The double standards of partisan outrage

The outrage over the Trump-Hegseth drone strikes in the Caribbean is all thoroughly appropriate. They amount to war crimes. Full stop.

And, also….

“Thou Shalt Not Kill”

Nothing in the Constitution empowers the President to unilaterally start wars, or kill people without due process. In fact, the document might be understood as an elaborate scheme precisely to limit executive power. Few goals would make more sense for the founders of a nascent Republic shrugging off the rule of an imperial monarch.

Setting aside the Constitution to instead examine the other text which our leaders claim to follow, we find an even more direct prohibition in the Bible on what we’ve all witnessed in the Gulf of (ahem) Mexico.

As many have suggested, the Pentagon’s strikes in the Caribbean have been tantamount to murder. Several angles, however, have appeared to remain widely unnoticed in the public conversation.

They know not what they do

Beyond constitutional limits on executive power, international human rights principles—which America once fought and won a World War to initially establish—also require a charge and trial before any use of lethal force by government actors.

Requirements to respect universal human rights grow doubly important when states act across borders. The original purpose of the United Nations—which America also played a crucial role in establishing after the Second World War—was to help prevent another one from ever breaking out.

How quickly our country has forgotten lessons won at the cost of so much blood!

Race, dissent, and military ethics

Many have voiced outrage over the seemingly forced resignation of Admiral Alvin Holsey, a senior judge advocate general (JAG) who had raised thoughtful, important—and internationally mandated—concerns that lethal strikes ordered by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth may have been (and in fact absolutely were) akin to murder.

Holsey is a senior officer who chose to fall on his sword rather than follow illegal orders. His resignation reflects a unique conundrum confronting military servicemembers, who face an international legal obligation to respect human rights, on the one hand, and conflicting courts-martial if they take action on that obligation by refusing the follow the chain of command.

That conundrum should make the sacrifices of heroes like Aaron Bushnell (or, for that matter, Edward Snowden or Daniel Ellsberg) all the more compelling. As long as I’m discussing Bushnell, I should note that the Israeli genocide in Gaza that compelled him to such dramatic dissent effectively continues, despite the supposed ceasefire declared by the state and quasi-state actors involved.

Even within the U.S., the importance of Holsey’s resignation as a Black admiral cannot be overstated.

The military was among the first public institutions in the U.S. to drive racial integration in a previous era. His departure renders the military less diverse, while also reinforcing a disturbing exodus of officers & servicemembers who come from marginalized racial & ethnic backgrounds or sexual orientations.

Observed through the lens of the present administration’s attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion principles, Holsey’s departure may have helped draw attention to a human rights and constitutional crisis—at the cost of the military’s legacy as a racially integrated institution.

Why now?

The outrage over these extrajudicial assassinations is about 15 years late.

It’s also sadly convenient: the president who established the presidential power to kill without charge or trial continues to enjoy the adulation of liberals.

It was President Obama who pioneered the practice, going so far as to personally approve what his administration claimed were “targeted” drone strikes.

The evidence, however, suggested otherwise. A joint investigation by international human rights clinics at Stanford and NYU law schools established in 2012 that drone strikes authorized by President Obama killed more unintended targets than intended ones. In other words, far from being in fact targeted, Obama’s orders amounted to death sentences for people—particularly in Afghanistan—effectively chosen at random.

Particular outrage has seemed to emerge over the “double strike” pattern that killed a group of sailors in the Gulf of Mexico who reportedly survived an initial Pentagon strike. But, again, it was Obama who outrageously established that pattern.

What his administration called “double tap” strikes frequently aimed to kill first responders to people needing medical care in the wake of an initial bombing.

Those initial strikes were based on often faulty so-called “intelligence” with no process of any kind, let alone due process, to ensure accuracy in targeting decisions. They were precisely what Trump has been doing more recently, closer to home.

In 2011, I had a chance to deliver a keynote address at a law symposium just down the street from where then-Attorney General Eric Holder had defended the Obama administration’s use of arbitrary drone strikes just a few days earlier.

I am sad to observe that reason did not prevail. Many of us warned at the time that Obama—who has more recently criticized the rise of authoritarianism around the world—was creating a roadmap for it here at home.

Acronym soup is no defense

The only theoretical distinction one might offer between how Obama and Trump have used arbitrary drone strikes, aside from the location and hemisphere in which their choices have killed people chosen at random, is which agency they each deployed to commit their international crimes.

Obama reserved drone strikes for the infamously unaccountable CIA. As the world’s most prolific terror organization, it makes sense for the CIA to be the agency committing international crimes. But it doesn’t make it any more legal.

The CIA was also the agency principally responsible for torture, another bipartisan international crime for which no American decision makers have ever been held responsible. Beyond insulating Wall Street from accountability during the 2008 financial crisis and overseeing the violent suppression of the national grassroots Occupy movement that responded to it, Obama’s most dangerous legacy was his decision to keep secret the Senate investigation documenting the CIA’s criminal trail, and to look the other way rather than enforce the legal precedent established at Nuremberg.

Today, Trump & Hegseth deploy the Pentagon to commit the very same crimes.

They have rebranded it, changing its formal name from the Department of Defense into the Department of War. The overtly offensive insinuation of the Pentagon’s new moniker (also its old moniker) makes only more clear why any imagined distinction between the Pentagon and CIA is ephemeral.

From the standpoint of justice—embodied either in international law, or domestic constitutional principles—there is no distinction at all. Both agencies are American government institutions.

Their continuing crimes implicate everyone in Washington.

So what?

Observing the bipartisan and interagency roots of this constitutional crime doesn’t make it any better. It just indicates that we can’t vote our way out of this problem. It also suggests which voices might have been paying attention more than the partisan hacks who embrace authoritarianism whenever convenient to them and their party.

The bipartisan nature of these constitutional crimes also means that any impeachment targeting Hegseth would be under inclusive, because he is far from the only figure complicit in them.

As I said when I ran for Congress during Trump‘s first term (during a particularly crucial period of time before senior Democrats were finally forced by grassroots pressure to embrace parts of my platform), impeachment matters—but the grounds for impeachment are also important. Had Democrats in office followed the rest of my recommendations, Trump would have been impeached by the Senate and would never have returned to the White House this year.

But as I observed at the time, Democrats are up to their necks in the same sordid self-serving offenses, which is why Americans shouldn’t expect any better from them. It was Democrats, after all, who established the dystopian presidential powers that Trump & Hegseth now abuse closer to home.

It was also Democrats who laughed all the way to the bank for the past 40 years, filling their bulging pockets through insider trading practices that are illegal for anyone other than members of Congress.

They’re all in this together

Trump pardoning disgraced former Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar offers a perfect example of how both parties are committed to corruption no less than the other. Corruption (in the 1.0 form of filling their filthy pockets) is, in fact, the one thing that most reliably brings them together (aside from weapon sales, which conveniently reflects yet another dimension of corruption).

The political kerfluffle that has erupted between Trump and Cuellar in the time since Cuellar’s pardon would be amusing were it not so revolting. The bipartisan poster children of corruption fighting amongst each other offers a perfect illustration of everything wrong with Washington.

Paid subscribers can access a further discussion exploring how the geopolitical crisis in the Caribbean may be a distraction from another one brewing in the very same theater, a drama playing out in the relative shadows that might be driving the more visible one to which so many voices are responding...