Hegseth Ordered ‘No Quarter’ for Drug Boats
A clear violation of the laws of war. But do they apply?
WaPo (“Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all“):
The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers. Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.
The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.
Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.
[…]
The elite counterterror group SEAL Team 6 led the attack, according to four people with direct knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing sensitive operations.
The commander overseeing the operation from Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, told people on the secure conference call that the survivors were still legitimate targets because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo, according to two people. He ordered the second strike to fulfill Hegseth’s directive that everyone must be killed.
[…]
In two social media posts Friday, after the publication of this report, Hegseth appeared to acknowledge the decision, writing, “these highly effective strikes are designed to be ‘lethal, kinetic strikes,’” and defended the operations as “lawful under both U.S. and international law.”
In a separate post on X from his personal account, he wrote: “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”
Late Friday, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) and Sen. Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island), respectively the chairman and senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, issued a statement about the “recent news reports — and the Department of Defense’s initial response — regarding alleged follow-on strikes on suspected narcotics vessels,” saying that they intend to conduct “vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”
[…]
In briefing materials provided to the White House, JSOC reported that the “double-tap,” or follow-on strike, was intended to sink the boat and remove a navigation hazard to other vessels — not to kill survivors, according to another person who saw the report.
A similar explanation was given to lawmakers in two closed-door briefings, according to two congressional aides. That explanation has prompted frustration among some members of Congress who say they believe the Pentagon was deceptive in its description of events, the aides said.
“The idea that wreckage from one small boat in a vast ocean is a hazard to marine traffic is patently absurd, and killing survivors is blatantly illegal,” said Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Massachusetts), a Marine Corps veteran and vocal Trump critic who received a classified briefing from Pentagon officials on the strikes in late October with other members of the House Armed Services Committee. “Mark my words: It may take some time, but Americans will be prosecuted for this, either as a war crime or outright murder.”
While I have substantial training in the laws of armed conflict, I’m not an expert in the field. Still, I’m quite uneasy about this.
Were those targeted enemy soldiers, they would clearly have been “hors de combat” under the provisions of the Geneva Conventions; American forces would have been required to allow them to surrender and be taken prisoner. The JSOC commander and those who carried out the order would be subject to prosecution as war criminals.
Because the administration has declared these people “narco-terrorists,” though, it may not be so cut and dried. American forces carried out a lot of operations during the so-called War on Terror where those declared enemy combatants had no ability to surrender.
One of the smartest folks on these issues, Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel for several months during the heyday of GWOT before resigning in protest, is quite convinced that this was “A Dishonorable Strike.”
One can imagine stretching Article II of the Constitution to authorize the U.S. drug boat campaign. The wildly overbroad Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) precedents, as I have written before, provide “no meaningful legal check on the president.” And there are dim historical precedents one could cite. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. noted in The Imperial Presidency that in the 19th century presidents unilaterally engaged in “[m]ilitary action against Indians—stateless and lawless by American definition—pirates, slave traders, smugglers, cattle rustlers, frontier ruffians [and] foreign brigands.”
One might also, possibly, stretch the laws of war to say that attacks on the drug boats are part of a “non-international armed conflict,” as OLC has reportedly concluded. This line of argument likely draws on a super-broad conception of the threat posed by the alleged drug runners as well as the expansive U.S. post-9/11 practice of treating as targetable (i) dangerous non-state actor terrorists off the battlefield; (ii) those who merely “substantially support” the groups with whom one is in an armed conflict; and (iii) activities that provide economic support to the war effort, such as Taliban drug labs or ISIS oil trucks. I don’t think this argument comes close to working without deferential reliance on a bad faith finding by the president about the non-international armed conflict and much greater stretches of precedent than the United States previously indulged after 9/11. Still, the unconvincing argument is conceivable.
But there can be no conceivable legal justification for what the Washington Post reported earlier today: That U.S. Special Operations Forces killed the survivors of a first strike on a drug boat off the coast of Trinidad who, in the Post’s words, “were clinging to the smoldering wreck.”
[…]
This is an old principle of the laws of war. The Hague Regulations of 1907 state that “it is especially forbidden . . . [t]o declare that no quarter will be given.” The 1863 Lieber Code—the famous U.S. government rules governing military conduct during the Civil War—provides: “Whoever intentionally inflicts additional wounds on an enemy already wholly disabled, or kills such an enemy, or who orders or encourages soldiers to do so, shall suffer death, if duly convicted, whether he belongs to the Army of the United States, or is an enemy captured after having committed his misdeed.” And the currently governing DOD Manual in Section 5.9 states clearly that persons “placed hors de combat may not be made the object of attack.” The Manual defines “hors de combat” to include “persons . . . otherwise incapacitated by . . . shipwreck.”
[…]
According to the Post, Bradley at some point argued that “the survivors were still legitimate targets because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo.” That is wrong. The theoretical possibility of calling other traffickers for help is not the test. The incapacitated survivors simply may not be targeted unless, as Section 5.9 of the Manual says, they affirmatively committed a “hostile act” or “attempt[ed] to escape.” If the Post’s facts are in the vicinity of the truth, that could not have happened.
Again, Goldsmith is a world-leading expert of these matters and I am not. But successive administrations took the position during GWOT that the laws of war did not fully apply to terrorists and other unlawful combatants because they were neither state actors nor operating as an organized military force (no flags, identifying uniforms, etc.). That was always legally dubious, even though it made some practical sense.
Further, an OLC opinion carries enormous weight. As Goldsmith himself has noted over and over—to his frustration and consternation—their “power to interpret the law is the power to bestow on government officials what is effectively an advance pardon for actions taken at the edges of vague criminal statutes.” So, even if Congress were suddenly to grow a backbone, those who carried out these orders are unlikely to be prosecuted, much less convicted.
That, of course, does not render dishonorable actions honorable.
One wonders whether the Democrats who reminded the Armed Forces that they have a duty to disobey illegal orders were thinking of this case when they spoke up.
War criminal
@Moosebreath:
Given their committee assignments, I think it’s highly likely that at least some of them had awareness of this issue.
I continue to believe that movies/television shows have warped American sensibilities on the appropriate use of force, and that this administration intuitively knows this, and what they can get away with in the court of public opinion.
These actions are so very clearly wrong and immoral, but I suspect there won’t be much outcry.
You know, deep down, that right after giving the order and watching these people be murdered little Petey went into his private make-up studio and jerked off.
These people are the worst that America has to offer.
And nothing will happen to them.
This is genuinely sad. The administration makes up a random, legally meaningless term and you immediately fall for it.
Drug traffickers are not terrorists. They do not seek to overthrow or render powerless the US government through violent means. It’s as plain as day that there are no combatants here.
The initial attack was already straight-up murder. The second attack was murder even if the laws of armed conflict had applied (which they clearly didn’t).
And it’s people like you – who refuse to recognize the bleeding obvious and who pretend that there might a debate to had about what is right in front of their noses – who provide the cover that allows the Trump regime to get away with this.
And, of course, quite a few service members are now guilty of murder, too.
If nothing changes, that stain will only spread.
What @drj: said. If this was war, it would be a war crime. But it clearly isn’t war, so it’s just murder.
Why? Serious question, why? It’s common practice in corporate America to get an opinion from your own counsel that what you’re doing is legal. It doesn’t make it legal, but may protect against triple jeopardy for knowingly breaking the law. DOJ does the same thing for the president. DOJ famously offered an opinion DOJ couldn’t prosecute a sitting president. It was reported the author asked the then AG which way he wanted it. Why TF is a DOJ opinion treated like it’s the law? Although with Roberts as the decider, it makes little difference.
@drj:
I’m not “fall[ing] for it.” Rather, because OLC has issued that ruling, it gives officials legal cover. OLC rulings are considered binding as to what constitutes “legal” for executive branch personnel. Further, as noted in the OP, there is substantial precedent from the GWOT era, including under the Obama administration, that LOAC doesn’t fully apply to those the administration deems terrorists.
That was also true of the Taliban and post-Saddam Iraqi insurgents.
@gVOR10:
Because the law is incredibly complex and we don’t want non-lawyers down the chain of command to have to make these distinctions for themselves. As with Presidents, we’ve built norms around the assumption that those who occupy these posts would be honorable.
@James Joyner:
That seems a silly thing to have done. Nixon, Bush/Cheney, Trump.
While committing war crimes against imagined narco-terrorists, Fatso is pardoning former Honduran President Hernandez for his conviction of being a violent, multi-ton drug trafficker.
So these war crimes are not about drugs or terrorism. My guess, based on history, is that money is changing hands.
@gVOR10:
From a 2008 Senate report for a bill (that never passed) seeking to make the process more transparent.
@James Joyner:
You are so, so incredibly wrong as to what are the obligations of military personnel under the Law of Armed Conflict:
And:
First, the Law of Armed Conflict is a part of international law, which, by definition, trumps national law. This was rather famously established at the Nuremberg Trials.
Second, OLC rulings are not even national law. These rulings are no more than guidance as to how national (and international) law should be interpreted in specific conditions.
Third, while members of the armed services, under normal circumstances, should be able to trust that OLC rulings are in accordance with both applicable domestic and international law, that does NOT remove their duty to disobey blatantly illegal orders. Befehl ist Befehl is no legal defense.
Fourth, Hegseth’s orders are without any doubt blatantly illegal. While lower ranking service members should not necessarily have to question whether an order to attack is legal (although the higher ranking ones certainly should), even a mere private must know, without any reservation whatsoever, that attempting to kill an enemy combatant who is hors de combat is a war crime.
Lastly, even apart from the intricacies of the Law of Armed Conflict (which aren’t even that intricate), it’s basic civics that the Executive (in this case the OLC) cannot make or amend laws, or make any kind of rules that trump the laws.
Officers who swear oaths to uphold the Constitution should know this.
Yeah, the next corrupt dictatorship that takes responsibility for its own policy misdeeds and holds those responsible to account will be the first.
@drj: See my comment right before yours.
@drj: Members of the military are required by policy and training to decline unlawful orders. If the order originated at the highest levels of government, realistically, their options are very limited. Hence, one assumes, Admiral Holsey’s early retirement.
@drj: To be clear, I join your moral outrage about all of this.
However, you are missing James’ core point. The fact that something may, in fact, be notionally “illegal” (as well as blatantly and obviously immoral) is not the same thing as “will lead to a prosecution, let alone a conviction.”
It is one thing to colloquially recognize something as illegal or even be able to point to the law one thinks is broken. It is another for it to actually be a situation in which a prosecution is likely (or even possible).
The fact that OLC decisions convey the protection that they do means that the degree to which any actual legal institution (i.e., a court of law) would recognize these acts as illegal is slim (if not none).
It is like the fact that many actions by police strike me, at least notionally, as illegal, but then the doctrine of qualified immunity (not to mention the social leeway we afford to police) means convictions tend not to happen.
In other words, something isn’t actually “illegal” until there is a conviction, and there are a lot of things that make the pursuit of a prosecution, let alone an actual conviction, impossible.
You are not mad as James; you are mad as James for pointing out the unfortunate way things actually work.
Like pretend president, like pretend secretary of “war.”
Let me be 100% perfectly celar: no one can close the airspace of another country.
The one exception is to run combat air patrols with armed fighters willing and able to shoot down any aircraft that does not divert from Venezuela’s airspace, and also any aircraft taking off in Venezuelan territory. Both such things are very likely illegal, to boot.
@James Joyner:
That comment changes nothing.
(Hint: your Senate report doesn’t say that OLC opinions are law, it says that OLC opinions are “law,” i.e., that such opinions often function as law without actually being one. Those quotation marks are there for a reason.)
More importantly, you really don’t seem to grasp that an officer’s loyalty is to the Constitution, not to the Executive. Or perhaps you don’t see the difference between the two, or maybe you don’t understand that Executive and Constitution can be in conflict with another.
Either way, it’s not a good look.
@drj:
You seem to be thinking that he is endorsing reality rather than simply describing it.
@Steven L. Taylor:
If so, James should have been clearer.
To give but just one example:
I could see your point if James had asked whether these laws would be applied by the government – either retroactively or going forward. But to question whether these laws applied during the attack is utter nonsense. (Because of course they did.)
@drj:
You are missing the point. The OLC decisions, combined with the fuzziness created by a variety of policies about non-combatant “terrorists,” create a legal morass that makes it difficult to apply the laws of war to what is a non-war situation.
He isn’t justifying; he is explaining.
I get the general outrage because all of this is outrageous, but often readers are so primed to express the understandable outrage that they read posts like this as being a defense when that is not the case. (I write from experience.)
If we can kill arbitrarily designated bad guys on the seas and in Venezuela, we should definitely kill them inside our country. I’m sure that hit squads comprised of sworn police officers could be constituted to blast away the bad guys on our streets.
@drj: As @Steven L. Taylor notes, I’m describing what I see as the reality of the situation. Namely that 1) OLC opinions have long been understood as binding on Executive Branch employees. See, for example, Mueller’s view that a setting President was immune from prosecution. and 2) GWOT has created a plethora of precedents where we have simply viewed LOAC particulars as inapplicable against those we deem terrorists or otherwise unlawful combatants. They both seem absurd to me with drug boats presenting next to no danger, but I’m confident nobody will be brought up on charges here.
Yes, I’m aware of the Nuremberg precedents. But we’re not talking anything like the level of violations committed by the Nazis. And, of course, they were only prosecuted because they surrendered unconditionally and were under Allied occupation.
Honestly, the more interesting case would be a counterfactual: What if the JSOC commander had declared the order manifestly illegal and refused? Would he have been brought up on charges? And would he have prevailed? Despite our rote training that officers are obligated to disobey unlawful orders, the track record of their judgment being allowed to override that of their civilian masters is mixed, at best.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Regarding the back and forth with @drj:
…this is why it is important to emphasize the following from the cited article and get mad at the right people for the right reasons:
As citizens are duty is to return Democrats to power, then call vociferously for prosecutions. There’s no way the country can restore law & order without Trump officials from the Cabinet level being put behind bars. Between actions in the Caribbean and the streets of Chicago, there are ample prosecutorial targets.
The unfortunate way the law actually works for the powerful and protected remains such until the people demand it work differently. Promote and defend the work of Rep. Moulton and the Illegal Orders 6.
@James Joyner:
I see where you are coming from, James, on the difference between what should happen and what likely will happen in these matters.
But, OMG, if Nazi level atrocities and foreign occupation are the bar we have to clear to see some justice brought to bear on Trumpian lawlessness, we are truly doomed as a country.
@Steven L. Taylor:
You are making this needlessly complicated. Once the military starts shooting, the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) applies whether or not the shooting was justified in the first place.
And LOAC is also part of domestic law because Congress ratified the The Hague and Geneva Conventions.
After all, since when can a part of the Executive decide to set aside laws adopted by Congress?
Hence, LOAC applies regardless of what OLC thinks. This is simply not something for the US government to decide – just as individual citizens cannot decide whether any properly adopted federal or state law applies to them.
And when it comes to orders so blatantly illegal as those issued by Hegseth, OLC opinions may protect against domestic prosecution, but not against being a criminal and the risk of prosecution abroad.
In any case, there is no “legal morass” or any other kind of legal ambiguity, just a rogue, criminal Executive and those in the armed forces who choose to obey clearly and unmistakably illegal orders.
@James Joyner:
You should be thoroughly ashamed of this:
And again missing the point with this:
Whether that commander would have prevailed or not during a US court martial is irrelevant to the question whether he violated both international and (because of Congress’ adoption of the Geneva Conventions) domestic law.
After all, war crimes are now official policy.
@drj:
James is not arguing with you; he’s telling you how it is.
Law is language. Language is malleable. Law is malleable. This is why a legislature that functions properly is necessary.
Think of it like a computer program. They get patched not just to fix bugs that interfere with its purpose, but to close security vulnerabilities that can only be found once it is released into the wild and scrutinized by motivated actors with nefarious intentions. No team of programmers can discover or predict every possible vector of attack. So they issue patches as vulnerabilities are discovered.
Likewise, Congress can write and pass laws, but they cannot predict every possible unintended consequence or clever wordplay that could be used to create a loophole. A Congress committed to governance would be amending legislation like a software company issues patches.
The better analogy wrt to OLC is open source software. Sometimes, when the governing structure of a big open source project makes a decision on a controversial issue, some of the community members who maintain the project fork the project.
The key difference is that we only have one executive branch—no way to fork it. In that case, Congress must act. But they don’t for various reasons.
@drj:
No, I am not making it complicated; it is complicated.
You want it to be simple. I get that. But the law is not self-executing.
Here is your error. The US government actually does get to decide (where do you think law enforcement and the courts reside?). This is radically different than an individual’s relationship with the law.
This reminds me of Locke noting that a person should not be the judge in their own trial (which is what leads to injustice in the state of nature). Broadly speaking, the government is its own judge here, and hence the problem.
Again, you are mad at the people telling you what reality is when you should be mad at reality.
@Kurtz:
Indeed.
@drj:
Oh, ffs. Yes, in an ideal world, that’s how it would work. Look around. We don’t live in an ideal world.
Guess what, non-idealized worlds are complicated. Manifesting simplicity doesn’t change a thing.
You’re trying to apply the ideal gas law at room temperature and wondering why the people applying the van der Waal equation are ignoring you smacking the table and screaming about PV=nrt.
@Slugger: I think that the military will be far more likely to refuse illegal orders to fire on people inside this country than outside.
Refusing orders is likely to be a career ending offense in the best of circumstances, and this administration is going to try to make an example of anyone who does so. But, even just knowing that it’s a career ending offense —even if they’re in the right — it gives the troops reason to latch onto any reason to follow the orders.
And is a few narco-terrorists get killed the wrong way a big enough reason to make that stand? People will believe a lot of things in order to not have to do something hard and lifechanging.
Even domestically, I think there will be some who follow orders to fire on the islamo-fascist narco-terrorist Antifa, but that it will create enough public outrage that the military starts standing down.
And then there are the ones who just want to open fire on their fellow Americans.
The military refusing illegal orders isn’t some nice, neat, well-orchestrated check on executive overreach. It will be a messy clusterfuck, with scattered tragedies, outrages, treason, “treason,” and heroism.
(Spent a few moments changing “will” to “would” and then back… I think we’re going to get there, it will be a messy clusterfuck…)
@Steven L. Taylor:
Obviously not.
But my point that regardless the law is. Perhaps not exactly alike for everyone who has to contend with it, but real and meaningful within not excessively broad parameters.*
Because if not, what’s even the point of an oath to uphold the law?
If not, how can there even be a social contract?
* Even apart from the point that we’re specifically talking about international law of which the US government is not the sole arbiter.
I think you’re being too charitable to James. YMMV.
@gVOR10:
And has that retirement accomplished anything other than giving one Admiral an inflated sense of self-worth (assuming the retirement was related at all)?
Or did it just mean that Halsey was replaced by someone who will not only follow these illegal orders but other, worse illegal orders?
I would not be surprised to learn that there are a number of senior military leaders who are telling themselves that they are “keeping their powder dry” and not actively opposing the administration until it will be effective.
And for some of them, it might actually be true, and not just abject cowardice!
It’s a complicated political calculation.
When Hegseth had his big get together for the Department of War where he told everyone that if they weren’t on board they should resign, the right thing for anyone there who wasn’t on board with this administration’s illegal adventures was obviously to just sit on their hands, and start to contemplate their red lines.
I’m not surprised that a few “narco-terrorists” on the high seas isn’t crossing red lines.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if the administration was hoping that it would, and that they could shake out a few who won’t follow far worse orders in the future.
We’re past the point where the law is predictive, and into the area where it’s largely office politics.
@Kurtz:
So, naturally, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must?
Maybe the willingness to be so cynical about this is what helped keep Trump out of jail. IMO, having a “smart, savvy” lack of faith in the rule of law is about halfway toward accepting that 1/6 had zero consequences.
@drj:
If I drive 65 in a 40, I have broken the law. But I do not automatically get a ticket.
There is a profound difference between committing an act that violates what is written in the law and actually being prosecuted and convicted.
See also “unconstitutional” acts.
@drj:
None of this is about cynicism. Unless trying to explain to you why sometimes a virus leads to an infection and sometimes it doesn’t is cynicism.
@drj:
Sigh.
This is an unfair statement.
Is it a “smart, savvy” lack of faith in the rule of law to note that it is illegal not to pay your bills as contracted, but that if you are rich enough, you can deploy lawyers to get away with it nonetheless?
Or that, as a matter of fact, a person can be innocent but will take a plea deal because they cannot afford the cost of a trial, nor the risk of an unjust outcome?
Or that a person will sometimes pay a settlement in a lawsuit where they are clearly in the right because the cost of going to trial to prove that fact would cost far more than the settlement?
I would love for justice and morality to be the preeminent driving force of our legal system, but it isn’t.
Throw in government action, especially those linked to foreign affairs and international actions, and it gets even more complicated.
Note that in these cases the wounded parties are typically nameless, faceless foreign actors who often have no standing/capacity to bring a case, and the party inflicting the damage is the US government, which controls law enforcement and prosecution–all in an area wherein the courts and the legislature have long, long deferred to the executive.
If you would like the system to change (and goodness knows I have been a reform advocate), confronting reality is rather central.
Again: you are railing not against us, but against reality.
@drj:
You are mistaking observation for endorsement. Not a single one of us interacting with you has expressed satisfaction with this state of affairs.
Yes, the law is. Yes, international treaties to which the US has acceded are the law of the land. But absent the will and the means to enforce a law, mere existence is a wash.
I don’t expect that you know off the top of your head what I think about everything. But I have been part of this community for a long time. And I’ve written many comments about the rule of law, the nature of language, and the tension that results from exposing every aspect of our lives, including our rights, to laissez faire economics.
So, no, your characterization of my position is incorrect. The only way to fix a flaw is to study the flaw.
FYI: I explained a while back that, for me, the most frustrating thing about Trump and MAGA is that I feel compelled to defend a bunch of systems that contain critical flaws.
If I say or do nothing, I get criticized. If I say or do something that defends a flawed system, then I get criticized for endorsing those flaws. And people wonder why so many others refuse to play a game they lose even if they win.
Stephan Miller came pretty close to labeling Democrats domestic terrorists awhile ago. I wonder if the OLC is willing to define the word. As of now it appears it can be applied to any criminal act. If words have no meaning anymore, how do we write laws?
Related article:
https://charliesykes.substack.com/p/the-order-was-to-kill-everybody
Related article:
https://charliesykes.substack.com/p/the-order-was-to-kill-everybody
@dazedandconfused:
Yeah, he labeled them a “domestic extremist organization” in an interview with Hannity, IIRC.
He also posted this to X:
Nitter link.
The application of the word terrorism opens the door to using terror statutes that erode Constitutional protections.
Yeah, words have meaning, but those meanings are unstable. I was thinking of the dictionary the other day. The practical everyday use of a dictionary is to determine the meaning of a word. But the key point is that dictionaries define words by their common usage.
In a game of Scrabble, it functions as an authority. But treating a dictionary as a prescriptive authority in other contexts is tricky, because compiling a dictionary is an inherently descriptive action. In that way, it is similar to a map—it cannot possibly contain every valid use of every word just as a map cannot capture every detail of a territory without being the size of the territory.
Courts use dictionaries, the text of the statute(s) under consideration, and, perhaps, the legislative debate over the statute. Well written legislation provides definitions for keywords. Of course, language is recursive and meaning is unstable, so even if a legislative text defines a set of terms, the definition of each term can be disputed. Or: turtles all the way down.
The use of the words terrorism and treason have been thrown around in RW media and among rank and file RWers for decades. They are often used to label anodyne actions, well accepted practices of governance, and the actions of officials during events like Benghazi. Hell, Anne Coulter wrote a book about Democrats titled Treason.
Here is another post, this one from Steven Cheung, quote-tweeting Jane Mayer:
Nitter link
At least one of the replies on this second thread accuses Mayer of treason. The hinges of these people were blown off long ago by the likes of Limbaugh and Tucker. Decades ago, it was JBS, Reader’s Digest, and McCarthy. Before that, trade groups like NAM. The most consistent tactic has playing with language—exploring the instability of meaning.
In fact, if you take a look at the biography of Stephen Miller, you will find an anecdote that his close friend in middle school was a Latino boy. At some point during their high school years, Miller told him one summer that they could no longer be friends, because of the racial difference.
What did Stephen do in his formative years? Listen to, frequently call into, and eventually become a guest on RW talk radio. Ironically, his most frequent interaction appears to be with The Larry Elder Show.
Helpful, because it proves Miller is not racist, just a defender of the rule of law and American culture. /s
@drj: “Maybe the willingness to be so cynical about this is what helped keep Trump out of jail.”
Actually, it was the Supreme Court’s willingness to be so cynical about this is what helped keep Trump out of jail.
Nothing said by anyone here is going to fix that.
@Kurtz:
Ol’ Doc Joyner’s writing has often had a dry, carefully not-judging tone that can be (mis)read as endorsement.
I assume that the tone is the result of his job, and taking a “military and military adjacent should not explicitly weigh in on X, Y and Z” professionalism to heart. (I do not know how that squares with running a blog on politics, or what the restrictions on teaching staff are… the man is contains multitudes or something, or the rules as they are applied are complex).
That said, I fail to see how drj failed to see the contempt in the quotation marks in our host’s phrasing here:
It’s as clear as Doc Joyner’s writing gets.
It all does make me wonder if designating the American Dental Association as “radical left dental-terrorists” would allow airstrikes, either in this country, abroad or in international waters.
@Kurtz:
One quibble: They are not exploring the instability of meaning, they are exploiting it.
@dazedandconfused:
Did I get auto-corrected? I was trying to type exploiting.
*scrolls up*
Indeed, I did.
Thank you.
@Gustopher:
Yeah, James definitely uses quotation marks in that way to express derision or contempt.
I commented about these terms a few weeks ago.
The thing is, and this speaks to @dazedandconfused’s point about meaning, terrorism is ill-defined.
The key component in many definitions is whether the goal is political. But some terrorist organizations also engage in the drug trade to fund their political project.
A drug cartel’s primary goal is financial gain. But some of their violent acts have political goals, albeit in service of its financial goals.
Moreover, what we think of as cartels are not exclusively engaged in the illicit drug trade.
Stateside, LCN is not considered a drug dealing organization, but some families or crews within those families do deal drugs. Historically, some families prohibited their members and associates from selling drugs, but it’s difficult to say whether those rules were actually followed and enforced or not.
All of this points to a couple things:
-separating politics and economics is impossible, no matter what the market zealots say;
-codifying definitions into law, especially when those definitions require analysis of intent, is an avenue for authoritarian abuse.
The electorate consistently chooses accepting the harms of prohibition over accepting the potential harms of increased availability afforded by decriminalization/legalization, regulation, and taxation.
Even a hint that “narco-terrorist” is a meaningful term does nothing but give aid and comfort to the totalitarian regime, reassuring it that its propaganda bullshit is having some success. Noting that the US “justice” system is so fucked up a court might agree with the regime simply sends a discussion of how to react to the regime’s lawlessness into a demoralising bed of weeds. America is long past the stage where the courts are going to stop Trump, especially when he will simply pardon anyone prosecuted for following his orders.
Today’s example of regime idiocy is this from the loathsome Lindsey Graham:
The appropriate reaction is not to discuss whether Graham means “drug caliphate countries” literally or metaphorically. It’s to respond with controlled anger that he is openly advocating vigilante justice and the rejection of international law in a project that will make his country despised around the world and risk turning Venezuela into the hemisphere’s Libya.
@Ken_L:
Yes, and also to point out that Lindsey “Hold the Tape” Graham is utterly lacking in credibility, including his clownish red-faced display on the Senate floor just a few days ago when he alone (I think) tried to create a justification for the government to pay him up to several million dollars because his call logs were among the many obtained by J6 investigators through a subpoena process.
Let’s remember the subject of this post — that Hegseth ordered “No Quarter.” And consider the incriminating evidence that the administration and/or Pentagon lied about actions pursuant to that order.
The OP stated, “Were those targeted enemy soldiers, they would clearly have been “hors de combat…” The excerpted pieces included,
and
And “@drj: commented,
According to the reporting, a Pentagon briefing stated that the follow-on strike was intended to clear debris and not to kill survivors, and briefings to Congress included a similar explanation. This consciousness of guilt on the part of those responsible puts things in a different light. I’m afraid it’s an unsurprising turn of events for an administration brimming with both lawlessness and incompetence. I would not want to be one of several officials who participated in and tried to cover up these actions. And it would be something to see the Admiral emerge unscathed after the conflicting reports over something so fundamental.