of a war on terror now, what that really is.

which is that after 9-11, Congress enacted a broad authorization for the use of military force against essentially al-Qaeda in countries that harbored al-Qaeda, which meant the Taliban in Afghanistan.