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“The Trump administration is saying that one person — the president — now decides if the United States is going to war.”

President Donald Trump has decided that the United States is engaged in a declared state of “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations” or DTOs, according to the notice.

It describes three people killed by U.S. commandos on a boat in the Caribbean last month as “unlawful combatants,” as if they were soldiers on a battlefield.

This is a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement arrest suspected drug dealers as opposed to summarily executing them.