This is a response, but not a rebuke, to Jed Babbin’s fine piece, which appeared Monday here at The American Spectator, discussing the legal questions surrounding the missile attacks on Venezuelan and Colombian drug boats attempting to deliver narcotics to poison our citizens. Babbin’s take wasn’t so much to pass judgment on the drug-boat sinkings as it was a shot at the Democrat lawmakers who last week put out a video that — arguably seditiously — implied President Trump was giving illegal orders in shooting up the narco-terrorists in those boats. (RELATED: Striking the Unknown) Trump’s orders for the boat strikes were made after Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared several organizations to be “foreign terrorist organizations.” The State Department designations included the hyper-violent gang known as Tren de Aragua as well as several drug cartels. At this point, we have to analyze the concept of due process of law. Everyone in U.S. custody is entitled to due process. Except, apparently, some terrorists. Terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — who are men such as Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged planner of the 9-11 attacks and al-Qaida small fry — have been ruled by the Supreme Court to be entitled to writs of habeas corpus (attempting to be released). The ruling didn’t include an allowance of full due process. Some have been released under habeas corpus and many have not. KSM, for example, was captured in 2003 and has been awaiting trial for 22 years. (The evidence against KSM was reportedly gained through torture and is thus inadmissible. A plea deal for KSM to avoid the death penalty was held invalid and is on the way to the Supreme Court.) So due process is limited to terrorists in U.S. custody who are inside the U.S. It doesn’t apply to the drug boats and their crews. What is the legal justification for summary executions of alleged drug smugglers? Neither the president nor Secretary of State Rubio has said. Several top military lawyers, including a top lawyer for the Marine Corps, Col. Paul Meagher, reportedly warned against the boat strikes. The UK government also reportedly stopped sharing intelligence which could lead to the boat strikes. On September 2, Trump said that, “Earlier this morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.” But he didn’t, then or since, outline the legal justification for the boat strikes. We must have substantial intelligence information that the boats which were hit had drugs on them and that they were coming to the U.S. to off-load the drugs. But the public is ignorant of those facts. Although the boat strikes are popular among Americans, we don’t have any evidence supporting them. No boats have been seized and the people on them have been killed rather than arrested. The president could still go to congress and ask for another AUMF to authorize strikes against the drug boats and the facilities from which they are launched. He could, instead, arrest the boats and their crews and bring them back to the U.S. for trial. But he hasn’t. In other words, the orders passed down the military chain of command are presumed to be legal, and so far there is no showing otherwise — but there is also no defense offered to the presumption. I think Trump should seek that defense. I think he ought to ask Congress for a declaration of war against the Maduro regime in Venezuela, which is married to Cartel de los Soles, the trillion-dollar narco-terrorist operation managed by the Venezuelan military. It’s called Cartel de los Soles because officers of the Venezuelan military, the Fuerza Armada Nacional Bolivariana (FANB), don’t have stars on their epaulets. They have suns. This week, the Trump administration proclaimed that Cartel de los Soles is a Foreign Terrorist Organization. It absolutely is that, and the designation is long past overdue. (RELATED: Maduro and American Mixed-Messaging) Narcotics trafficking is the stock in trade of the Maduro regime. It’s been described by retired CIA pro Gary Berntsen as the “Costco” of the international drug trade — processing, logistics, security, you name it, Caracas is the central hub of the criminal syndicate systematically poisoning the American people with narcotics. Much more so than the Mexican cartels, who are increasingly franchisees working for their Venezuelan masters. Berntsen’s name is one to know if you haven’t followed him before. He goes back a long way — his career at CIA spanned a quarter-century, and it involved the Northern Alliance takedown of the Taliban at Mazar-i-Sharif, investigating the East African embassy bombings, and lots of other stuff. Late last week, Berntsen and Ralph Pezzullo, who combined to write a book called Stolen Elections: The Takedown of Democracies Worldwide, which is generating a very significant amount of buzz, did a two-hour podcast interview with Lara Logan, which offered a chapter-and-verse indictment of Smartmatic, the Venezuelan company that has played a prominent role in fomenting election irregularities across the globe. Including in the Philippines, for example. It’s a compelling interview. Not much Berntsen and Pezzullo said in it hasn’t been offered elsewhere. And it informs what’s happening in the Caribbean Sea right now. Trump is taking down the Maduro regime in Venezuela because a small group of patriots stopped the 2024 election fraud. And they figured out how the 2020 election was rigged by voting machines owned by the Maduro regime. Venezuela = America’s rigged elections. — Emerald Robinson ✝️ (@EmeraldRobinson) November 23, 2025 This column is not going to delve too deeply into the mechanics of the voting machines vis-à-vis paper ballots. That drags the reader into a minefield; you can steal an election just as easily with paper ballots, particularly those that are mailed in, as you can with corrupted election software and electronic voting machines. (RELATED: SCOTUS Must Stop Mail-In Voting Madness) But the point is that it’s Venezuela. Smartmatic is a company explicitly founded to fix elections by the communist Chavez regime, and it operates globally. The Chavez regime was behind Black Lives Matter, it’s been behind the anti-fracking movement, and lots of other insurgent efforts to damage our culture, politics, and economics. (RELATED: US Intelligence Downplays Maduro Partnership With Tren De Aragua) And now that regime, which destroyed the oil and gas sector that used to power the most prosperous nation in Latin America, has turned to narcotics. (RELATED: Trump Squeezes Maduro’s Narco-State) Berntsen isn’t the only voice calling out the fact that Venezuela exported millions of its citizens up through the Central American corridor as a cover for the seeding of thousands of Tren de Aragua thugs who would seize control of the drug trade and vertically integrate it through Caracas. As well as establishing what Berntsen calls a criminal insurgency to destabilize our cities by the dozen. That insurgency continues, complete with Useful Idiots in sensible shoes direct from the Trader Joe’s parking lots acting as human shields, as ICE attempts to push criminal aliens out of the country. (RELATED: The Soros Footprint in Latin America) Tren de Aragua alone is a casus belli. It represents a hostile invasion of the United States of America with an aim toward killing our kids and destroying law and order in our population centers. That alone is worth war. If any of the election interference claims are proven, it’s a casus belli. A hostile regime in our hemisphere that steals an election from its own people, which the Maduro regime unquestionably has done multiple times and beyond any doubt did last year, is a threat to democracy greater than any of the others on the global stage. It would hardly be outside our precedent to take out such a regime. (RELATED: Maria Corina Machado Getting the Nobel Peace Prize Is Just Fine) And it has to be understood that the Maduro regime is not particularly Venezuelan, but rather a hybrid occupation government that rides on a backbone of some 15,000 Cuban military and intelligence officers who lustily suppress and immiserate the people of that nation for their own benefit. (RELATED: How Cuba Is Becoming Beijing’s Caribbean Outpost) Let’s put this to a vote. Let’s get a declaration of war — or, in the modern parlance, an authorization for the use of military force — against Caracas, and let’s have the strike group assembled in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Venezuela do its work and destroy this cancer in our hemisphere so that the elected government the Venezuelan voters chose last year can finally take office and dismantle the trillion-dollar criminal cartel which is poisoning democracy and life across the world. We’ll get a good measure of who’s actually for democracy with that vote, and who’s for narco-terrorism instead. READ MORE from Scott McKay: Five Quick Things: A Bush Family Comeback? Not No. Hell No! ‘Don’t Give Up The Ship’? Seriously? The SNAP Reset, Too Long in Coming, Is a Happy Accident of the Schumer Shutdown