The Perfid Crime
Pete Hegseth loves to repeat the mantra F-ck Around and Find Out. The testosterone-fueled, speak loudly and carry a big schtick threat is meant to be directed toward America’s enemies. But the truth is that, under Hegseth, it’s America’s own military that has been effing around, and so far, we’re finding out there are few, if any, consequences. The capture of Maduro has taken the boat bombings off the front pages, and as is the case with so many stories in the Trump news cycle, new scandals replace previous scandals at a pace that makes it almost impossible to maintain a national focus on any of them. But let’s not move on just yet. The Trump administration has argued that the boat bombings are militarily kosher because “there is an armed conflict with suspected drug runners.” That’s clearly not true, but let’s pretend for a minute that this is a war-like armed conflict, and we’re not simply exercising law enforcement actions that amount to extrajudicial murder. Then the bombings would be allowed under international law, right? Well, maybe, if every layer you peeled back on every action taken by Trump and Hegseth didn’t expose more criminality. The NYT (Gift Article) on why, even if the boat bombings weren’t plain old crimes, some of them were probably war crimes. U.S. Attacked Boat With Aircraft That Looked Like a Civilian Plane. “The nonmilitary appearance is significant, according to legal specialists, because the administration has argued its lethal boat attacks are lawful — not murders — because President Trump ‘determined’ the United States is in an armed conflict with drug cartels. But the laws of armed conflict prohibit combatants from feigning civilian status to fool adversaries into dropping their guard, then attacking and killing them. That is a war crime called ‘perfidy.'” So we basically have illegal strikes carried out in an unlawful manner. It’s no wonder that Hegseth is so determined to punish Mark Kelly for participating in a video in which Senators “called on troops to uphold the Constitution and not to follow the Trump administration’s military directives if they were unlawful.” Stating the simple laws of the land is considered seditious, and breaking those laws from the coast of Venezuela to the streets of Minneapolis is the new norm. That’s what the eff we’re quickly finding out. And if things continue to slide, America will be fubar.
