April 23, 2018 "Information Clearing House" - The recent missile attack on Syria, in response to alleged use of chemical weapons on civilians by the Assad regime, revealed the scope of Donald Trump’s lawlessness. The attack, launched by the United States, Britain and France, was an open violation of international law and the United Nations Charter, which is the centerpiece of the “rules-based” order that the United States claims to defend. The charter prohibits “the threat or use of force” against a sovereign nation, unless the attack is authorized by the UN Security Council, is an act of self-defense, or is consented to by the sovereign government. None of these provisions apply. Some argue that the attack is justified by the emerging “right to protect,” but that too permits intervention only with UN sanction.

Defenders of the strike argued that it was necessary to trample international law in order to enforce it. Former Obama State Department official Anne Marie Slaughter praised Trump for doing the “right thing,” and tweeted that “It will not stop the war nor save the Syrian people from many other horrors. It is illegal under international law. But it at least draws a line somewhere and says enough.”

The attack also violated the US Constitution, which lodges the power to make war in the Congress and not the executive branch. Congress has provided no authority for the invasion of Syria. The post-September 11 Authorization to Use Military Force authorizes action the organizations that perpetuated 911 and their offshoots. No contortion of logic can stretch it to include the Assad Regime in Syria which has led the attack on IS in Syria.

The secret legal rationale – if there is one – would likely be based on the rationale invoked by both Obama and Trump for earlier strikes in Syria: that as commander-in-chief, the president may use military force to uphold regional stability and vital international norms in the national interest. This contention, as Jack Goldsmith, former attorney in the Office of Legal Counsel under George W Bush, concluded, “places no limit at all on the president’s ability to use significant military force unilaterally.”

If Trump is allowed to step over legal lines like this, the consequences may be dire. That the impulsive, erratic, ignorant president claims the power to use the military anywhere at any time that he might decide is frightening enough. It becomes terrifying when combined with the views of the war cabinet he now seeks to assemble.

The Syrian strike coincided with uber-hawk John Bolton assuming his post as National Security Advisor. Bolton’s views – and treatment of colleagues –are so extreme that a Republican senate refused to confirm his nomination by George W. Bush to be Ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton was not only part of the effort to sell the war against Iraq, but remains a defender of what is clearly the greatest US foreign policy debacle since the Vietnam War. Having learned nothing from that calamity, he remains a vociferous advocate of so-called “preventive” war against both North Korea and Iran. He openly scorns diplomatic achievements like the Paris climate accord or the multilateral Iran nuclear weapons agreement. He advocates escalating US involvement in Ukraine, and a more muscular policy against both Russia and China.

Trump has nominated Mike Pompeo, the former “Congressman from Koch,” to serve as secretary of state. Pompeo also was a champion of the Iraq debacle. He too has called for preventive military assault on North Korea and Iran. He is highly critical of the the Iran Agreement and the Paris climate accord. While he presented himself as an advocate of “relentless diplomacy” in his Senate conformation hearings, he also admitted, under questioning by Senator Jeff Merkley, that he thought the president had the power to make war without the mandate of Congress.

Trump has also selected Gina Haspel to be director of the CIA. Haspel was notoriously involved in running one of the CIA’s torture sites in Thailand, where water boarding among other tortures took place. Then, in direct violation of orders from the White House, she pushed the destruction of videotapes of the torture. Her defense is the classic Adolf Eichmann plea rejected by the Nuremburg Tribunal after World War II: that she was “just following orders.” (Not surprisingly, her nomination has been touted by a bipartisan group of former spies and operatives, and opposed by over 100 former admirals and generals, because “We did not accept the ‘just following orders’ justification after World War II, and we should not accept it now.”)

If confirmed, her appointment would indicate that the United States not only does not punish those who violate the most basic strictures against torture, but chooses to reward and elevate those officials.

This is where we are headed: An impulsive and bellicose president empowered to use force on his own authority advised by the advocates of aggressive war with a covert arm headed by a practitioner of torture.

This is precisely what the founders of the country sought to protect against by giving Congress the power to declare war. James Madison noted that the power to declare war is “fully and exclusively vested” in the Congress because the “executive is the department of power most distinguished by its propensity to war: hence it is the practice of all states, in proportion as they are free, to disarm this propensity of its influence.”

This article was originally published by "The Naation" -