After a series of military strikes against Venezuelan boats that it alleges were smuggling illegal drugs to the United States, the Trump Administration is reportedly pushing for regime change in the South American country and hoping to oust leftist President Nicolás Maduro.
Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Geoffrey S. Corn, who now serves as director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, offered legal and military analysis of the Trump Administration's Venezuelan policy during a December 2 appearance on MS NOW's "Morning Joe." And he laid out a variety of problems with actions that Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are taking.
Corn told "Morning Joe" host Mika Brzezinski, her colleague Jonathan Lemire (a former Associated Press reporter) and The New Republic's Michael Tomasky that if an order to "kill the stranded members" of a "ship's crew" in the Caribbean Sea was given after a "first strike," it would indicate "an order to commit an illegal killing,"
"Were you trying to finish off the boat, or were you actually trying to kill the stranded members of the crew?," Corn told the panel. "And if it was the latter, how could you justify that, knowing that once an individual is shipwrecked, they are essentially out of combat? But again, this all goes back to the most troubling aspect of that statement by the White House press secretary (Karoline Leavitt), which is this idea that President Trump can merely designate a narco group as a foreign terrorist organization — and somehow, that authorizes the use of deadly combat power as a measure of first resort, shifting from a law enforcement to a wartime paradigm."
Corn added, "That's a chilling assertion of authority. Why are we even treating this as a war?"
The retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel was vehemently critical of Hegseth for "summarily dismissing," from the Pentagon, "senior military lawyers" — which, he warned, is creating a "shock effect" on the U.S. Armed Forces.
Corn told Brzezinski, Lemire and Tomasky, "There's been a general dismissiveness of the role of law in regulating the use of military force on behalf of the nation. And you see this starting to have its manifestation in incidents like this…. A very good friend of mine is the former judge advocate general of the Canadian Armed Forces, and he told me once, 'I never worried about the meetings I was invited to — I only worried about the meetings I wasn't invited to.'"
Corn continued, "So, have they been marginalized? This is a really important issue because rules of engagement are not stupid. They preserve the legitimacy and the integrity of our military operations."