The United Kingdom has stopped sharing intelligence with the United States on drug boats in the Caribbean to stay out of major counter-narcotics strikes in the region.
While controlling multiple territories in the Caribbean, the U.K. has long helped the U.S. interdict drug smugglers in the open sea, CNN reported. But as the mission becomes more lethal, the U.K. no longer wants to be involved.
The intelligence blackout began over a month ago.
The Department of War has launched more than a dozen strikes on boats, killing 76 people.
Believing that the strikes violated international law, the U.K. started to worry that its intelligence was helping the U.S. locate the vessels before obliterating them.
Trump administration officials have defended the strikes, saying the drug traffickers are “operating under the control” of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
Some legal experts, however, have questioned President Donald Trump’s authority to act on the threats without congressional approval.
Brian Finucane, a former State Department legal adviser, recently told The Daily Wire that “the strikes are not legal” and lack justification.
“The precedent that this administration seems to be invoking are strikes the U.S. has taken over the course of the last 20-plus years in the context of the U.S. war on terror against groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS,” he said. “But those precedents are really irrelevant and a red herring with respect to the strikes we’re seeing in the Caribbean and now the Pacific.”
“For the first time, the U.S. government designated criminal entities, drug trafficking organizations as foreign terrorist organizations,” he explained. “But those assertions seem to be undermined by the U.S. Intelligence community.”
Dr. Nicholas Creel, law professor at Georgia College and State University, believes the strikes are legal, pointing to roughly five out of 30 examples of “instances where we moved first and somebody died” where the president actually received congressional approval.
“What a lot of people lose in this is if we do agree that the president has the authority to respond to attacks, who is it that gets to define an attack is? It has to be the president,” Creel said. “It necessarily cannot be Congress.”
“That’s why we chose this word to give the president the authority to respond to these attacks so it has to be that decides what this attack is. And if you or I think this is not an attack, fine, but we’re not the president.”
He continued: “Pretty much every president since FDR would have to have been said to have acted unconstitutionally in terms of the war powers, which seems a bit odd. If it’s that common a practice, is it really, I mean, just because people are doing it doesn’t mean it’s legal, but at the same time, if everybody is basically doing it? Is it really illegal?”
.png)
.png)
