Donald Trump and maga Republicans created a dangerous and scary precedent for multiple unjustified mass killings

Echo Letters to the Editor published in the Los Angeles Times and in Yahoo.com: Trump isn't making life more affordable, but he is making it scarier.

After making the pathetic the lame excuse of mistakenly killing at least 175 Iranians, mostly children, with a Tomahawk missile, Donald Trump blithely responds, "Some mistakes are made" ("The Trump administration continues killing without answers," June 29). Really❓ Puh-leeze❗😡

The footage of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti's killings is already forever seared into my brain. And the cavalier attitude afterward of the trigger-happy agents who shot them signals to us they knew in advance they wouldn't face any consequences.

And we see these same familiar patterns in how this administration operates in the Caribbean, where at least 210 people 😔😨😥are now confirmed dead by air strikes because they were allegedly bringing illicit drugs to America in small motorboats, seeming hardly seaworthy enough to reach our shores.

Trump does not know how to make life more affordable in America, but he has shown a rather, uh, killer aptitude for instilling abject terror in the hearts of the citizenry as well as the rest of the world.

From Robert Archerd, in Rancho Palos Verdes, California

Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth a dual danger and maga Republicans are responsible for their illegal behaviors! Trump and Hegseth are war criminals

 You can’t hide from war crimes by calling them ‘fake news:

Since September, the United States military has been blowing up boats allegedly trafficking drugs in the Caribbean.

Echo opinion published in the Los angeles Times by Jonah Goldberg.

You can’t hide from war crimes by calling them ‘fake news’

Whether these attacks are legal is hotly debated. Congress hasn’t declared war or even authorized the use of force. The Trump administration has simply designated various — alleged — drug traffickers as “terrorists” or members of “terrorist organizations,” and then waged war upon them. The legal finding supporting all of this has not been released to the public. But, whatever the administration’s case in private is, it was sufficiently weak that the British government announced in early November it no longer would share intelligence with the U.S. relevant to the Caribbean operation over concerns about its lawfulness❗

On Friday, the Washington Post dropped a bombshell report about the first of these operations. During the strike, the Navy not only took out a suspected drug-trafficking boat — as had been reported previously — but when survivors were spotted clinging to the wreckage, the special operations commander overseeing the operation also ordered a second strike on the survivors, in order to comply with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s order to kill everyone involved.

“Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation,” the Post reported. “‘The order was to kill everybody,’ one of them said.” ⚠️

Whatever you think about the broader Caribbean operation, it is a simple fact that shooting survivors at sea is war crime, under American and international law.

In a lengthy social media post, Hegseth attacked the Washington Post’s report as an instance of the “fake news … delivering more fabricated, inflammatory and derogatory reporting.”

What Hegseth didn’t do was directly deny the report. Instead, he insisted that “we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be ‘lethal, kinetic strikes.’”

The intent to kill everybody on the first try isn’t a legal excuse to murder survivors clinging to burning wreckage.

Indeed, a much shorter follow-up post was even more of a non-denial denial: “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.” (But the convicted narco-mafia don, Juan Orlando Hernández, former president of Honduras, was convicted of large-scale drug trafficking in the United States and then, unbelievably, he was pardoned by Donald Trump. 🙄 😒💢)

With even Republican members of Congress expressing grave concerns, the official story changed from “fake news” to a more forceful denial over the weekend. Donald Trump said that Hegseth denied giving any such illegal order, “and I believe him, 100%,” adding that he “wouldn’t have wanted that. Not a second strike.”

So, now the White House confirmed there was a second strike on the survivors, and conceded that it would at least be against the president’s policy. 

Whether the White House will concede the strike was unlawful remains to be seen. ("It’s important to understand that all the targeted vessels attacked by the U.S. were operating in international waters and are covered by international law. Both human rights groups and international law experts have expressed serious concern about the ethical and legal issues associated with the attacks which international law experts have characterized as “extrajudicial executions.”- Reported in the Virginian Pilot newspaper by Chris Kelley Cimko)

But, what we do know is that someone gave an order for a second strike. And if it wasn’t Hegseth, whoever that person was could be looking at a court-martial — or given who the commander-in-chief is, a pardon.

But I don’t want to get ahead of the news. 

Instead, I’ll make a few points.

First, a minor gripe: This administration and its defenders need to be more selective in their use of the term “fake news.” I have no problem calling a false story “fake news.” But if you know that a story isn’t false, calling it “fake news” just sets you up to look like even more of a liar and hypocrite down the road when you end up admitting the truth and defending actions you once pretended were slanderous.

More importantly, the whole Caribbean strategy is constitutionally and legally dubious. As a matter of foreign policy, it looks more and more like a pretext for some kind of regime change gambit in Venezuela. If the administration has evidence that justifies its actions, it should reveal it. I understand arguments for secrecy, but if they couldn’t convince the British, through classified channels, of the operation’s legality, it’s probably because the case is unconvincing.

Even more important: Illegal orders, particularly orders to in effect murder people, cannot be justified. When a half-dozen Democratic members of Congress released a video saying that the military shouldn’t follow “illegal orders,” the president and many of his defenders became hysterical. 

Donald Trump lamented that America has become so “soft” that such “seditious behavior” isn’t punished by death anymore.

More sober critics of the Democrats complained that the video sowed confusion in the ranks and hurt morale. I’m somewhat sympathetic to that argument. But you know what else sows confusion and hurts morale❓ Actual illegal orders.

X: @JonahDispatch

Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth giving American military illegal orders in violation of the Defense Department's policy to save shipwrecked survivors

Echo opinion published in the Virginian Pilot, newpaper in Norfolk Virginia written by Jon Duffy*.

Pege Hegseth is giving illegal orders to American military in violaion of the Pentagon's own policies. 

New reporting from the Washington Post described how the U.S. forces conducting counter-drug operations in the Caribbean fired second missiles at people who survived an initial strike and were left swimming in the water. 

This illegal war crime marks a stark departure from long-standing U.S. military practice and from the most basic prohibitions in the laws of war.

If the United States is firing second missiles at survivors of its own strikes, we are no longer debating policy. 

Rather, we are describing a nation committing the very acts it once prosecuted others for. We have become what we once condemned.

There is a rule every professional military knows it cannot break: You do not kill people who can no longer fight. You don’t do it because the moment you do, you are no longer engaged in war. You are no longer fighting an enemy. You are killing for the state.

For weeks, the country has argued over legal memos, theories of presidential authority and the semantics of “armed conflict.” All of that obscures a simpler truth. Killing survivors is not a legal gray area, a battlefield innovation or a partisan dispute. It is a war crime. Full stop❗

The Geneva Conventions forbids violence against anyone “placed hors de combat,” or “out of the fight.” 

As a matter of fact, the Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual restates this without qualification. Section 18.3.2.1 even states, “For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.” Every American service member learns it before deploying. Killing people who are swimming for their lives is not a “disputed framework.” It is the abandonment of law.

In three decades of service, I watched how the institution quietly conditions people for moments like this — not through malice, but through the steady rewarding of compliance and the quiet sidelining of candor. By the time a real moral test arrives, most of the system has already learned that silence is the safest choice.

We know that a senior lawyer at U.S. Southern Command raised legal concerns and was sidelined from the process. 

Silencing a dissenting voice is not the act of a confident military. We know the SOUTHCOM commander, Admiral Alvin Holsey, abruptly announced his retirement amid these operations. The effect was unmistakable: The last check on illegality disappeared, and the killing continued.

A second missile does not fire itself. Killing survivors requires the participation or assent of entire layers of command: intelligence analysts, targeteers, pilots, strike cell leads, watch officers, military lawyers, commanders, post-strike assessors. This was not a lone aviator making a catastrophic judgment. This was institutional, and the institution committed a crime.

The cost of this atrocity is suffered by those least empowered to stop it. Young Americans — some barely old enough to drink — will carry this for the rest of their lives. 

Unfortunately, some will rationalize it. Some will break under it. 

A nation that orders its warriors to kill the helpless forfeits the moral standing to ask anything further of them.

Firing on the defenseless is not a gray area or “irregular warfare.” Our uniforms may be cleaner, the legal memos more elaborate, the language more sanitized — but the act is the same. These are war crimes — ordered from the very top of the chain of command. And the consequence is unmistakable: the collapse of the moral credibility of American power.

There must be investigations. There must be consequences — reaching as far up the chain of command as the facts demand. A military that kills the helpless is not operating in a fog of war. It has crossed the final boundary separating a professional force from a system designed to execute, not to think.

A nation that orders its service members to kill the defenseless is not being protected by its military. It is morally injuring its warriors, dishonoring the institution they serve and disfiguring itself.

And a nation that tolerates this — without outrage, without accountability, without demanding that it stop immediately — can make no claim to exceptionalism. It has surrendered its soul.

*Jon Duffy is a retired Navy captain. His active duty career included command at sea and national security roles. He writes about leadership and democracy for the Los Angeles Times.

Pete Hegseth is responsible for the murder of Venezualan survivors of the US ordered boat attack. He must be fired

Before he was secretary of defense — Pete Hegseth got it right.
Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Joan Vennochi

This isn’t the fog of war. It’s the fog of panic.

“There have to be consequences for abject war crimes,” Hegseth said in a video clip, during a talk he gave in 2016, that has resurfaced and is making the rounds on news stations.

“If you’re doing something that is just completely unlawful and ruthless, then there is a consequence for that. That’s why the military said it won’t follow unlawful orders from their commander in chief. There’s a standard, there’s an ethos. There’s a belief that we are above what so many things that our enemies or others would do.”

Now that Hegseth is facing questions about a possible war crime that occurred on his watch and under his command, he has jettisoned the ethos “that we are above what … others would do.” He pounced on six Democrats who posted a video saying that service members did not have to carry out illegal orders handed down by their commander-in-chief and referred to what was essentially a version of his own remarks from 2016 as “despicable, reckless, and false.” Donald Trump accused the lawmakers of “seditious behavior” and the Pentagon said it was launching an investigation into one of those Democrats, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy captain.

In his job as defense secretary, Hegseth has also spent a lot of time talking about the “warrior ethos.” But as this controversy shows, he is far from a stand-up warrior, despite doing physical training with troops.

Rather than take ownership for the consequences of his order to strike a boat in the Caribbean on September 2, that he said was carrying drugs, and to kill everyone on it, as The Washington Post first reported, he is shifting accountability to an underling. Admiral Frank M. Bradley, commander of US Special Operations Command, has been identified as the official who made the decision for a follow-up strike that killed two survivors of the initial blast, and Bradley will be answering questions about it during a closed-door session with lawmakers.

The day after that September 2, operation, Hegseth told “(Fake❗)Fox & Friends,” “I watched it live.”  But now, he is saying he watched only the first strike live. At Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting, he said he watched the beginning of the strike before he “moved on” to his next meeting.

When he was asked if he saw any survivors after the first strike, Hegseth said, “I did not personally see survivors.”

Bradley, he said, authorized both strikes. “He sunk the boat, sunk the boat and eliminated the threat, and it was the right call.” Pressed for more information, Hegseth said, “This is called the fog of war.”

No, this is called the fog of panic and the ethos of self-preservation, no matter what the cost to others.

To put this debacle in context, it’s hard to beat this headline over George F. Will’s column in The Washington Post: “A sickening moral slum of an administration.” Or, Will’s opening paragraph: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.”

Trump and Hegseth have invented a war, one they say gives them license to blow up boats suspected of drug smuggling, without the need to show proof or evidence or to even identify the suspects. 

This invented war has so far killed more than 80 people, a tally that the Trump administration has generally defended. Then came the report about the second September 2, strike to kill those two survivors, what military and legal experts say is a violation of international law.

Hegseth’s reaction shows that he knows that, too, and so does Donald Trump.

Since the story broke, about the second strike to take out the survivors, Trump has been hedging about Hegseth. As reported by The New York Times, on Sunday, aboard Air Force One, he said, “Pete said he did not order the death of those two men.” He added, “I believe him, 100 percent.” But he also said, “I wouldn’t have wanted that. Not a second strike.”

At the Cabinet meeting, Trump again distanced himself from the second strike, saying he didn’t know about it when it happened. 

Trump also said the United States is “going to start doing those strikes on land,” noting that “the land is much easier.”🙄❓

Meanwhile, as he pursues that questionable strategy against drug trafficking, Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who had been sentenced to 45 years in prison for his role in a conspiracy to traffic cocaine into the United States.

Hypocrisy, not to mention immorality, is the hallmark of the Trump administration. Even so, moving past the controversy over the strike that killed those two survivors on September 2, won’t be easy.

As Hegseth said back in 2016, “There have to be consequences for abject war crimes.”

But Hegseth, a champion of the warrior ethos, does not want to be the warrior who faces those consequences.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must stop the failures in the unpopular Trumpzi cruelty agenda

Editorial: Homicide on the high seas published in The Times Union newspaper in New York state.

Donald Trump is seriously mentally ill.  

"Trump clearly has his eye on projecting power". 

He is is ordering extra-judicial killings of suspected drug dealers; Congress needs to make clear that he lacks the power to declare war.

Donald Trump is sending U.S. military forces into the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean to blow up small boats suspected, without evidence, of transporting drugs.

And, in a style entirely befitting an administration run by a former reality show star and a military led by a preening ex-Fox (Fake❗) News personality, the Trump administration released video of the obliteration of the small craft for viewers to enjoy or recoil from, depending on one’s thirst for blood and stomach for state-sanctioned homicide.

Donald Trump claims his authority allows him to declare a state of armed conflict with drug cartels, which he designated as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” in an executive order on his first day in office and has since expanded. He says these groups “present an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”

Rather than treat drug trafficking as an international criminal matter and work cooperatively with foreign governments to interdict traffic outside the U.S., Donald Trump is deploying the military to go after suspected traffickers in international waters, and possibly even in other nations’ territorial waters. More than 50 people have been murdered in such strikes so far — for allegedly committing a crime that is not a death-penalty-eligible offense.

The strategy drew condemnation from Columbian President Gustavo Petro after the death of a man he said was a lifelong fisherman on a boat that was adrift. Mr. Petro called it murder; rather than offer evidence to defend his actions, Donald. Trump said he would cut U.S. assistance to and impose new tariffs on Columbia.

U.S. officials have presented no substantial proof to the public that the people being killed are drug traffickers. We’re to take the word of an administration that’s notoriously lax with facts as it cites “intelligence.”

The broader picture here can’t be ignored. Donald Trump has deployed warships, fighter jets and troops to the Caribbean as he tries to force out Venezuela’s president, Nicholas Maduro. 

In fact, Donald Trump is actually planning a 💲20 billion bailout for Argentina — contingent on his favored political candidates remaining in power. To the north, Mr. Trump has been hostile to Canada and talked about annexing Greenland.

Donald Trump clearly has his eye on projecting (illegal❗) power — that morally neutral commodity — throughout the Western hemisphere, regardless of the alliances and friendships it risks. He's enabled by an atmosphere of fear and intimidation in a government (and more specifically a military establishment) that the president and his lieutenants have been purging of career lawyers, inspectors general and other officials and watchdogs who would normally warn against potentially illegal actions.

Enablers of evil Donald Trump also includes a Congress controlled by Trump’s party that has been timid when it comes to even questioning his violations of laws such the Constitution's vesting the power to declare war with Congress, not with the president.

But, Congressional Republicans seem as unbothered with Donald Trump’s violation of that document, because he is eager to trample it. They had best remind him about who declares war in this republic — and pronto, ❗ before he starts a much bigger one than the military equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.

#ImpeachTrumpAgain #Impeach25thAmendment NOW❗