It’s worth reminding ourselves that the 9/11 attacks — or, more precisely, the U.S. government’s response to the 9/11 attacks — bears a direct relationship to the drug-war killing spree in which President Trump and the U.S. national-security establishment are engaged in the Caribbean.
And make no mistake about it: These are wrongful killings, pure and simple. Sure, it’s true that there is no reasonable possibility that anyone is going to be indicted or prosecuted for them or that the Supreme Court would ever permit a criminal prosecution or conviction of either the president or his military drug-war goons to stand. But the fact remains: the president and his military forces are extinguishing the lives of people who are simply accused of violating a federal criminal offense: to wit, U.S. drug laws. Under our system of government, U.S. officials, including the president, cannot legally extinguish the life of anyone, including foreign citizens, who is simply accused of violating a U.S. drug law. When they do so anyway, they are engaged in a wrongful killing of a human being.
So, what does 9/11 have to do with these drug-war killings? In an apparent attempt either to shield themselves from a future criminal prosecution for murder or to guarantee no interference by the U.S. Supreme Court with their drug-war killings, President Trump and the Pentagon are encasing their killings in war-on-terrorism rhetoric. They’re saying that the drug-war suspects they are killing are more than just suspected drug dealers. They’re saying that they are also “terrorists” or suspected members of a “terrorist” organization. Thus, they are now referring to the people they are killing not just as drug dealers but rather as “narco-terrorists.”
It a darkly brilliant strategy because they know that as soon as they raise the terms “terrorists” or “war on terrorism,” there is zero chance that the U.S. Supreme Court will interfere with their killing spree, especially since it’s the military, rather than the DEA, that is carrying out the killings. Ever since the U.S. government was converted to a national-security state in the late 1940s — and especially ever since the assassination of President Kennedy, the Supreme Court, along with the Congress and, for that matter, U.S. presidents — have not dared to interfere with the power and majesty of the national-security branch of the federal government, especially given its omnipotent power of assassination. The Court has long held that a judicial concept that it created and called the “political-question doctrine” precludes it from interfering with actions relating to “foreign affairs,” even when such actions clearly violate the U.S. Constitution.
Prior to the 9/11 attacks, most everyone understood that terrorism is a federal criminal offense, just like the violation of U.S. drug laws. That meant that terrorist suspects were indicted and prosecuted in U.S. District Courts, just like drug-war suspects. That’s why the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center in 1993 were prosecuted and convicted in a federal court.
With the 9/11 attacks, the situation radically changed. U.S. officials claimed that the attacks were actually an “act of war” rather than a criminal offense. Unfortunately, in the fear and panic after those attacks, there were even some libertarian scholars who were supporting this remarkable claim. But in fact, the 9/11 attacks were a criminal offense, just as the 1993 attack on the WTC was a criminal offense. But in the post-9/11 panic and fear, the national-security establishment was permitted to get away with its act-of-war theory.
What was fascinating, however, is that this act-of-war theory did not supplant the criminal-offense concept. It simply supplemented it. At the option of the Pentagon and the CIA, a terrorist suspect could now be treated as either a criminal defendant or an “unlawful enemy combatant” — i.e., a terrorist who did not wear a military uniform. Thus, some terrorist suspects have been prosecuted in federal district courts as criminal defendants who have violated U.S. laws against terrorism. Others have been captured and sent to the Pentagon-CIA prison/torture center in Cuba, where they have been tortured and deprived of effective assistance of counsel, due process of law, speedy trial, trial by jury, and other procedural rights guaranteed to criminal defendants under our system of government.
Through it all, the Supreme Court has not dared to put a stop to this extra-constitutional system, something that Trump and the Pentagon and everyone else in Washington, D.C., are fully aware of. Thus, Trump and the Pentagon know that by ingeniously relabeling drug-war suspects whose lives they summarily snuff out as narco-terrorists, they can continue their illegal killing spree in the Caribbean with the guarantee of no interference by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.
