Is “narco-terrorist” an Orwellian cheat code?
This column was first published by The Washington Examiner.
This weekend, after weeks of increased tensions, social media threats, and blown-up drug traffickers in the Atlantic Ocean, American forces successfully carried out an assault on Venezuela and captured dictator Nicolas Maduro.
Now, let’s make one thing absolutely clear: Maduro is scum of the earth, and is almost single-handedly responsible for causing the unimaginable suffering of his own people and the destruction of a once-prosperous nation under the blood-soaked banner of socialism. The fact that he is out of power is undeniably a good thing for both the Venezuelan people and the broader fight of good against evil.
But — especially as Trump hints at the words that will cause the pseudo-intellectual anti-neocon podcaster class to have a panic attack: regime change — two things can be true at once. It is undoubtedly good that Maduro has been captured and we are allowed to ask serious questions about how this was achieved in the context of the checks and balances that are supposed to protect the American civil system from abuse.
This particular war-like assault on Venezuela was justified as a non-war by the twisting of rhetoric. The best example: Maduro and his activities were preemptively labeled as “narco-terrorism” in order to justify the use of force generally accepted in the war against terror.
Of course, you may think that what Maduro was doing counts as narco-terrorism, but that doesn’t mean that the executive branch can unilaterally decide that Maduro is a narco-terrorist, charge him with domestic crimes, and then engage in an act of war to bring him to justice without anyone being allowed to even furrow their brow.
For the thousandth time, that doesn’t mean that bringing Maduro to justice is wrong. Far from it. It doesn’t even mean that this action — in isolation — was wrong. No, the point is that we are witnessing the continued consolidation of war-making power in the White House, without any legislative input, and no-one seems to care.
Yes, it is true that Barack Obama did this too, but we agreed that was wrong. Yes, it is true that notifying Congress — let alone asking for permission — risks operational security, but that’s an indictment of the current members of Congress, not the system of checks and balances it is meant to respect. And yes, it is true that Maduro deserves to face justice, but how justice is achieved also matters, and that’s the part being papered-over.
Non-Democrat critics, such as Thomas Massie, were immediately lambasted as the moral equivalent of Ana Kasparian and Hamas for questioning the constitutionality of Trump’s move, it took one phone call to convince initial-critic Sen. Mike Lee that, because Maduro was “arrested…to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States, and that the kinetic action … was deployed to protect and defend those executing the arrest warrant,” the action was “likely” constitutional, and Vice President JD Vance — who was suspiciously absent during the operation and its announcement — took to social media to explain the legality of the operation. Vance — as the Yale-educated authority on all legal matters, apparently — tweeted that “Maduro has multiple indictments in the United States for narcoterrorism,” and that “You don’t get to avoid justice for drug trafficking in the United States because you live in a palace in Caracas.”
Another day, another expertly-constructed straw-man argument from Vance. No-one — at least, no-one who isn’t a partisan hack — is making the argument that Maduro shouldn’t face justice. Instead, we are pointing out that imposing an Orwellian-style label of “narco-terrorism” to bypass our entire system is something we — as taxpayers — are allowed to question.
Ultimately, this must be a question of limiting principles. If the executive branch is permitted to declare war — no matter how short or successful or popular — based on lawyer-esque tricks of language like “narco-terrorist” and “kinetic action,” what happens when that same power lands in the lap of a Democrat who might apply their own definition of terrorism upon those who might not get the GOP’s juices flowing?
To bring joy to Tucker Carlson and his ilk, here’s an obvious example: what happens when President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sends American forces to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu using precisely the same argument?