the country i grew up in had me convinced that i'd never see this variety of crap being done in our name;

In 2003 the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Council (OLC) issued a memo which declared the use of torture in ‘authorized military interrogations’ as legal when done under the ‘president’s constitutional authority to direct a war’.

The memo was widely condemned. The Obama administration withdrew it but refrained from prosecuting the torturers which had used it as cover.

The Trump administration now issued a comparable OLC memo to justify its wanton killing of alleged drug smugglers at sea.

Starting in September the Trump administration announced 19 strikes on boats in the Caribbean which have killed at least 76 seafarers. Most of them were random poor people:

One was a fisherman struggling to eke out a living on $100 a month. Another was a career criminal. A third was a former military cadet. And a fourth was a down-on-his-luck bus driver.

The men had little in common beyond their Venezuelan seaside hometowns and the fact all four were among the more than 60 people killed since early September when the U.S. military began attacking boats that the Trump administration alleges were smuggling drugs.

The argument of the new OLC memo is even more frivolous (archived) than the torturous reasoning of the former one:........more.......