The gop nazi's are 'making up new rules', 'they're inventing excuses'... they're making up new rules...they're inventing excuses... ... after the fact.
The Trump administration sinks to a new low – opening fire on drowning men
"It's the boats, stupid -- Trump officials say second strike aimed to destroy drug boat instead of crew"
Related: Pete Hegseth Should Be Charged With Murder No matter how you look at the strikes on alleged “drug boats”—as acts of war or attacks on civilians—Hegseth has committed a crime and should be prosecuted. [...]Domestically, the Uniform Code of Military Justice would have more teeth when it comes to holding Hegseth accountable. Again, even during actual wars, killing unarmed civilians is a crime. I have some hope that the military will do something to rein Hegseth in because, while Hegseth is primarily responsible for these killings, his orders put other military personnel at risk. Hegseth might be politically protected (for now), but every single service member involved in killing unarmed civilians (I’m looking under the bus at you, Admiral Bradley) could also be charged with a crime. P - In fact, these military courts are my best bet for accountability for Hegseth and all his willing underlings—once there is a change in our regime. That is what happens (at least sometimes, on rare occasions) when crimes are committed. The regime that authorizes the war crimes never self-police. We have to wait until that regime is out of power.
These deadly US boat strikes are the latest example of a president corrupting both the law and morality
Sat 6 Dec 2025 05.12 AEDT
People protest against the US military's deployment and targeting of suspected drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean, in St Petersburg, Florida, 16 November 2025. Photograph: Dave Decker/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
The Trump administration looks ever more like a criminal enterprise – and now it seems to have added war crimes to its repertoire. Though even that may be too generous a description.
On Thursday, word came that the US military had launched yet another deadly strike on a small boat moving through international waters. This time the attack killed four people, bringing to at least 87 the number of people the US has killed in a series of 22 such strikes on what it says are drug boats – vessels carrying illicit narcotics in the Caribbean or eastern Pacific.
This has been happening for months, but the issue has only just drawn political heat thanks to a Washington Post investigation of the first such attack on 2 September. The paper reported that US forces hit the targeted boat once, then hit it again – the second strike killing two survivors clinging to the wreckage. According to the Post, the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, had issued a verbal command to “kill them all”.
Now that incident is under congressional scrutiny, with even some Republicans uneasy about what appears to be a clearcut case of a war crime. The defence department’s own Law of War manual forbids precisely this kind of action, spelling it out in black and white on page 448 .. https://ogc.osd.mil/Portals/99/Law%20of%20War%202023/DOD-LAW-OF-WAR-MANUAL-JUNE-2015-UPDATED-JULY%202023.pdf?ver=Qbxamfouw4znu1I7DVMcsw%3d%3d : “Members of the armed forced and other persons … who are wounded, sick or shipwrecked, shall be respected and protected in all circumstances.” Not that you should need a manual to tell you that. The law of the sea demands that you rescue those at risk of drowning; basic human decency demands that you don’t fire on them.
Trump loyalists have denied that Hegseth gave an explicit order that everyone on board be killed and have tried to argue that the two men in the water were legitimate targets because they had proved themselves to be still “in the fight”, perhaps by calling in help from fellow “narco terrorists” nearby. Democrats who have seen the same classified footage of the incident say that, on the contrary, the video shows the killing of men in distress, their vessel destroyed and posing no threat.
That would constitute a war crime, but for one thing: there is no war. The Trump administration says that the boats in its sights are ferrying drugs – fentanyl and the like, which kill Americans – from Venezuela to the US and that the traffickers are part of a “designated terrorist organisation”. In effect, it argues that the “war on drugs” is an actual war, in which the US military has the right to act as it would against any other armed enemy.
But the laws of war don’t work like that. As Sarah Yager of Human Rights Watch explained to the Guardian, a US president “can’t just make up a conflict”. Of course, Donald Trump would dismiss the demand that for a war to be legal it has first to be declared by a congressional vote, but harder to brush off is the fact that the supposed enemy in this case poses nothing that could reasonably be described as a military threat. These are small boats that may or not be carrying drugs, with no serious means of defending themselves. The right way to deal with the danger they represent is the way they were dealt with under previous administrations – as a policing operation involving interception and arrest.
In other words, the problem here is not just the “double tap” incident that killed those two shipwreck survivors. It is the entire, months-long operation which has killed 87. In Yager’s words: “Nobody on those boats can be killed legally by the United States military.” Viewed like this, we are not contemplating a war crime on 2 September so much as a string of crimes: extrajudicial killings that, simply put, look like murder.
There could hardly be a graver charge, yet how has Hegseth himself responded? By posting a mocked-up cover of a children’s book, depicting the much-loved character Franklin the Turtle apparently aiming a rocket launcher at a group of boats, under the imagined title, Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists. As Logan Roy might put it, this is not a serious person.
[Insert: Not only the president but his underlings also see themselves as above the law.]
There is no need to pretend that Hegseth’s actions amount to the sullying of a previously clean reputation; no one is under any illusions as to the long and appalling record of the US in Latin America. Even so, the Trump administration is somehow managing to plumb new depths – and not only in that part of the world.
Europeans have long been alarmed at Trump’s lopsided approach to the Ukraine war, evinced most recently by his unveiling of a supposed peace plan that the White House was compelled to deny had originated in Russia, so closely did it resemble a Kremlin wishlist. The sixth and latest visit to Moscow of Trump’s golfing buddy and personal envoy, Steve Witkoff, this week, and his chumminess with Vladimir Putin, did little to dispel that impression.
What’s driving Team Trump’s push to end the war is not the hope of restoring Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence but rather the desire to cut a deal that would bring US businesses hundreds of billions of dollars. According to a major probe by the Wall Street Journal, what Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s handpicked envoy, have been negotiating in closed-door meetings in Miami and elsewhere is a grand bargain that would “bring Russia’s $2tn economy in from the cold”, while giving the US a slice of the action, whether access to $300bn or so of Russian central bank assets frozen in Europe or joint US-Russian ventures to exploit the enormous mineral wealth of the Arctic. Russia would end its isolation, Americans would get even richer and – an added bonus for Moscow – those pesky Europeans would be cut out.In the words of the Polish prime minister Donald Tusk: “We know this is not about peace. It’s about business.”
And to be clear, that business motive is not solely about enlarging the coffers of the US Treasury to benefit the hard-pressed US taxpayer. Note how Jared Kushner, who joined Witkoff in Moscow this week, saw his investment fund, Affinity Partners, enjoy billion-dollar cash infusions from the very Gulf monarchies with whom he negotiated as a White House official during his father-in-law’s first term. In Trump world, the boundary between public and private does not exist: what profits the US profits Trump and his circle.
[Trump Jr.-Backed Company Cashes In on Massive Pentagon Contract [...]A start-up funded by a Donald Trump Jr.-backed venture capital firm has been awarded a $620 million contract from the Pentagon, reports the Financial Times. P - Vulcan Elements, a small rare earths start-up, will receive the funds as part of a larger deal from the Defense Department. This $620 million loan is the largest made by the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital. P - It’s far from the first time Don Jr. has reaped the benefits of his daddy’s presidency. Vulcan is backed by the 1789 fund, where Trump Jr. sits on the board. Four of the companies in the 1789 fund’s portfolio have been awarded government contracts just this year, to the tune of more than $735 million overall, according to the FT. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=177031349]
A favourite example, if only for its vivid clarity, was the meeting this summer on board a superyacht moored off the coast of Sardinia. Present was Witkoff and a member of the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates in charge of $1.5tn of the UAE’s sovereign wealth. The two men had much to celebrate. In May, it had been announced that one of the sheikh’s investment firms would deposit $2bn into World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency outfit founded by the Witkoff and Trump families. Two weeks later, the White House granted the UAE access to specialist AI computer chips that had previously been off-limits, thanks to national security fears that the chips might find their way to China. What a happy coincidence it was that those two unrelated events followed each other so swiftly, and how convivial that encounter in Sardinia must have been.
The word corruption can be used in two ways. In its legal sense, it can refer to dishonest conduct by those in power, typically involving bribery. But it can also have a deeper meaning, referring to the corrosion of standards, the decline of norms and the removal of moral restraints. If and when Donald Trump and those who serve him, and themselves, are eventually called to account, they will be confronted by that single word, in all its shades – and all its force.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
Guardian newsroom: Year One of Trumpism: Is Britain Emulating the US? On Wednesday 21 January 2026, join Jonathan Freedland, Tania Branigan and Nick Lowles as they reflect on the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency – and to ask if Britain could be set on the same path. Book tickets here or at guardian.live
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