If You Can’t Make It Right, Make It Legal

If You Can’t Make It Right, Make It Legal

American Enters Its Banana Republic Phase

In excess of $3 billion, some experts maintain… the increase in Trump family wealth, modestly estimated, from Trump’s tenure as President. I’ve gone over all of this before. I’ve covered “donors” to Trump’s various projects, from inauguration day to the construction of his completely regal ballroom (taking out the entire East Wing of the White House completely on his own), to all the products, assets and services hawked from his presidential perch, his campaign coffers… most of whom need the federal government on their side. For contracts, approvals, exemptions and even pardons. He has his own private law firm, masquerading as the Department of Justice (his “retribution” armada of lawyers), own private police force (anonymous ICE agents who do not need warrants and eschew due process to arrest anyone at will) and even his entire military able to attack boats at sea and threaten invasion of any nation he personally labels as terrorist or narco-terrorist… free of congressional or judicial oversight.

Our DOJ and the DOD have struggled with definitions of “torture” before, legitimizing what was globally acknowledged as torture – from waterboarding, exposure to extreme temperatures, hanging on the wall for hours at a time, religious and sexual humiliation and abuse, sleep deprivation, etc. – during the Iraqi and Afghan wars. But blowing boats out of the water, killing almost 100 without any proof of narco-trafficking, completely at whim… with a mini-Dr Evil Hegseth enjoying every deadly moment?! But the question arises, for every soldier of every rank who swore to protect the Constitution, we have to ask, if soldiers see obvious statutory or constitutional violations in their orders, do they have to follow them?

Retired Navy Captain, Jon Duffy, writing for the November 18th Los Angeles Times, addresses that issue: “If killing men in boats at sea were truly legal, we wouldn’t need a secret memo to say so… According to the Washington Post, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel quietly assured the Defense Department last week that U.S. service members cannot be prosecuted for the more than 20 ‘boat strikes’ that have killed at least 80 people in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. A memo like that does not speak the language of lawfulness. It speaks the language of guilt management and accountability avoidance. When a government must preemptively promise its warriors immunity, it is conceding that it has crossed a line.

“This is not an isolated excess. It is the continuation of a moral collapse that has unfolded, memo by memo, across decades of American warfare. The George W. Bush administration wrote the first of these permission slips when its lawyers redefined torture as ‘enhanced interrogation.’ The Obama administration rescinded those opinions — then used the same machinery of justification to rationalize drone strikes, including one that killed an American citizen in 2011 and another that killed his 16-year-old son. The party in charge may change, but the grotesque logic endures: If you can’t make it right, make it legal.

“President Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth have brought that logic to the open sea. Missiles fired from American aircraft are obliterating small open-hulled speedboats suspected of carrying drugs. There are no declarations of war, no charges, no trials. The Pentagon insists these killings are ‘lawful orders,’ vetted by lawyers ‘up and down the chain.’ That line should chill anyone who has ever worn a uniform. No law of armed conflict permits execution without combat. No one in those boats justifiably can be labeled a combatant. There is no moral universe in which vaporizing human beings in the middle of the ocean is an act of justice… Our allies see what we refuse to admit. The United Kingdom reportedly stopped sharing intelligence for these missions, unwilling to be complicit in acts that violate international law…

“Officers trained through their careers on principles like proportionality and restraint have outsourced their conscience to legal process. The logic goes that if the lawyers have signed off, ethics need no longer enter the equation. The “legal” justification acts as a sort of moral anesthesia. But every order carried out under that logic erodes the institution that gives it — and the soul of the person who obeys it… The phrase “lawful orders” has become the military’s institutional sedative. We repeat it to absolve ourselves of thinking, to pretend that justice can be delegated to paperwork. No matter how many knots a lawyer ties themselves in to get there, legality is not legitimacy.” Is that true? Pardon me? Exactly!

Also writing for the LA Times, columnist Jonah Goldberg ask whether the abuse of the presidential pardon power needs to be limited to what our Forefathers believed was a safety value for judicial missteps and excess. They assumed that anyone elected to the presidency would be a person of integrity and of good character. Wrong on both counts. “The problem: Congress’ impeachment power has proven to be a dead letter in the modern era of hyper-partisanship. Just as presidents cannot be trusted to use the pardon power responsibly, Congress cannot be trusted with the responsibility to hold presidents accountable. Without checks, there is no balance.

“There still should be room for pardons and clemency in our system. But leaving it solely in the power of presidents has led to evermore abuse. Indeed, I think it’s almost a certainty that Trump will use the Biden precedent to preemptively pardon much of his administration, his sons and himself before he leaves office. Given the ongoing weaponization of the justice system — and his abuse of it — he’d almost be a fool not to… The Constitution was written with men like George Washington in mind. When Washington opted to step down after two terms, it established a two-term tradition that endured until Franklin Roosevelt violated it. Afterward, we amended the Constitution to codify what had been a tradition.” But wait, there’s so much more.

The November 17th The Hartman Report, knowing that the Epstein papers were going to released at least at some level, Thom Hartmann wrote:

• Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex-trafficking ring are demanding Congress release all the files, and Trump was attacking Republicans for even considering going along with them (now he’s opened his own ‘investigation,’ which will prevent their public release regardless of Congress as he pretends to call for them to be made public.

• Trump incited a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol after insisting, against all evidence and over 60 court losses, that the 2020 election was stolen from him. That wasn’t protest: it was a violent assault on American democracy itself that led to the death of three police officers and the hospitalization of over 140 others. Yet the GOP continues to use Trump’s lie as a political weapon...

• He’s incited hate against those least able to defend themselves, promoting a culture of violence and intolerance. From people fleeing murder and rape in their own countries to those merely seeking a better life to American communities of queer people and religious and racial minorities, Trump has licensed the most base and disgusting elements in our society…

• His trade wars gutted American credibility, paved the way for bribes to himself and his boys, all while punishing the very supporters he claimed to champion.

How much corruption is enough? MAGA officials believe it is a perk of power, and that rigging elections is OK. Trump may hit some bumps after his Epstein loss, but he is already trying to turn the focus on Democrats… and there are so many “legal reasons” why the only “Epstein papers” we’re likely to see from the DOJ will be heavily redacted. Trump isn’t a lame duck yet, his MAGA minions are not going go away quietly and follow the Constitution… but until they do or are severely punished for not protecting what they all swore to protect…

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is really hard to see where the United States is on morally higher ground these days than some of those brutal banana republics, where money flows upward… and people who disagree just disappear.