The United States is involved in an “armed conflict” against drug posters, he told Donald Trump in a notice sent by the Pentagon to Congress, whose objective is to legally support the recent Washington’s operations against Venezuela.
The letter, obtained by AFP of a parliamentary source that requested anonymity, occurs after the deployment at the end of August of several military ships in the Caribbean Sea, and the destruction of at least three ships in this area, involved according to Washington in drug trafficking, killing at least 17 people.
The jurists emphasized that these attacks came out of any legal framework, and this official statement points, so that the Trump administration serves as a legal justification for the operations carried out in Venezuela.
Such a report to Congress “is legally required (…) after any event in which the US armed forces were involved in an attack,” said a White House official to the AFP.
“As we have repeatedly declared, the president acted according to the law of armed conflicts to protect our country from those who try to bring mortal poison on our coasts,” said Anna Kelly, a White House vice representative.
“Military threat”
However, the US Constitution establishes that only Congress has the ability to declare war, still doubting doubts about the validity of a declaration of “armed conflict” so great.
The posters involved in drug trafficking have become the last decades “more armed, better organized and violent” and “illegally and directly cause the death of tens of thousands of US citizens every year,” said the Pentagon in this letter revealed first by the New York Times.
“In response (…), the president determined that the United States was involved in a non -international armed conflict with these designated terrorist organizations,” the notice continues.
Washington accused Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his government to be in charge of a vast drug trafficking organization to the United States. Caracas strongly denies these accusations and, in response to the American deployment considered as a “military threat,” launched military exercises and the reservists mobilization.
The Venezuelan government condemned the “illegal incursion” of American hunters in an area under their air traffic control on Thursday, saying that it endangered the security of civil and commercial aviation in the Caribbean, in a statement. The Venezuelan Defense Minister had reported before to overflow five American combat planes near the country’s coast.
Source: BFM TV
