Slander the Murdered

 The scrutiny on Capitol Hill this week of the alleged "double-tap" drone strike on a boat in the Caribbean has revealed something profoundly disturbing: namely, the large number of our elected officials, both in Congress and the executive branch, who now just officially and publicly support the extrajudicial execution of anyone suspected of transporting drugs. 

Which—as a friend of mine pointed out the other week—places our government on the same moral level as former Philippine strongman Rodrigo Duterte—currently under arrest in the Hague for killing criminal suspects without charge or trial. That's what our supposedly democratic government has been reduced to in just eleven months of Trump's rule. 

If this monstrousness were all emanating from the White House, it would be horrible enough—but not surprising. I expect this sort of thing from Trump and Hegseth. The even more revolting spectacle this past week, though, has been to see the number of congresspeople who are willing to carry water for the regime on this issue and become complicit in its crimes. 

I have a number of concerns: first, we're spending all this time on the "double-tap" strike, which allows Trump and Pete Hegseth to displace responsibility further down the chain of command. What we should be shouting from the rooftops is that every one of these strikes, "double-tap" or not—each of which Trump and Hegseth have ordered and applauded—has been an obscene crime and a human rights violation. 

Every one of them has been an obvious and unapologetic strike on a civilian vessel. The administration never pretended otherwise—they never claimed that these boats were carrying anything that posed a direct military threat to U.S. forces. So, even on the administration's own version of events, the people killed in these strikes were at worst criminal suspects—i.e., civilians. And that makes killing them either a war crime or just plain murder. 

And the White House has no place to hide from this, because they've been bragging about each murder as it occurred. 

Congress has been poring all week over videos of the suspected "double-tap" strike, which provides an opportunity for regime apologists to try and reinterpret them. But meanwhile, Pete Hegseth and Trump's other henchmen have already posted videos of these murders for all to see—at least one of which already clearly showed a disabled, incapacitated vessel; and all of which show unarmed people perishing in the most horrific ways. 

(Shelley's image in a poem comes to mind, of Sidmouth and Castlereagh as a pair of sharks and ocean scavengers following a slave ship, in order to feast on human corpses left in its wake. I'm picturing Hegseth now with two rows of razor-teeth and a dorsal fin trailing these small fishermen's boats.)

None of the boats depicted in these videos was a military craft. None of the people being engulfed in flames in these videos—whose last instants of life have now been turned into murder porn for the delectation of millions of the regime's social media followers—had any ability to defend themselves. They are all plainly unarmed and helpless. 

So, however much the administration tries to explain away the "double-tap"—they have no legal or moral defense for the entire campaign of drone killings that has so far executed 87 civilians without charge or trial. 

But even if we ignore all of that context and focus solely on the "double-tap" strike, as the media this past week has encouraged us to do—the apologists' attempt to justify it have been particularly pathetic and grotesque. 

Congresspeople who have seen video footage of the second strike, which killed the survivors of the first, have pointed out that it plainly shows an overturned vessel and a number of helpless people in the water being blown up. Which looks an awful lot like a war crime of exactly the sort—firing on the shipwrecked—that the Pentagon's own manual of the laws of war forbids as an illegal order. 

The regime's congressional apologists have therefore had to get creative in coming up with alternative explanations for what they saw in the video. Maybe—some of them suggested—when the men on the overturned vessel waved for help, they were actually signaling to other drug traffickers (no other boats or aircraft were reported in the vicinity). 

Tom Cotton, though—Senator from Arkansas—wins the prize for the most obscene propaganda. "I saw two survivors trying to flip a boat [...] back over," he reportedly said, "so they could stay in the fight." 

"The fight" here being—on the administration's theory—the attempt to smuggle drugs, which are indirectly bound for a U.S. market, where they might indirectly contribute to overdose deaths someday (even though these boats are generally understood to be carrying powder cocaine—not linked to any major public health crisis in the U.S.—rather than the far deadlier fentanyl). 

Cotton knows this is absurd. He has to lie and say absurd things anyway, because that is the only possible way to justify what is plainly an act of murder. 

It's also plain that what he's doing here is a deliberate piece of dehumanization. He's trying to portray the men on these boats as inhuman fiends—possessed with a daemoniac, monomaniacal urge to do nothing other than deliver deadly drugs into the veins of Americans. 

Even though we all know they are nothing of the sort. They are fishermen. If they are in fact carrying drugs (and we have no public evidence or indictment or trial to confirm it), it was—as the Associated Press recently reported—most likely because they were looking to pick up a measly $500 pay-out to their family by moving a kilo of coke alongside their usual catch. 

These are people at the very bottom of the hierarchy of the international drug trade. Maybe they made a bad choice—but, as an author pointed out in the New York Times yesterday, it's not one that our laws normally would subject to the death penalty—still less without a charge or trial first!

But Cotton needs to turn them into monsters—fiends driven by a mad urge to do nothing but shove drugs up the noses of the gringos (which the former Honduran president JOH is actually alleged to have said he would do, by the way—but Trump pardoned him this week)—rather than being what they are—low-level drug couriers and fishermen who made a bad life decision. 

He needs to engage in this work of dehumanization so that the American people's conscience will not be troubled by their own president and Secretary of Defense posting videos online of these human beings being murdered in broad daylight. 

So, go ahead, Tom Cotton: 

Slander the murdered, libel the dead, 

burden your guilt on the innocent dead, [...]

call them 'barbarians,' you who have murdered 

—to quote the poet Harry Alan Potamkin.

These men were not given any chance in life to defend themselves in court from accusations of carrying drugs—before their lives were snuffed out—so why should they be allowed to defend themselves now in death from Cotton's posthumous smears? 

The administration, with their strikes and "double-tap" war crimes, has made sure these men will be silent forever. They will never be able to tell us the real reason they were signaling for aid or trying to cling to the overturned vessel—even though anyone with the slightest empathy would realize the obvious explanation is the ordinary drive for human self-preservation, not some sinister plot to "stay in the fight." 

They will never be able to defend themselves, so Cotton can "slander the murdered," and "call them barbarians" to his heart's content. 

To which, all I can think to reply with is a stanza from Kenneth Rexroth (in his poem, "Thou Shalt Not Kill," which turned me onto Potamkin in the first place): 

The Gulf Stream smells of blood

As it breaks on the sand of Iona

And the blue rocks of Canarvon.

And all the birds of the deep sea rise up

Over the luxury liners and scream,

“You killed him! You killed him.

In your God damned Brooks Brothers suit,

You son of a bitch.”