DHS Wouldn't Take Mattis' No for an Answer on Lethal Force

[DonViejo]

The Pentagon chief said he didn’t have the authority to order troops to open fire on the caravan’s unarmed migrants. So DHS got the authority from the White House.

Spencer Ackerman, Asawin Suebsaeng

11.21.18 5:22 PM ET

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis last month objected to using military force to protect border agents on the southwest border, a knowledgeable current U.S. official and a former Defense Department official told The Daily Beast. But Mattis didn’t object on principle. When the Department of Homeland Security requested the so-called force protection mission from the Pentagon, Mattis declined because he thought he lacked the authority to do so, the current official said.

Mattis’ objection, as of late October, was the genesis of a highly controversial White House memorandum issued late Tuesday explicitly authorizing the potential use of lethal force against the unarmed civilians of the migrant caravan.

DHS wouldn’t take no for an answer, The Daily Beast has learned. Homeland Security went above Mattis’ head in order to get Donald Trump’s chief of staff to secure for them the potentially lethal military force for which immigration hardliners in the administration had clamored.

As first reported by Military Times on Wednesday, the White House has expanded the authorities permitted to the military for a border deployment widely panned as a pre-midterm election stunt. Among those authorities is “a show or use of force (including lethal force, where necessary),” Military Times quoted the memo, should Customs and Border Patrol personnel come under serious threat from an unarmed group of men, women and children.

Unusually, Military Times reported, the memo bore the signature not of President Trump, but his chief of staff, John Kelly, a retired Marine general and former secretary of Homeland Security. Kelly is not in the military chain of command. The White House has yet to release Kelly’s one-and-a-half page memo, but Newsweek published it late Wednesday.

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/dhs-wouldnt-take-mattis-no-for-an-answer-on-lethal-force?ref=home

[TomSlick]

1. Trump and Kelly can sign "stuff" until the world looks level.

The Posse Comitatus Act is the law. Every JAG in the military knows the PCA and will advise commanders that a violation is a crime.