When open murder becomes official government policy

I want to follow up on this morning’s post about the Trump regime’s straightforward murder of suspected — or more likely “suspected” — drug smugglers. I think it’s a mistake to focus on whether the six people murdered yesterday were involved in drug smuggling, because whether or not they were is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT to the legalities, or rather the illegalities, of simply murdering them via the instrumentalities of the US military.

What’s striking here is that the Trump administration, unlike previous administrations, is not even pretending to have any legal justification for this. The second Bush administration went to enormous lengths to gin up a legal rationale for invading Iraq. The Reagan and Nixon administrations went to equally great lengths to hide the illegal Iran-Contra deal and the bombing of Cambodia, because they at least understood that breaking the law is something that, in a lawful regime, has to be done secretly if at all possible. (This is a striking illustration of the aphorism that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue).

JEC touches on a particularly disturbing aspect of all this:

As I understand it, the Trump Regime has so far refused to disclose its legal justification for these attacks. Which is manifestly insane. (To be clear, it has made statements gesturing in the vague direction of several ostensible justifications, but it has not committed to any particular one, nor has it disclosed any actual OLC or JAG legal opinion on the matter.)

Among other things, this means that we have no idea what the military understands itself to be doing. Clearly, the military leadership has bought some version of the Trump “justification.” But since we don’t know what that is, we have no idea what else is encompassed by that “reasoning,” and we have no idea what — if anything — the armed forces still won’t do.

The Trump regime has failed to do this for two reasons: there is no possible justification for this sort of murder, even with the most “creative” sorts of pseudo-legal arguments, and, more important, not even pretending to have a legal basis for murdering people you want to murder is the ultimate authoritarian flex.

Yes there’s a slippery slope here from the AUMF and the “war on terror,” certainly. But this is qualitatively different, because not even pretending to have a legal justification for murdering your opponents, real or perceived or fabricated, is crossing a legal Rubicon of great significance.

It’s true that the rule of law always depends on various fictions, absurdities, and suspensions of disbelief, but despite that it remains far preferable to its alternative, which is what this is. This passage from an Orwell essay written in the early days of WWII, when England was in a desperate struggle to avoid imminent conquest by fascists, captures that point in a different but related context:

An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is ‘just the same as’ or ‘just as bad as’ totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the castor oil? The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption cannot go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.

We are now rapidly losing our “familiar shape” here in America, not because of an invading army, but because of the enemy within. And, as in so many other moments in life, we are learning that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

. . . Trump authorizes (not) secret attempt to overthrow Venezuelan government.