Friday, September 05, 2025

“The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All The Lawyers”

 This is pretty much the outcome Shakespeare meant:

THE LETHAL STRIKE on a boat in the Caribbean on Tuesday was a criminal attack on civilians, according to a high-ranking Pentagon official who spoke to the Intercept on the condition of anonymity.

The Trump administration paved the way for the attack, he said, by firing the top legal authorities of the Army and the Air Force earlier this year.

“The U.S. is now directly targeting civilians. Drug traffickers may be criminals but they aren’t combatants,” the Department of Defense official said. “When Trump fired the military’s top lawyers the rest saw the writing on the wall, and instead of being a critical firebreak they are now a rubber stamp complicit in this crime.”
And that’s only the beginning:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth offered his own justification for the strike the same day. “Every boatload of any form of drug that poisons the American people is an imminent threat. And at the DoD our job is to defeat imminent threats,” he told a group of journalists. “A foreign terrorist organization poisoning your people with drugs coming from a drug cartel is no different than Al Qaeda, and they will be treated as such as they were in international waters.”

Two U.S. government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that Hegseth’s justification – which one called “completely unserious” – took shape after the attack.

Experts said Hegseth’s rationale was flimsy, if not farcical. “Tren de Aragua being designated as a foreign terrorist organization is a purely domestic law enforcement designation. It offers no authority for the military to use deadly force,” said Todd Huntley, who was an active-duty judge advocate for more than 23 years, serving as a legal advisor to Special Operations forces engaged in counterterrorism missions around the world. “Under international law, there’s no way this even gets close to being a legitimate use of force.”
So?
Hegseth said the attack would be followed by others. “It won’t stop with just this strike,” he told Fox News on Wednesday. “Anyone else trafficking in those waters who we know is a designated narco-terrorist will face the same fate.”
Oh, and about the lawyers:
Hegseth fired the Air Force’s and Army’s top judge advocates general (JAGs) in February to avoid “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.” The next month he commissioned his personal lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, as a Navy JAG and empowered him to help overhaul the JAG corps, reportedly pursuing changes that would encourage lawyers to approve more aggressive tactics and take a more lenient approach to those who violate the law of war. Parlatore’s prior claim to fame was successfully defending Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL accused of first-degree murder in the death of a captured ISIS fighter as well as the attempted murder of civilians in Iraq. Distinguished former JAGs and members of Congress have repeatedly spoken out about Hegseth’s efforts to undermine the independence of military legal counsel and subvert military justice.
This is fine. Right? Sure. This is fine.
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