The boat strike program the Trump administration is engaged in isn’t actually supported by law. Even his own in-house counsel can’t seem to agree on what justification to use. Shortly after being threatened with a little congressional oversight, the Office of Legal Counsel shrugged together a legal memo that basically said that the less of a direct threat boats allegedly carrying drugs to the US posed to US national security, the more easily the people in the boats could be killed.
And it’s not like the strikes are discriminate. They’re based on hunches and the administration’s desire to eradicate any boat it thinks has departed from countries it wants to control, like Venezuela. On top of the lack of legal rationale for initial strikes, there’s evidence the Defense Department engages in double- or triple-tap attacks meant to kill the survivors of the original strike — something that’s extremely handy because it also kills potential litigants.
Those extra strikes are illegal under even the United State’s own rules of engagement. And yet they continue. These strikes may have fallen off the radar due to the deluge of unbelievably horrific shit this administration generates daily, but they’re still happening even if the focus has shifted elsewhere.
Fighting a war on drugs doesn’t actually mean you’re engaged in a literal war — you know, the sort of thing Congress used to get angry about if presidents decided they’d rather not deal with any resistance from the legislative branch when getting their war on. This country engages on “wars” on everything from literacy and hunger (but not this administration) to abstract concepts like “woke” and “transgender everywhere.”
That doesn’t mean the administration can drone strike entities still clinging to DEI initiative. Nor can it blow up shipments of cell phones designed for children’s hands just because it believes these “distractions” are leading to lower reading comprehension scores.
The same goes for the War on Drugs. While there’s value in intercepting shipments and arresting those involved, a military program that kills people just because they might be trafficking drugs (much of which appears to headed to other destinations than the United States) is not only illegal, it’s immoral.
Experts in international and U.S. domestic law told an inter-American human rights organization on Friday that the Pentagon’s campaign of blowing up boats it suspected of smuggling drugs in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean was illegal.
[…]
Ben Saul, the U.N. special rapporteur for protecting fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, accused the United States of “responding with lawless violence that flagrantly violates human rights, in its phony war on so-called narco-terrorism.”
“Drug trafficking is a crime, not war,” said Mr. Saul, a professor of international law. He also said a portrayal of the suspected drug traffickers as being responsible for “speculative drug overdoses” did not constitute a “permissible law enforcement action in personal self-defense or the defense of others.”
Perhaps you’re as cynical as I am. Maybe you see this and wonder what is even the point: some dude said some stuff to the United Nations, which doesn’t mean much now that the Trump administration has decided no other nation or international association of nations has the power to stop it from doing what it wants to do.
Sure, there’s limited utility in statements made to entities the US government is just going to ignore. But don’t let that bury the lede: the Trump administration is engaged in an unprecedented murder program predicated solely on its legally unsupported position that trafficking drugs (to anywhere!) is exactly identical to engaging in terrorist attacks against US citizens.
This is an under-count. There’s no reason to believe the government has released information on every strike, especially since it delayed release of footage showing the military engaging in multiple strikes to murder survivors of its initial boat strike. We may never know the full body count of this extrajudicial killing program. But it’s harrowing to note (as the Times does in its report) that only two rescues of boat strike victims occurred during the last six months, even though the military is obligated — by US law and international law — to attempt to rescue survivors of military attacks it engages in.
The White House is War Crime Central. And now it’s adding to its rap sheet by bombing Iranian schools on top of killing people in international waters. The administration’s response, of course, refused to engage with the allegations made during this conference, choosing instead to claim (1) the Intra-American Human Rights Court (IAHCR) should mind its own business and (2) that it should look at some other cases that don’t involve the Trump administration’s casual human rights violations. You know, the usual stuff: “you’re not the boss of me” + whataboutism.
It’s the State Department pretending you can make a Venn diagram out of humanitarian aid mandates and international human rights laws:
The IACHR lacks the competence to review the matters at issue, which concern the interpretation and application of international humanitarian law, not human rights law, and should not be a pawn in a domestic litigation strategy of the ACLU or any other party.
A normal person would see these concepts as nearly completely overlapping. This administration is not normal. It’s a collective of inhumane people with an inordinate amount of power. And from what’s seen here, it’s clear the body count in international waters will only continue to rise.
This nation is filled with loudmouths who claim the Second Amendment ensures the rest of the amendments are protected. There are a lot of gun owners who bristle at any hint of gun control, even as they insist they might be the only thing protecting us from a hostile government.
This noise gets a lot louder any time a member of the Democratic party is in the Oval Office. You barely hear it at all when the GOP in the White House, even when the current iteration of the GOP looks a whole lot like the authoritarians these people swore they’d gun down the minute they reared their fascist heads.
Our rights are being destroyed daily but no one on the Second Amendment side has said a thing until now. Perhaps only reason they’re speaking up now is because it’s a fair-skinned gun owner who was murdered by federal officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota — the second murder of a city resident in as many weeks.
ICU nurse Alex Pretti stepped between a Border Patrol officer and the woman he was trying to douse with pepper spray simply because she was standing there recording him. Pretti stood there, holding his phone up, recording the officer as he first sprayed Pretti with pepper spray before pushing him up against a wall.
Moments after that, Pretti was wrestled to the ground, swarmed and beaten by federal agents. Mere moments after that, Pretti was executed by two of the officers, as described here in Bellingcat’s frame-by-frame breakdown of all available footage of the shooting:
After firing once, the agent in the black beanie repositions, and then quickly fires three more shots at Pretti’s back at close range while he appears to try to stand up.
[…]
Pretti collapses onto the ground after the first shots and the agents back away. A second agent (the one wearing the brown beanie hat) then draws his gun and fires at least one shot. This is the fifth shot that is heard. The agent in the black beanie can be seen and heard firing more shots. Shots five through ten all fired at Pretti’s motionless body.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol Commander at Large Greg Bovino have claimed without providing further evidence, that Pretti arrived at the scene “to inflict maximum damage on individuals” and Noem told reporters that his actions amounted to “domestic terrorism.”
“This individual who came with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers committed an act of domestic terrorism, that’s the facts.”
No. He came with a phone and was legally carrying a legally-owned handgun. If this government is just going to assume anyone carrying a gun is a criminal who can be summarily executed merely for being near federal officers, we’re well past the point any “liberal” administration has dared to go.
And after years of ignoring cops shooting people who happened to be carrying guns (mainly because many of those people were minorities), two heavy-hitters in the gun rights arena have stepped up to criticize one of Trump’s many ineffective prosecutors, Bill Essayli, who has decided there’s no better way to cap off a long string of rejected indictments by claiming officers are fully justified if they decide to shoot people just because they have guns.
Here’s what Essayli added to his repost of the DHS’s claim that Alex Pretti signed his own death warrant by legally carrying a gun:
If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you.
[W]e condemn the untoward comments of @USAttyEssayli. Federal agents are not “highly likely” to be “legally justified” in “shooting” concealed carry licensees who approach while lawfully carrying a firearm. The Second Amendment protects Americans’ right to bear arms while protesting—a right the federal government must not infringe upon.
Of course, even though this entity got all hot and bothered by the suggestion that law enforcement officers are welcome to kill gun owners, it had to first give credit where it isn’t due (suggesting the DOJ has any interest in engaging in a full investigation) and dipping out of the tweet by sending some strays in the direction of the people who are currently getting murdered by federal officers:
Finally, the Left must stop antagonizing [ICE] and [CBP] agents who are taking criminals off the street and play a crucial role in protecting communities and upholding the rule of law.
Sooooo close. If the organization had stuck to the condemnation of Bill Essayli’s assault on the only right they care about, it might have meant something. But it means so much less when this (justified) criticism of federal officials is sandwiched between bending the knee to the DOJ and mindlessly insulting people just like the person they (sort of, from an oblique angle) defended in retrospect.
This sentiment from the First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California is dangerous and wrong.
Responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens.
This one is much more straightforward, but still walks back the criticism of the federal prosecutor by telling everyone to “await” a “full investigation” which almost certainly isn’t going to be happening.
Only 14 minutes earlier, the NRA account was actually running interference for the administration with a statement it released before Essayli angered the association.
“For months, radical progressive politicians like Tim Walz have incited violence against law enforcement officers who are simply trying to do their jobs. Unsurprisingly, these calls to dangerously interject oneself into legitimate law-enforcement activities have ended in violence, tragically resulting in injuries and fatalities.
As there is with any officer-involved shooting, there will be a robust and comprehensive investigation that takes place to determine if the use of force was justified. As we await these facts and gain a clearer understanding, we urge the political voices to lower the temperature to ensure their constituents and law enforcement officers stay safe.”
This has led to Essayli trying to walk back his statement by claiming he didn’t say the thing he said and that these two prominent critics are “putting words in his mouth.” He “substantiated” his counter-claim by putting a whole lot of new words in his own mouth — words that very definitely weren’t in the shorter post he put out in support of the DHS’s smearing of the person its employees had just executed in broad daylight on a public street.
In the end, it means almost nothing. Two Second Amendment-focused organization raised their voices briefly — breaking with the administration they absolutely adore — to condemn a perceived attack on their rights. But they’re utterly silent when it comes to condemning the act that prompted their belated reaction. They don’t honestly care how many people are killed by law enforcement officers. The only thing they care about is being able to open carry while shopping at Walmart or invading federal buildings to overturn elections. Everyone to the perceived left of their core membership can continue to get fucked.
Alex Jeffrey Pretti was an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. He spent his days caring for American veterans—the men and women who served this country and came home broken in body or mind. He wanted to make a difference in this world. That is what his parents said, in a statement released hours after federal agents killed him on an American street.
Ten shots.
His phone was in his right hand. His left hand was raised above his head. He was being pepper-sprayed. He was trying to protect a woman that ICE had just pushed to the ground.
Ten shots.
The Department of Homeland Security told the nation he was armed and dangerous. They said he had a gun and two magazines. They said this justified what they did.
His parents say the administration is telling “sickening lies.” The video shows no weapon drawn. His hands were visible. He was not a threat. He was a nurse. He was a caregiver. He was a citizen of the United States, exercising his right to exist in public, and they executed him for it.
Ten shots.
⁂
Bruce Springsteen wrote “American Skin” after police fired forty-one shots at Amadou Diallo in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building. Diallo was reaching for his wallet. They thought it was a gun. It wasn’t. He died in a doorway, guilty of nothing but living in a body that power had decided was dangerous.
Is it a gun? Is it a knife? Is it a wallet? This is your life.
The song was about what it means to be Black in America. About teaching your children how to survive an encounter with police. About the terror of knowing that compliance might not save you. That your hands can be up and empty, and you can still die. That the story they tell afterward will have nothing to do with what happened.
Twenty-six years later, the principle has expanded. The American skin now belongs to anyone who stands between federal power and its chosen targets. Anyone who does not move fast enough. Anyone who tries to protect their neighbor. Anyone who makes the mistake of believing their rights are real.
You can get killed just for living in it.
⁂
They said Renee Good was a domestic terrorist. They said she weaponized her vehicle. They said she tried to run over an agent.
The video shows her trying to slowly drive away. They shot her through the windshield, point-blank, in the face. She was a mother. She was a poet. She was trying to leave.
They said Alex Pretti was armed and resisting. They said he physically intervened. They said he was a threat.
The video shows a man with a phone in his hand and his other hand raised. His parents say he was trying to protect a woman. He was a nurse. He cared for veterans. He died in the street outside a donut shop.
This is the pattern. Kill first. Lie second. Let the Community Notes and the spokespeople and the Fox News chyrons do the work of making the murder disappear.
Stephen Miller called him a domestic terrorist. After he was dead. The label applied retroactively, to justify what had already been done. This is how it works. This is how it has always worked. The power to kill and the power to define are the same power.
⁂
Here is what we know:
Three thousand federal agents occupy Minneapolis. They wear masks. They operate without meaningful oversight. They have killed two people in less than three weeks. They have shot another. They deploy tear gas on crowds, including children. They refuse to let local police secure crime scenes. When a police chief insists on preserving evidence, they try to order him away.
The Attorney General of the United States has sent a letter to Minnesota officials: ICE will leave if the state turns over its voter database.
Ten shots in the back.
Federal paramilitaries are killing citizens in the streets of an American city. And the price of their departure is control of the state’s elections.
This is not immigration enforcement. This is not public safety. This is extortion. This is the use of state violence to seize election infrastructure in a swing state. This is the thing itself, undisguised, in plain sight.
⁂
I am watching the tech executives I used to work alongside post about AI, tariffs, and founder mode. I am watching them calculate the angles. I am watching them decide that this is not their problem, that the adults will handle it, that surely someone will restore order before it affects them personally.
There is far more outrage from tech leaders over a wealth tax than over masked federal agents executing civilians in the streets.
That tells you what you need to know about the values of our industry. That tells you what the costume was worth. That tells you what “freedom” means to the people who claim to love it most.
⁂
Forty-one shots for Amadou Diallo.
Ten shots for Alex Pretti.
The math is not the point. The math is never the point. One shot would have been enough to end a life, to orphan a future, to prove that none of us are safe when power decides we are in the way.
Alex Pretti’s parents asked the public to get the truth out about their son. He was a good man, they said. He cared for veterans. His last act was trying to protect a stranger.
This is the truth: your son was murdered by agents of the federal government. They lied about why. They will not be held accountable unless we make them accountable. The system designed to prevent this has failed, and the people with the power to stop it are afraid to use that power.
The wire still holds. Because some of us continue to insist on holding it.
But the wire is fraying. And the hands that hold it are bleeding. And the only question that matters now is whether anyone with power will do anything other than issue statements of concern while the bodies accumulate.
Forty-one shots. Ten shots. Is it a gun? Is it a knife? Is it a phone? Is it your life?
You can get killed just for living in your American skin.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
Two weeks ago, ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Nicole Good in cold blood. I said then that we had to abolish ICE and impeach Trump & Noem before they incited another murder.
As more details have emerged, it’s only looked worse. Multiple angles of video showed Good was trying to avoid hitting anyone. Ross, stupidly, stepped in front of her vehicle to film her license plate. The video shows her backing up and turning away from him.
Now the gunshot evidence reveals it was even worse than we knew. Of the three shots Ross fired, only one was fatal: one fired well after her car was clear of him, shooting through the side window. He executed her as she drove away.
The administration lied. They claimed she was aiming to harm ICE agents when she was doing no such thing. They called her a domestic terrorist.
Then Tom Homan made a promise. He claimed that if people didn’t stop calling ICE and CBP murderers, they were just going to have to murder again.
Now they have. In cold blood, they murdered Alex Pretti.
It was an American murder.
Let’s be clear about what Pretti did and did not do. He was not protesting. He was not brandishing a weapon. He had a legal, holstered gun, which he never touched and never sought to grab. His “crime” was helping direct traffic, videotaping what immigration officers were doing, and then moving to help a woman who had been pepper sprayed and knocked down on the ice — even as Pretti himself had been pepper sprayed.
He was helping. That’s all.
And yet, once again, the worst of the Trump administration rushed to blatantly lie. They claimed he was a terrorist. That he came to murder federal officers. That he brandished a weapon. None of that is true.
By all accounts Pretti was a good person — an ICU nurse at the VA hospital, someone about whom there has been an outpouring of stories describing a kind, gentle, helping man. But none of that should matter. If he wasn’t an ICU nurse. If he wasn’t a nice guy. Even if he wasn’t an American citizen. Nothing he did would justify being shot multiple times in the middle of the street.
Incredibly, the party that made the Second Amendment’s “right to bear arms” the most consequential and central plank of their entire identity is now trying to claim that merely possessing a legal, holstered gun justifies being murdered by federal agents.
It was an American murder.
Kash Patel went on Fox News and claimed, falsely, “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple. You don’t have a right to break the law and incite violence.”
Except that’s bullshit. The MAGA right has a long history of proudly showing up at protests brandishing loaded weapons. Sarah Longwell compiled some examples that make the hypocrisy unavoidable. MAGA doesn’t care. They know they’re lying and they get a thrill from it. It’s a game to them to lie because it “triggers the libs.”
They will justify and celebrate murder so long as they can meme it and parade around how mad it makes empathetic people to see their friends and neighbors murdered.
Hell, Kyle Rittenhouse became a hero of the MAGA right not just for showing up to a protest brandishing a loaded weapon, but for killing people. Kash Patel publicly berated “the left” for not giving Rittenhouse “due process” (which he did, in fact, receive), and now claims that Pretti deserved to be murdered for doing far less.
JD Vance, who has been blaming Minnesota officials because he knows he has to make shit up, once praised Kyle Rittenhouse:
He saw a bunch of thugs and rioters destroying his community, and no one was doing anything about it. You know one of the values that represent my community, if not honor and loyalty and devotion to your community. This 17-year-old boy saw no one protecting the businesses, the people, the community. So he went down there and did it.
It wasn’t even Rittenhouse’s community. He lived in a different state entirely.
Pretti did live in Minneapolis. And he, too, saw thugs and rioters destroying his community. They just happened to be federal agents. And he got murdered for trying to help.
The MAGA world rushed to blame him.
It was an American murder.
A man, a helper, shows up to help. Yes, he’s carrying a gun. But it’s legal to do so. He had it legally. He could carry it legally. He never once sought to use it. Instead, he sought to help people. Help them navigate a crowded street. Help witness the actions of federal agents who were kidnapping and attacking people. Help the woman near him who was pepper sprayed and knocked over.
And he got murdered for it.
Every bit of it is obscene. Every bit of it is unnecessary.
And the rush by Trump officials and their cult-like followers to justify it? That’s American too. The lies, so blatant, so obvious. These people have learned that truth doesn’t matter anymore, so long as they can repeat the lies enough on enough friendly TV networks. They will always have pathetic cult members who will repeat and pass them on.
Renee Good’s final words were “Dude, we’re not mad at you.”
The agent who murdered her responded “fucking bitch” after shooting her through the head.
Alex Pretti’s final words were “Are you okay?” — spoken to someone who needed help.
Some of the agents involved in his murder mock cried “boo hoo” at the people screaming at them for killing a man in the street who did nothing wrong.
Where else but America could you have a helper murdered by federal officials in broad daylight for doing nothing but helping, while carrying a gun he did not brandish?
Where else but America would you see federal officials mock those who were shocked and upset by the murder?
Where else but America would you see federal officials immediately blame the victim for exercising his Second Amendment rights — the same rights those officials claimed to hold sacred?
The murder of Renee Nicole Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross has certainly created quite the divide between the reality-based majority of the population who doesn’t want masked unaccountable federal law enforcement goons invading cities they have no business being in and shooting people for saying “dude, I’m not mad at you” and trying to drive away… and the fantasy-land MAGA folks who are bending over backwards to justify the murder.
Late last week the video from Ross’s phone was released (why Ross was filming Good is a whole separate issue, but shows how Homeland Security is much more focused on producing memes, not doing actual law enforcement), which MAGA cultists pretended exonerated Ross. It did no such thing. It made him look way, way worse.
He deliberately placed himself in front of the vehicle. He walked around the car filming Good and her partner. As can be clearly seen in the video, Good turned steering wheel of her car all the way to the right such that the car was not heading towards Ross and could not hit him. And he shot her three times anyway, once through the windshield and twice through the open driver-side window. Even if you could (and you can’t) argue the first should was potentially justified if he thought the car was coming towards him, the fact that he easily stepped aside and then continued firing shows that it was not justified at all.
And, of course, his first words after murdering a woman in broad daylight in the middle of the street was: “fucking bitch.”
So her last words: “Dude, I’m not mad at you.” His first words after murdering her: “fucking bitch.”
And then, of course, there’s what was discussed last week: how the MAGA faithful immediately began lying and claiming she was a “domestic terrorist” with multiple people trying to twist the story to claim she somehow “deserved” this.
One of the leaders of the goons, “border czar” Tom Homan, (who appears to have gotten away with taking $50,000 in a paper bag from federal officials pretending to be business owners seeking favors from Donald Trump) went on Meet the Press on Sunday and talked about how Democrats need to stop calling ICE murderers or they’ll have no choice but to murder again:
Homan: "We gotta stop the hateful rhetoric. Saying this officer is a murderer is dangerous. It's just ridiculous. It's gonna infuriate people more which means there's gonna be more incidents like this."
The transcript is as ridiculous as it is chilling:
We gotta stop the hateful rhetoric. Saying this officer is a murderer is dangerous. It’s just ridiculous. It’s gonna infuriate people more which means there’s gonna be more incidents like this, because the hateful rhetoric is not only continuing, it’s gonna be double down or triple down.
It’s the classic abuser’s lament: if you didn’t want me to hit you, why were you so mean to me.
First of all, the ones ramping up the “hateful rhetoric” have been the MAGA faithful. They’re the ones spreading baseless conspiracy theories, insisting that Good was a “domestic terrorist” or a “paid agitator.” This is the same thing Homan, Gregory Bovino, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and Donald Trump have been doing for months, encouraging ICE to see the public as enemies to be fought, not a public they are supposed to be protecting.
Second, if federal agents are so fragile that people calling them names means they’re going to murder people, they shouldn’t be federal agents at all. They shouldn’t be allowed to handle firearms, frankly.
This is textbook authoritarian blame-shifting: create the conditions for violence through dehumanizing rhetoric, then blame the victims when violence inevitably occurs. And it’s not just Homan. The entire MAGA ecosystem is working overtime to justify this murder and preemptively excuse the next one.
Case in point: Fox News columnist Dave Marcus, who wrote this weekend that “wine moms” protesting ICE’s occupations, invasions, and law breaking is somehow a criminal conspiracy of “wine moms.”
Say what?
Marcus’s piece is transparently absurd—he’s claiming that citizens exercising their First Amendment rights to criticize federal agents constitute a criminal conspiracy—but he gives away the real game a few paragraphs in. Good and these other “wine moms'” actual “crime” wasn’t obstructing justice. It was mocking ICE agents in a manner that hurt their feelings:
The video of Good and her partner heckling and, let’s be honest, goading ICE officers with an obnoxious smugness that makes most people’s skin crawl, is just one of many.
It’s difficult to think of something more “obnoxiously smug” than a Fox News columnist insisting that after an ICE agent murdered a woman in broad daylight for protesting ICE’s actions… we should blame protesting women.
We see these self-important White women doing it in video after video after video, taunting cops, insulting journalists or even bystanders, often with a weird and disturbing glee.
The inclusion of “journalists” in that list is also telling in multiple ways. First off, the MAGA world is way more famous for “insulting journalists.” Hell, it’s part of Trump’s daily activities to insult and taunt journalists. I can’t find any example of Marcus complaining about that. But it sounds like if wine moms make fun of him for his journalism, well, that just means they deserve to be shot in the face?
But, more to the point: obnoxious smugness, heckling, and even goading federal officers is textbook First Amendment-protected speech. Criticizing government officials, even obnoxiously, is perhaps the core function of the First Amendment. Marcus seems to have confused “speech that annoys federal agents” with “criminal conspiracy.” And he’s using his own confusion to justify murder.
All of this, of course, is coming straight from the top. Late yesterday, Donald Trump told the press gaggle on his plane that murdering Good was acceptable because “the woman and her friend were highly disrespectful to law enforcement” and that “law enforcement should not be in a position where they have to put up with this stuff.”
Q: "Do you believe that deadly force was necessary?"Trump: "It was highly disrespectful of law enforcement. The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement…Law enforcement should not be in a position where they have to put up with this stuff."
Yes, he is literally justifying murder by his personal police force by claiming that being “highly disrespectful” (i.e., engaging in First Amendment-protected speech) makes the use of deadly force “necessary.”
Also note how Trump himself reveals that all the retconning nonsense by his MAGA faithful that the shooting had nothing to do with how Good spoke to Ross was all pretext. This was always about whether or not you kiss the boot in front of you. If you don’t—if you are “highly disrespectful”—Trump and his cronies think they can shoot you. And if you complain about it, they can shoot more people.
The state sponsored murders of wine moms will continue until morale improves.
You can see how fragile and pathetic these men are. They are so desperate to subjugate and suppress people who disagree with them politically. They seemed to think that once they were in power, the public would love and admire them for their power. Instead, the vast majority of Americans see them for what they are: pathetic, insecure man-babies in way over their heads.
So, now their only recourse is to ramp up the threats. To say that if you actually call out their criminal actions, such as murder, for what they are, they’ll just be forced to murder more critics and protestors.
They will never take responsibility for their own actions. They will never reflect on their own culpability. Because to reflect would require admitting what everyone already knows: they have no argument. They have no legal justification. They have no constitutional authority for what they’re doing.
All they have is the authoritarian’s playbook: dehumanize your critics, commit violence, blame the victims, and threaten more violence if the criticism doesn’t stop. It’s the logic of every tinpot dictator in history, now being deployed by federal law enforcement on American streets.
There is no question that they’ll murder again. Homan has already promised they will. And it’s why we need to keep exercising our First Amendment rights to speak out against this authoritarian nonsense, rather than capitulating and letting them win.
Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old award-winning poet, a mother of a six-year-old, and a wife who had recently moved to Minneapolis. That all ended yesterday when a masked ICE agent murdered her in broad daylight, shooting her multiple times at close range in the head. She had stuffed animal toys in the glove box of her SUV that rammed into another car after she’d been killed for no reason at all.
We have video of what happened. Multiple angles. The Trump administration is lying about every single detail anyway.
Donald Trump kicked off with a blatant lie, claiming that Good “viciously ran over the ICE officer.”
Known liar, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, called Good a “violent rioter” who “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.”
Kristi Noem made up a complete fantasy:
It was an act of domestic terrorism. What happened was, our ICE officers were out in enforcement action, they got stuck in the snow because of the adverse weather that is in Minneapolis, they were attempting to push out their vehicle, and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.
Not a single one of them is telling the truth. They are flat out lying.
Here’s what actually happened. The folks at Bellingcat put together a top down view showing the murder, pieced together from multiple videos:
Using imagery online of the shooting by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, we’ve created an animated sequence which highlights the approximate positioning of officers and vehicles at the scene. The red dot represents the agent who fired the shots. Yellow dots are other agents who arrived at the scene.
This morning (after equivocating all day yesterday, as I’ll discuss below), the NY Times put out a video using multiple bystander videos, showing that the ICE agent (1) was not hit (2) was not in the path of the vehicle and (3) was absolutely fine afterwards (contradicting claims from the administration that he was run over and in the hospital). See it here:
From all the evidence, it’s clear that Good had stopped and when ICE agents started demanding she move, she started to pull around the ICE vehicle in front of her. She paused to let another vehicle drive by her. As that happened (for no apparent reason) the ICE agent who eventually murdered her walked around the right side of her car to the front. As he does that two other ICE agents approach the car, with one telling her to exit the car while another yells for her to move. She then proceeds to try to drive away from the ICE agents. The one who had stepped in front of her car steps aside and then just starts madly firing at her head.
He murdered her. And Trump and his cronies are lying about it with video evidence directly contradicting every word.
This isn’t the first time ICE has killed someone. This is actually the ninth such shooting by an ICE agent since September, every single one of which involved an ICE agent blatantly violating policy by firing into a vehicle. This is at least the second outright murder, as opposed to attempted murder.
While ICE conveniently took down its page describing this (got something to hide?), the official policy is that “firearms shall not be discharged solely to disable moving vehicles.” Also, “discharging a firearm from a moving vehicle is prohibited.” There are some limited exceptions, but they appear to apply solely to a case where the car is driving directly at an ICE agent.
ICE shouldn’t even be in Minneapolis. It shouldn’t be anywhere. It shouldn’t exist. Nor should it ever have existed, as many of us have warned for many, many years. When we first started writing about ICE over 15 years ago, it was already a lawless organization.
This murder of an American citizen on a quiet street—someone who was just there to observe and monitor ICE agents kidnapping people—exemplifies why ICE is fundamentally incompatible with a free society. We’re talking about a masked federal police force, operating in secret, with no apparent limits, no meaningful rules, and no consequences for violence. They’re engaging in lethal force against anyone—citizens and non-citizens alike—because they’ve been given implicit permission by the White House to do whatever they want. MAGA folks mock the Gestapo comparison, but what else do you call an unaccountable secret police force that operates with impunity, murders citizens in broad daylight, and then lies about it with the full backing of the state?
Further, as detailed in the Court’s factual findings, agents have used excessive force in response to protesters’ and journalists’ exercise of their First Amendment rights, without justification, often without warning, and even at those who had begun to comply with agents’ orders…. While the Court acknowledges that some unruly individuals have been present during these gatherings, their presence among “peaceful protestors, journalists and legal observers does not give Defendants a blank check to employ unrestricted use of crowd control weapons,” and, in many of the instances in which agents deployed less lethal munitions, they did not direct the force anywhere near such bad actors…. Agents’ “use of indiscriminate weapons against all protesters—not just the violent ones—supports the inference that federal agents were substantially motivated by Plaintiffs’ protected First Amendment activity.”
Judge Ellis also called out DHS’s systematic lying—the same pattern we’re seeing now:
While Defendants may argue that the Court identifies only minor inconsistencies, every minor inconsistency adds up, and at some point, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything that Defendants represent
And yes, they will lie in the face of directly contradictory video evidence. Judge Ellis again:
Presumably, these portions of the videos would be Defendants’ best evidence to demonstrate that agents acted in line with the Constitution, federal laws, and the agencies’ own policies on use of force when engaging with protesters, the press, and religious practitioners. Buta review of them shows the opposite—supporting Plaintiffs’ claims and undermining all of Defendants’ claimsthat their actions toward protesters, the press, and religious practitioners have been, as Bovino has stated, “more than exemplary.”
A federal judge warned us six weeks ago that DHS and ICE would likely kill people and lie about it even when video proved them wrong. Yesterday proved her right. Again.
I had a few other stories I planned to write up on Wednesday, not to mention taking care of some other work, and I spent most of the day just unable to do anything, feeling sick to my stomach.
Yes, this happens in America (and elsewhere), but it shouldn’t. This is fucked up.
As 404 Media points out, this has become the standard course of action by the Trump admin these days.
This is a pattern. Some event happens as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, DHS rushes out a misleading, wrong, or incendiary statement that does not reflect reality, and it becomes another piece of ammo for the X.com grifters, right wing media ecosystem, or people who just love the idea of others being hurt.
And, again, why the fuck is ICE even in Minneapolis anyway? Because a small-time MAGA grifter YouTuber made a misleading video a few weeks ago claiming day care centers in Minneapolis were running a scam. His “evidence”? The day cares had locked doors and wouldn’t let him in with his cameras—which is what day cares do when random people show up demanding entry.
Noem is claiming that ICE had to be in Minneapolis based on her lies that the city is “dangerous” and full of “criminals” who don’t belong there. But as multiple people have pointed out there has been only one murder in Minneapolis in 2026.
It was the one committed by this ICE agent yesterday.
The Trump MAGA DHS position is that if you don’t immediately submit in every possible way, they will frame you as a “threat” who they can kill with impunity. Defector’s summary is exactly right:
Now that the Trump administration has shown it will immediately make up a flagrant lie in an attempt to justify the summary execution of a U.S. citizen, on video, in broad daylight—and will outright valorize the ICE agent who drew his pistol and killed a civilian for the crime of moving her vehicle a few feet—the message is clear, to ICE agents and everyone else: Nothing constrains these agents except whatever inhibits any individual one of them, personally, from brutalizing and murdering any person who disobeys them….
In the eyes of the state and its agents, all of the rest of us are walking around with a standing presumption, not just of guilt, but of murderous intent. Anything but total and immediate submission is domestic terrorism. It’s punishable by whatever the masked and unidentified government agent pointing a gun at your face decides to dish out.
And, of course, the compliant media is playing its part. Both the NY Times and the Washington Post initially embraced the view-from-nowhere approach of claiming the events around the shooting are “disputed.”
Come the fuck on. Five hours later and the headline is still about a disputed shooting. Just a basic lack of courage to acknowledge the obvious.
The old journalism joke is that if one person tells you it’s sunny outside and the other says it’s raining, you don’t report that the weather is disputed. You go the fuck outside and check. We have the video here. Multiple angles. It shows exactly what happened. But the Times and Post were treating the administration’s obvious lies as equally valid to the documented evidence because… why? Because acknowledging that a federal agency will murder a citizen and then lie about it in the face of video evidence is too uncomfortable? This isn’t neutral journalism—it’s active complicity in state violence. When the media treats documented murder and transparent lies as a “dispute,” they’re telling every ICE agent that there will be no accountability, no matter how clear the evidence.
Yes, eventually, this morning, both the NY Times and the Washington Post published more thorough investigations, showing that the administration is lying. But they let the “dispute” stand for 24 hours, allowing the administration to set the narrative that will live on. And even now they’re using equivocal language. The Post’s story talks about how the video evidence “raises questions about” what the admin is saying, rather than just coming out and saying that they’re LYING.
And I won’t get into how state media like Fox News is reporting on this: focusing on whatever it could dig up about Good to mock her, as if anything in her personal life or views somehow justifies her being murdered. Or all the GOP elected officials going on TV trying to pretend that she might have deserved to have been murdered in the street.
Yes, I know that in these tribal times so many people are playing the team sports thing of just immediately defending their cult leader. Going on X and looking around, you see just an overwhelming flood of absolute bullshit from MAGA folks cracking jokes (remember when they wanted people fired for joking about Charlie Kirk’s murder?) and trying to spin the story, knowing full well it’s all bullshit.
But some are seeing through it. A neighbor near where the murder happened, who identified himself as “right leaning,” admitted that the situation shook him, as “this is not how we’re supposed to be doing things in America.”
Really worth watching this interview with a bystander who witnessed the ICE shooting in Minneapolis: "I'm pretty right-leaning. But seeing this, this is not how we're supposed to be doing things in America.”
He’s right. And it is beyond disgusting that so many powerful forces in our government and the media are trying to twist and manipulate the story to justify an out of control ICE.
The only appropriate response here is to shut down ICE. Shut down DHS. Yes, there are important and necessary roles in DHS, but they existed without DHS before it was formed two decades ago, and we can redistribute those roles elsewhere in the federal government. But we don’t need ICE. We don’t need a secret federal police that goes around in masks kidnapping and murdering people.
It’s about as un-American as you can imagine.
This murder has at least appeared to wake some politicians from their slumber. We’ve seen multiple Democratic politicians, especially in Minnesota, speak out as forcefully as I’ve seen politicians speak out in years, telling ICE to get the fuck out of Minneapolis and calling out the administration’s lies directly. That matters. When officials with actual power are willing to name the truth—that ICE murdered a citizen and the administration is lying about it—it creates space for others to do the same.
But also thousands came out to memorialize Renee Nicole Good, in the freezing cold in a Minneapolis January. Hundreds turned up at a training session for legal observers, even as hundreds more are already patrolling Minneapolis, observing ICE’s illegal actions, and doing so knowing that ICE and DHS won’t hesitate to shoot them dead.
That’s what a movement looks like when institutions fail. Not waiting for someone to save us, but showing up in the freezing cold to say: you will not do this in our name. You will not kill our neighbors without witness. You will not lie about it unchallenged.
I’m going to leave this post up for a while before we post anything else. This matters more than the usual tech policy stories right now.
There are plenty of things going on that are infuriating. Ever day this administration finds new ways to spit on the Constitution. We’re still dealing with the illegal invasion of Venezuela, and apparent plans to attack multiple other nations around the Western Hemisphere.
But Renee Nicole Good’s murder cuts through all of that noise. A masked federal agent murdered an American citizen in broad daylight for no reason at all. The administration lied about it with video evidence directly contradicting every word. The media called it “disputed.” And thousands of people said no.
The institutional guardrails have failed. The courts warned us this would happen and it happened anyway. The media won’t hold power accountable. So the work falls to us—to show up, to document, to refuse to accept the lies, to make the cost of this violence too high to sustain.
ICE must be abolished. This cannot stand. And anyone who makes excuses for what happened yesterday has chosen a side, and it’s not the side of America or freedom or anything resembling justice.
Renee Nicole Good was a poet, a mother, and a citizen murdered by her own government for the crime of existing near an ICE agent having a bad day. Remember her name. Remember what they did. And remember that they lied about it even with the cameras rolling.
Yeah, the economy sucks and trade-war tariff agendas are only making things worse. But as Trump promised/threatened during a recent national address from the White House, things are turning around, even if you (MAGA voters especially) are too stupid to see it.
It looks like the first growth market to see a significant increase might be law firms specializing in maritime law. (And those of you who specialize in Third Amendment law might want to hang around for a bit before becoming Costco greeters or whatever.)
The Trump administration has been straight up murdering people in international waters for the past few months. The regime’s “shoot first, demand all questioners be hit with sedition charges” plan hasn’t exactly worked out. Questions are actually being asked, and in response, the administration has been engaged in some last-minute retcon. Following the controversial boat strikes, the government has now declared drug cartels and drugs themselves to be terrorists worthy of extrajudicial killings.
Trump kills people in boats and commandeers Venezuelan oil tankers while relying on plenty of specious legal assertions. If there’s anyone who loves specious legal assertions, it’s the people who worship Donald Trump. This is the new hotness awaiting us in 2026: the addition of mercenaries to an undeclared war of opportunity.
Here’s Senate head Mike Lee with a proposal to allow regular-ass Americans to participate in actions that are already extremely questionable in terms of legality.
U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) introduced legislation today that would allow private entities to stop drug cartel smuggling and violence. The Cartel Marque and Reprisal Authorization Act authorizes President Trump, as provided under the Constitution, to commission American operators under letters of marque to seize cartel property and persons on land or sea. Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) introduced the House version of the legislation.
“The Constitution provides for Letters of Marque and Reprisal as a tool against the enemies of the United States,”said Senator Mike Lee.“Cartels have replaced corsairs in the modern era, but we can still give private American citizens and their businesses a stake in the fight against these murderous foreign criminals. The Cartel Marque and Reprisal Authorization Act will revive this historic practice to defend our shores and seize cartel assets.”
Lee’s bill is hardly worth reading. It only runs three pages and basically says “the president can hire whatever mercenaries he wants” before heading to a conclusion that claims the president can declare whoever he wants to be a “cartel” and therefore a worthy target of whatever sort of Blackwater-murdering-civilians might ensure.
Of course, every Senate bill must be matched with something similar. No one specially asked congressional reps Tim Burchett and Mark Messmer to speak up, but they’ll be damned if their bootlicking will go unnoticed.
On March 28, 2023, Burchett responded to the Covenant School shooting, where three nine-year-old students and three staff members were killed in Nashville, by telling reporters: “It’s a horrible, horrible situation, and we’re not going to fix it. Criminals are gonna be criminals. And my daddy fought in the second world war, fought in the Pacific, fought the Japanese, and he told me, he said, ‘Buddy,’ he said, ‘if somebody wants to take you out, and doesn’t mind losing their life, there’s not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it.'” Burchett also said he sees no “real role” for Congress in reducing gun violence, other than to “mess things up”.
[…]
After a local D.J. was killed and 22 others were wounded in the 2024 Kansas City parade shooting, Burchett inaccurately identified an adult attendee of the Kansas City rally, Denton Loudermill Jr., as the shooter, claiming he was an “illegal alien”. Burchett’s social media post received 1.4 million views.
Yeah, so he’s one of those people.
Burchett’s buddy on this one is Rep. Mark Messmer, who used to be a pretty normal person before being elected to his current position. Now he’s just a guy who says stuff like this:
These two rubes were at least ahead of the game. They tossed this one into the congressional pool back in February 2025. That one has been copied word-for-word by Sen. Mike Lee, who looks like he’s desperately trying to shore up his toady credentials now that Trump has pretty much declared war on anything traversing international waters while in the vicinity of Venezuela. Everything old is new again, except for Donald Trump, who is older than last time and far less likely to remember this idea got pitched months ago.
The Trump administration has never seen a bad idea it can’t make worse. And while Trump has chosen to legislate from the executive office as often as possible, he’ll always have a place in his heart for the desperate sycophants who are willing to give him whatever he wants, no matter the cost to their own careers.
And there are plenty of violent, bigoted sycophants in the private sector just dying for an opportunity to get their violent racism on. They, too, are now being given a chance to claim a chair at the Big Boy table and to engage in lawlessness this administration will always celebrate, rather than condemn.
The Trump Administration’s murder-in-international-waters program debuted far ahead of its legal rationale. Many people inside the administration were blindsided by this sudden escalation. Those expected to stay on top of these things — military oversight, congressional committees, etc. — found they were even further behind the curve than the late-arriving “justification” for extrajudicial killings of alleged “narco-terrorists” that used to be handled by interdiction efforts that left everyone alive and anything of value (drugs, boats, weapons) in the hands of the US government and its foreign partners.
This was something new and horrible from a regime already known for its awfulness. Even after the belated (and then hastily revised) justification was delivered by the Office of Legal Counsel, it was difficult to see how the US government could justify extrajudicial killings of alleged “terrorists” who were — at worst — simply moving narcotics from point A to point B.
The administration’s bizarre insistence that the mere existence of an international drug trade constituted a deliberate, violent attack on America was further undercut by a lot of inconvenient facts. First of all, most of those being killed had no connection to the top levels of drug cartels. They were merely mules tasked with transporting drugs. In other cases — including the one that involved a double-tap strike (which was actually four strikes) to ensure the survivors clinging to boat wreckage could no longer be referred to as “survivors” — the drugs allegedly being trafficked were headed to midpoints that suggested the narcotics were actually headed to Europe, rather than the United States.
To be clear, this administration doesn’t actually care whether or not it engages in murder or other acts of violence. What it does care about is allowing the killing to continue for as long as possible before the system of checks and balances finally gets around to dialing back the murders a bit.
A recent article from the New York Times gives the game away, even if the lede gets a bit buried. The headline mentions a White House “scramble” to “deal with” people who survived initial extrajudicial killing attempts. In one case, two survivors were rescued by the US military after failing to die during the initial strike. The White House said they should be sent to El Salvador’s torture prison. The State Department — currently headed by Marco Rubio — said this simply wasn’t possible. Both survivors ended up being sent back to their countries of origin.
Two weeks later, another murder attempt failed to murder everyone on the boat, leading to another hasty conference call between the White House, career diplomats, and Defense Department leadership. The ultimate goal was to get rid of these people as quickly as possible, which necessarily involved hasty arrangements made with government officials in their home countries.
The real reason for these hasty talks — and the secrecy surrounding them — is this: The administration definitely doesn’t seem confident that it’s fully justified in ordering military members to engage in actual war crimes; specifically, the murder of people military bylaws make clear they are supposed to be rescuing.
The two attacks discussed above happened nearly two months after the double-tap boat strike that definitely looks like a war crime. But the Trump administration definitely isn’t going to bring back survivors to face justice by charging them and giving them their day in court. If it does that, it might lose everything it likes about murdering people in international waters.
Legal cases in the United States involving survivors would force the administration to present more information to try to back up its rationale for the attacks.
[…]
“From the administration’s point of view, there are good reasons to be averse to bringing survivors to Guantánamo Bay or to the continental United States,” [former State Dept. lawyer Brian Finucane] said.
If the U.S. military brings the survivors to the Navy-run prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, lawyers defending them could file a habeas corpus lawsuit in U.S. federal court questioning whether there really is an armed conflict, for legal purposes, between the United States and cartels. Congress has not authorized the United States to engage in any such conflict.
To use the ever-popular poker parlance, that’s an obvious “tell” — something that indicates the administration has very little confidence in the legal rationale for these extrajudicial killings. If it thought it’s arguments had a very good chance of holding up in court, it wouldn’t be hastily returning “narco-terrorists” to their home countries as quickly and quietly as possible, where they’ll presumably immediately resume their “narco-terrorism.”
That’s also why the first double-tap strike occurred only days into Trump’s undeclared war on alleged drug boats. As far as we know, this hasn’t been repeated, despite everyone who hasn’t already resigned from the Defense Department (or been thrown under the bus by those whose positions are unassailable thanks to their deference to Trump) claiming either ignorance of the double-strike or saying lots of stuff about “saving” the country from being murdered by inanimate fentanyl (or whatever).
Any survivor is just another chance to prove the US government wrong. And if it isn’t immediately clear survivors have somewhere to be hastily dumped, you can probably assume the military will resort to Plan B: mob-style “hits” to make sure these witnesses can’t talk.
Now that congressional members on both sides of the aisle have decided it might be worth taking a look at the Defense Department’s “murder people in boats” program, we’re finally learning more than the Trump administration has been willing to share about these extrajudicial killings.
The administration’s lawyers have cobbled together justifications for these actions — OLC (Office of Legal Counsel) memos that rely heavily on claims that trafficking drugs (whether or not those drugs ever end up in the United States) is the same thing as engaging in a conventional war against the US government and its citizens.
All that’s really happening is this: the US military is sinking boats in international waters it claims are loaded with drugs. That alone would be horrific enough, especially since drug interdiction processes have historically always involved the seizure of alleged drug boats and their occupants, not justified-after-the-fact drone strikes.
Most legal experts believe these actions are illegal. No court has ruled otherwise, which means Trump will keep doing them until (and, most likely, after) they’ve been found to be illegal.
One recent boat strike has not only undercut the Trump administration’s justifications for these attacks, but has exposed the ruling party as bloodthirsty thugs willing to cross the line into war crimes just because it can.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the U.S. military on Sept. 2 to kill all 11 people on a suspected drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean Sea because they were on an internal list of narco-terrorists who U.S. intelligence and military officials determined could be lethally targeted, the commander overseeing the operation told lawmakers in briefings this past week, according to two U.S. officials and one person familiar with the congressional briefings.
[…]
The detail that the 11 people on the boat were on an internal U.S. military target list has not previously been made public. It adds another dimension to the Sept. 2 operation that has been mired in controversy over the military’s decision to launch a second strike after the first left two survivors in the water.
It’s that last sentence that’s raising an issue here even Republican representatives are having difficulty defending. The recording of the September boat strike (which has yet to be released to the public) shows two survivors of the first strike clinging to the boat wreckage and waving their arms in hopes of being rescued.
The administration has made a couple of claims about what’s shown in this recording. First, it claims the survivors were waving to their compatriots, hoping to be rescued along with whatever drugs had survived the first strike. It also insists this “waving” is indicative of drug traffickers who wish to remain “in the fight.” In other words, the government is insisting any boat strike survivors who refuse to immediately die are only interested in delivering their drug payload, rather than simply being the byproduct of violent acts: the people who somehow manage to live through a government attack designed to kill them.
For nearly an hour, DoD personnel — including Admiral Bradley — discussed what to do with these impertinent “traffickers” who had somehow survived the initial strike. According to Bradley, he ordered a second strike. When that failed to sink the wreckage the survivors were clinging to, he ordered two more strikes, ceasing his attack only after the boat was sunk and both survivors were definitively dead.
The head of the Defense Department — Pete Hegseth — continues to claim he neither ordered the additional strikes, nor had any knowledge there had been survivors of the first strike. This simply cannot be true given his position and access to boat strike footage. Furthermore, both the administration and Hegseth himself released truncated recordings of this boat strike while bragging about their willingness to engage in extrajudicial killings in international waters.
There’s no reason to believe this boat strike program is legal. Pretty much everyone outside of the administration and Trump’s MAGA gravitational pull have stated as much. The administration itself is still struggling to generate legal rationale for these strikes. What it has produced so far is just as incoherent as its defense of this “double tap” attack that targeted shipwreck survivors, including its absurd claim that the less threatening these alleged traffickers appear to be, the more the administration is justified in killing them and removed the obligation for Trump to approach Congress to ask permission to continue the extrajudicial killings.
It is considered a war crime to kill shipwrecked people, which the Pentagon’s law of war manual defines as people “in need of assistance and care” who “must refrain from any hostile act.” Although most Republicans have signaled support for President Donald Trump’s broader military campaign in the Caribbean, the secondary strike on September 2 has drawn bipartisan scrutiny — including, most consequentially, a vow from the Senate Armed Services Committee to conduct oversight.
While the laws surrounding the executive branch deployment of military force have been significantly diluted since 2001 (the current Authorization of Use of Military Force [AUMF] is still in effect, 25 years later but was only supposed to be in response to terrorists connect to the 9/11 attacks), the administration can’t simply wave awayliteral war crimes by claiming people just trying to survive the sinking of their boat constituted a clear and present threat to the United States that demanded three additional US military strikes to ensure they were dead and their boat was completely destroyed.
And if you still think none of the above is persuasive, there’s also this fact: the boat hit by four military strikes wasn’t even headed towards the United States. It was headed to another South American country that usually serves as a transport point for drugs headed away from the US.
The alleged drug traffickers killed by the US military in a strike on September 2 were heading to link up with another, larger vessel that was bound for Suriname — a small South American country east of Venezuela – the admiral who oversaw the operation told lawmakers on Thursday, according to two sources with direct knowledge of his remarks.
[…]
US drug enforcement officials say that trafficking routes via Suriname are primarily destined for European markets. US-bound drug trafficking routes have been concentrated on the Pacific Ocean in recent years.
It’s immediately apparent that this boat strike program has nothing to do with deterring trafficking and everything to do with the administration’s desire to destroy anything and anyone coming from countries south of our southern border. I mean, it’s already made it clear it won’t prosecute military troops or officials for engaging in illegal activities related to its boat strike program.
With that deterrent removed, the only constraint left is the consciences of those asked to carry out the administration’s orders. And anyone with a functional sense of right and wrong will find themselves out of a job during the next Trump administration purge cycle until there’s no one left to refuse to do Trump’s dirty work.
For weeks, we’ve been told the threat posed by the trafficking of illegal drugs is indistinguishable from an outright declaration of war on the United States by foreign drug cartels. Trump and his toadies insist traffickers are bringing drugs across the border to “kill” Americans, which would be an entirely self-defeating business plan no self-respecting cartel would ever engage in. Obviously, he’s lying, as are those who speak for him.
But those lies are being used to buttress something even more awful than our usual War on Drugs: the extrajudicial murders of people only suspected to be moving drugs from Venezuela to… well, anywhere else but Venezuela. There are plenty of people between the United States and Venezuela who might be interested in purchasing/trafficking drugs. To insist that these drugs (if they exist at all) are headed to the US border with the intent of “killing” cartels’ customer bases is a lie so stupid it shouldn’t be given the dignity of a one-sentence debunking.
Trump is playing hardball in international waters, straight up murdering people simply because their boats have departed from Venezuelan shores. And while he keeps constructing his “Savior of America” facade, he’s so self-interested he can’t stop himself from undercutting his own narratives.
The man is a blend of involuntary muscle movements and brain stem-level thinking. “DRUGS ARE KILLING US” he screams into the bullhorn he owns (TruthSocial). Meanwhile, back at the Oval Office, he’s letting the drug dealers he personally likes off the hook.
President Trump announced on Friday afternoon that he would grant “a Full and Complete Pardon” to a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who, as the center of a sweeping drug case, was found guilty by an American jury last year of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.
The news came as a shock not only to Hondurans, but also to the authorities in the United States who had built a major case and won a conviction against Mr. Hernández. They had accused him of taking bribes during his campaign from Joaquín Guzmán, the notorious former leader of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico known as “El Chapo,” and of running his Central American country like a narco state.
As several current and former government officials noted in that preliminary reporting, Trump’s actions were not only harmful to foreign relations and ongoing anti-drug trafficking efforts, but also made a mockery of Trump’s other statements about going hard on drugs.
A day later, nothing had changed but the status of Juan Orlando Hernandez’s pardon, which was now a fact, rather than a threat. And, of course, it was Classic Trump™, all the way down to the New York Times’ coverage of it.
Mr. Trump signaled on Saturday that he was ratcheting up his campaign against drug cartels, saying in a social media post that airspace above and surrounding Venezuela should be considered “CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.”
Less than 24 hours earlier, Mr. Trump had announced on social media that he was granting a full pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, a former president of Honduras who had been convicted in the United States of drug trafficking charges in what was seen as a major victory for authorities in a case against a former head of state. That pardon has not yet been officially granted.
The two posts displayed a remarkable dissonance in the president’s strategy, as he moved to escalate a military campaign against drug trafficking while ordering the release of a man prosecutors said had taken “cocaine-fueled bribes” from cartels and “protected their drugs with the full power and strength of the state — military, police and justice system.” In fact, prosecutors said that Mr. Hernández, for years, allowed bricks of cocaine from Venezuela to flow through Honduras en route to the United States.
Oh NYT, that’s not “remarkable dissonance.” And it certainly isn’t the “display” of “contradictions” claimed in the headline.
The word the NYT is looking for (in both cases) is “hypocrisy.” These are hypocritical acts performed by a president who resolutely does not care that he’s the embodiment of hypocrisy. There’s no “contradiction” or “dissonance.” This is how Trump operates. His “shut down the borders” yelling obviously clashes horribly with his decision to pardon a foreign drug trafficker, but everything about it is entirely consistent with all known Trump actions/statements to date. It may look like dissonance to someone who just emerged from a 12-year coma today, but it looks exactly like Trump business as usual to everyone else.
This doesn’t mean this hypocrisy should be ignored. It absolutely shouldn’t. It just means we shouldn’t use nicer words that suggest an error of judgment might have taken place, because that just gives a deliberately hypocritical act (one of several!) by Trump a veneer of plausible deniability it certainly goddamn doesn’t deserve.
