When President Donald Trump first announced that he had ordered the Pentagon to attack fishing boats and speedboats on the high seas which he said carried dangerous drugs destined for willing buyers in the United States, many of us who monitor the government for its indifference to the Constitution perceived it as truly criminal and utterly scandalous.
The military commits murder when it intentionally kills a civilian non-combatant who poses no immediate threat to the U.S. or to military personnel. The crime is committed by all personnel in the chain of command who knowingly participate in these attacks.
The order to kill civilian non-combatants is an unlawful order which the military personnel who receive it have a legal and moral duty to challenge and either decline to carry out or resign from the military.
It was scandalous because the president and his secretary of defense boasted about it.
When this view was articulated by six members of Congress, the secretary of defense sought — without a hearing — to reduce the military pension of one of them who is a retired Navy captain, and the Department of Justice sought to indict all six. Trump called for their summary execution.
The federal judge to whom the challenge of the Pentagon’s pay reduction order was assigned ruled that never in American history had a recipient of a military pension had it reduced for pure speech, much less a recipient who is also a U.S. Senator. He invalidated the pension reduction.
Then, when the DoJ presented its case against the six members of Congress to a grand jury in the District of Columbia and asked the grand jurors to indict the six for disturbing the morale of the military, the grand jury declined to do so.
Bear in mind that at a grand jury proceeding, there is no judge or defense counsel present. The grand jurors hear only what the government wants them to hear; and still they told the government: No.
I offer this background as a baseline to examine the thinking of the Trump administration officials involved in this sordid business. They believe they can kill and punish without due process and prosecute those who verbally challenge them.
While the military committed murder, the prosecutors who sought to indict members of Congress for speech committed misconduct in office because they employed the tools of government in direct contravention of the Constitution.
It gets worse.
Last year, we learned that after a targeted attack on a speedboat in September had failed to kill all of its occupants, the admiral in charge ordered a second strike so as to kill the three survivors as they were clinging to debris and trying to stay alive. This, too, was an act of murder; and, like all these boat attacks, a war crime.
War crimes are not pardonable by the president and may be prosecuted by any sovereign nation at any time. War crimes have no statute of limitations or venue requirements for prosecution.
In response to the public and congressional outcry over the murders of the hapless boat attack survivors, the Pentagon began to rescue survivors whom it failed to kill. When Pentagon lawyers asked DoJ lawyers what to do with them and DoJ lawyers asked for the evidence of their crimes, the Pentagon demurred and promptly transported them home. What evidence there was — if any — was destroyed by the Pentagon, yet another crime.
Last week, we learned of two developments that altered this landscape. When two of the survivors whom the military brought home served notice of their intent to sue the government for a violation of their civil rights by attempting to kill them, and when the families of two of the non-survivors of the same attack served notice of intent to sue the government for wrongful death, we learned that the Pentagon had stopped its policy of rescuing survivors and began calling in the Coast Guard— which is no longer in the Pentagon but rather in the Department of Homeland Security — to do the rescuing.
We also learned last week that when an attack on Dec. 30 left eight survivors, and the Coast Guard was called to rescue them, it took 44 hours for the Coast Guard rescue plane to arrive on the scene.
The Pentagon now refuses to inform the Coast Guard of its planned attacks — as it apparently mistrusts its sister agency with any foreknowledge of killings. Those DHS folks are apparently in no hurry to rescue survivors either. The Coast Guard plane that eventually arrived at the site of the Pentagon attack only to find an empty sea took an absurd 3,000-mile circuitous route from Los Angeles north to Lake Tahoe then west to Sacramento then south passing over Los Angeles to Costa Rica and then west to the search area 650 nautical miles out to sea in the Pacific Ocean.
What’s going on here?
What’s going on is a deliberate series of secret macabre government decisions that — contrary to law — it is better for survivors to drown at sea than have all this played out in a federal court room. The law, of course, regards these uncharged persons — living and dead — as innocent and it imposes upon the military that killed them, not a largely domestic agency it mistrusts, the legal obligation to rescue the survivors.
This criminal indifference to human life transgresses the natural law, the Constitution and federal statutes. But it is worse than that. It reveals a deep-seated nihilism animating the Trump administration. Nihilism rejects all standards of human behavior, recognizes no restraints on the exercise of power and accepts no universal concepts of right and wrong.
The price for this nihilism abroad is a government at home that fails to protect the rights of persons, operates without transparency and respects no laws. Who voted for this?
