OPINION: Shedding light on legality of Carribean killings
Idaho's Senator Jim Risch proclaimed in a Dec. 11 meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the “attacks in the Caribbean are absolutely, totally and 100% legal under U.S. law and international law.” Those strikes have produced a body count nearing 100 since Sept. 2. Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley effectively debunked Risch’s argument, pointing out that only Congress has the power to declare war under the U.S. Constitution. Risch incorrectly claimed that the killings were "clearly not a war, but kinetic action,” as though that somehow got around the Constitution. His response makes no sense because the violence of war is always kinetic action.
There is no need to get into the legal weeds about the legality of Trump's Caribbean killings because their unlawfulness has been well established in the last three months. Even the DOD’s new AI chatbox, which Pete Hegseth proudly announced on Dec. 9, said that an order to kill two survivors of a boat strike would be “an unambiguously illegal order.”
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