Famous States

 The CIA was reportedly involved in providing key intelligence to enable the hit this week on an alleged cartel boss in Mexico. And even as Mexican authorities sought to downplay the level of U.S. involvement in the strike—perhaps for internal political reasons—Trump bragged about it openly. 

Given that the U.S. has murdered 150 people and counting in ongoing strikes on civilian vessels in the Caribbean and the Pacific—not to mention all those earlier U.S. drone strikes—it may seem that the taboo against extrajudicial killings and foreign assassinations has simply vanished. 

Still, it should concern us that the CIA apparently coordinated and abetted a capture and kill operation in a foreign country—what Ken Klippenstein refers to as the practice of "lethal doxxing." And this does indeed appear to be another extrajudicial murder: I've not seen any evidence there was a serious attempt to bring in this alleged drug lord by the book. 

And even if the U.S. government's role was really as limited as Claudia Sheinbaum has indicated—most analysts agree the killing was staged as a sop to Trump to forestall direct U.S. intervention. Mexican authorities felt they needed to deliver a "scalp" to Trump, as one analyst put it—an ominous phrase to anyone who's read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. 

In short, U.S. drug war hawks are finally getting some version of the covert ops and assassinations against drug kingpins that they've fantasized about for decades. I'm sure this is a wet dream for them. For the rest of us, it reeks only of what James Russell Lowell called the first Mexican-American war, in his Biglow Papers—namely: "murder."

In his great "Ode, Inscribed to William H. Channing," R.W. Emerson wrote scornfully of those who boasted about the superiority of American civilization or morals. "Behold the famous States," he wrote, "Harrying Mexico / With rifle and with knife!" He pointed as well to the other obvious injustice of his time: the Fugitive Slave Act. 

Both have eerie parallels with our own moment. Even as Trump has displayed military aggression in Mexico, Venezuela, and elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere—he is also busy kidnapping and abducting African refugees in order to illegally render them to third countries across the Atlantic—in what looks increasingly like a kind of reverse Middle Passage. 

Most recently, this policy has involved shipping people to a secret prison in Cameroon. When an Associated Press reporter tried to investigate the secret facility apparently holding people indefinitely at the best of the United States, and threatening them with deportation to the countries they originally fled—they were beaten and arrested in turn. 

I found by thee, O rushing Contoocook!

And in thy valleys, Agiochook!

The jackals of the negro-holder.

—as Emerson put it. Forced abductions of African nationals to face indefinite detention and bondage in their home countries. Plus sabre-rattling and "scalp" hunting in Mexico. It sounds indeed like the "famous States" are up to their old tricks of the 1840s. 

And if Trump wants to boast about these atrocities, as he did in the State of the Union speech, we can only say, with Emerson: "Go, blindworm, Go!"