The Murdering Of Boaters Is Public, Not Secret

Murdering boaters is not legal or illegal depending on whether the emperor has called his victims “terrorists.”

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War

Trump is murdering the occupants of boats in distant waters. The problem is not that any memos his flacks may have written about it are secret, as Jameel Jaffer wrote in Thursday’s New York Times. Ever since Rosa Brooks told a Congressional committee that Obama was either murdering lots of people or doing something perfectly acceptable, depending on the words in memos he was keeping secret, lawyers have been arguing that presidential-missile-related failures to keep breathing are a problem for transparency. Jaffer concludes:

“The courts should not debase our democracy by pretending that there are good national security justifications for keeping us in the dark.”

This nation has never had anything remotely resembling a democracy, but if it did, it would be debased by MURDERING PEOPLE, not by failing to publish a memo on why you think it’s legal to murder people.

Murdering people is not a problem because stuff a demented fool said about those people hasn’t been proven, as Senator Rand Paul, like thousands of others, has suggested on social media: “We don’t blow up boats off Miami because 25% of the time suspicion is wrong. We shouldn’t do it off Venezuela either.”

You could be 100% certain that these boats were built out of pure cocaine, and murdering everyone on them would still be murder. Strong suspicion of a crime, for a law abiding society, leads to prosecution for said crime, not blowing up boats and anyone on them or near them.

Murdering people is not a problem because it’s not part of a war, or because a war has not been authorized by Congress, as Congresswoman Ilhan Omar suggested in introducing a war powers resolution that Speaker Mike Johnson has illegally refused to hold a vote on:

“It was not self-defense or authorized by Congress. That is why I am introducing a resolution to terminate hostilities against Venezuela, and against the transnational criminal organizations that the Administration has designated as terrorists this year.”

Congress has no power to legalize crime. It cannot authorize mass rape. It cannot authorize mass torture. It cannot authorize mass murder. Venezuela and Colombia are nations with laws against murder. When you murder people there, you are not in the Land of the Southern Command, but in somebody’s country violating its laws. And the world has laws against war, starting with the United Nations Charter. You can fail to hold a vote, like the House — or vote a measure down like the Senate — on redundantly declaring a particular war forbidden — or you can issue a declaration of war from the tippy top of Capitol Hill declaring a war acceptable — but you won’t have legalized a war.

In our culture, where advocates for war are given peace prizes, war in general is treated as the weather or law enforcement, while particular oddities in a war become “war crimes.” Thursday’s The Guardian even gives Russia this benefit, writing:

“In 2024, nearly a million hectares of Ukraine’s land burned. Heat, mines and shelling contributed, but footage of drones targeting firefighters has raised the question of war crimes.”

Get it? Shelling is standard war murder and destruction. Even mines are respectable, now that NATO governments want them. The general course of a mass murder operation is untouchable (otherwise you might have things like a conviction of the Israeli government in a court of law). But targeting firefighters raises “the question of war crimes.” It’s also always a question. Always. Always. Always. I challenge you to find a reference to war crimes not accompanied by “the question of” or “the possibility of” — as if mere mortals just can’t tell by looking at an enormous public spectacle livestreamed before their eyes (that might require a society that actually thought like a democracy), as if it’s going to come down to what’s on important pieces of paper. And as if every element of a war is not a crime because the war is a crime.

Murdering boaters is not legal or illegal depending on whether the emperor (the imbecile now demolishing the East Wing with money from weapons dealers paid to construction workers even though the funders’ own products would have been faster) has called his victims “terrorists.” Judging by what the (presumably human) users of social media think, the belief is very, very widespread that once a president says “terrorist,” he can kill you. Of course YOU don’t need to worry about that the way that, you know, certain people might, except that Trump has publicly declared that people who disagree with him are terrorists. Have you ever disagreed with him?

The solution is not to get Trumpolini to take back that royal decree, but first and foremost to admit that murder is still murder even if the murderer shouts “terrorist.” If we cannot admit that, then there is no amount of secrecy, or much else at all, that can debase us. We have debased ourselves all the way down to the core of the Earth.