William Barr, Donald Trump's nominee for attorney general, believes the president has vast, unilateral authority to protect national security, which he says is threatened by the distribution of psychoactive substances the government has decreed Americans should not want.
Those positions are a dangerous combination that is apt to encourage the worst instincts of a president who portrays himself as tough on crime, promises to stop the flow of illegal drugs, and revels in pointless military displays. With Barr as attorney general and Trump as president, we may see an increasingly literal war on drugs in which aggression masquerades as self-defense.
The template for that war is the 1989 invasion of Panama, in which U.S. troops deposed the dictator Manuel Noriega, who had been indicted by federal grand juries on money laundering and drug trafficking charges, and installed a new government. Barr, who at the time was in charge of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, describes himself as "a big supporter" of the operation, saying his advice to President George H.W. Bush was to "just go out there and do what you have to do."
The legal rationale for the invasion was widely criticized. As Columbia law professor Louis Henkin observed in 1991, "some of the alleged motives and purposes are suspect," while "the arguments justifying the invasion under international law are not persuasive and, in some respects, border on the frivolous."
In Barr's view, however, sending American soldiers to "arrest" Noriega--notwithstanding the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits using the military for law enforcement without congressional approval--was "a justifiable defensive act by the United States." Barr, who served as attorney general for about a year at the end of the first Bush administration, likens drug trafficking to terrorism, saying it is "really a national security issue."
