Taibbi - Insane Clown Pentagon.

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In an effort to get a full legal picture about the issues involved with Donald Trump’s months-long campaign of strikes against suspected drug boats, I reached out as many people as I could think of: lawyers I knew and didn’t know, veterans I knew and didn’t, plus a few others who had things to add but ended up not being quoted in the forthcoming piece “Insane Clown Pentagon.” These people were nearly unanimous in denouncing the Venezuela operation as a nadir of the Trump era: “Probably the dumbest shite he’s pulled,” is how one appalled source put it.

A number of these people are not exactly Democratic partisans but still argued that whatever Trump is trying to do in Venezuela colors well outside the lines, even by War on Terror standards. Several sources said the closest parallel they could think of is Barack Obama’s Libyan bombing campaign, in which Obama was ripped for blowing past ostensible War Powers guidelines in an action that probably should be more infamous than it is. We also looked at past drone bombings, incuding campaigns that seem at least as gruesome as the allegations of the current scandal, which is how Greg Collard ended up with the upcoming “Original Double Tap” story. Greg’s interview with an original investigator of “double tap” drone strikes, Mustafa Qadri, offers a brutal (and surprising) short-cut comparison between then and now.

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This time, it’s not fake news. Donald Trump, War Secretary Pete Hegseth, Admiral Frank Mitchell Bradley, and soldiers involved with the September 2nd boat-bombing operation that allegedly involved firing a second time on survivors really do face serious legal exposure, with Trump and Hegseth even handing enemies potential grounds for impeachment through their own statements.

The administration’s behavior since Monday has been a master class in political dysfunction. Trump, Karoline Leavitt, and especially Hegseth created major political problems both by clumsily throwing troops under the bus at the first sign of scandal, and also by inadvertently giving evidence against themselves at the exact moment they’re facing a destabilizing challenge from Senators like Mark Kelly. How bad is it? Law professors and military analysts struggled to find words.

“fricking shameful, and I voted for these guys,” says a former Army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“It’s the kind of thing that makes military lawyers’ heads explode,” said Eugene Fiddell, who teaches military justice at Yale.

“Totally crazy,” added Michel Paradis, an author and human rights lawyer known for representing Guantanamo Bay detainees. “Even if I could come up with some sort of legal theory for why we can start bombing drug boats indiscriminately, you can’t shoot survivors.”

“It’s pretty remarkable that the United States has decided that at the — I’m not going to use the word whim — that at the discretion of the president, he can designate any criminal organization as a terrorist organization and start killing people as a measure of first resort,” said Geoffrey Corn, professor of law and a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel.

Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson described talking to service members who are struggling with these orders, adding that these missions also cross a line for him in a big way. “We’ve sort of enshrined under the banner of fighting terrorism this concept of extrajudicial killings,” he said. “Well, we’re now the goddamn Salvador death squads. It’s outrageous.”

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Democrats, Press Gloss Over Original "Double Tap" Operations

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On February 6th, 2012, fourteen years before the current controversy over Venezuelan boat bombings, Scott Shane of the New York Times wrote a story with the ominous title, U.S. Said to Target Rescuers in Drone Strikes. Though the phenomenon had been mentioned in academic reports previously, the Times piece was one of the first press organs in America to describe “follow-up” drone strikes, which came to be better known as “double tap” strikes.

The piece explained that British and Pakistani journalists had counted 50 civilians had died in recent “follow-up strikes” that sources on the ground claimed were intended to kill rescuers and first responders. The Times report elicited a bizarre non-denial denial from Barack Obama’s White House, in which an unnamed spokesman said we should “wonder” about “misinformation” coming from “elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and help Al Qaeda succeed.”

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What Trump is doing is expanding on something that already existed. That’s something important for people to realize. As an international lawyer, I’m a huge fan of the role the U.S. played in setting up the international legal system. The Americans were the ones who insisted people go to trial. That system is being systematically dismantled, and it’s really a worrying development.

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