The Borderline Constitution
A News Link Round-Up
Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with updates on an ongoing campaign of war crimes, the deportation state versus the Constitution, the MAGA kakistocracy, the fraud behind the $1.776 billion “slush fund,” and Ukraine’s emerging dominance on the battlefield.
A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.
We Literally Hanged People at Nuremberg for This
The President Has Murdered 200 People Instead of Arresting Them. We Won’t Forget.
More than 200 people have now been killed in Trump’s campaign against “drug boats” since it began in early September….
If you don’t already, I want you to understand that this is not a close legal question, and it never was. I’ve been warning that this exact thing was coming for years because I sat in one of the rooms while the idea was first floated. The first time we showed Donald Trump the map of maritime drug routes into America in 2018, on a trip to Key West, his aides started chattering about ways to go “full Sicario” (the 2015 film about the CIA launching a cartel war) literally on the flight home. Stephen Miller asked whether armed US drones could simply fire on boats in international waters, and whether the people aboard were protected by the Constitution.
The answer back was simple. It didn’t require any legal consultation. It would be illegal, we told him. You cannot kill unarmed civilians because a president has decided to call them terrorists. Stephen Miller dropped it. Yet eight years later, he is reportedly one of the architects of the policy he once denied ever discussing….
Any person involved in this on the inside probably has their Google alerts turned on to notify them of each shred of news about this program. To see if Congress was opening a broader inquiry. To see if people are still talking about whether it’s “legal,” hoping the country will finally forget. Which is why there’s a real chance that someone tied to the drug-boat murders will stumble across this article.
So I want to address the final portion of this piece to them—the people participating in Trump’s deadly strikes.
Maybe you signed one of the pieces of paper that made this possible. Perhaps you stayed in the room when you should’ve walked out. Trust me, I’ve been there before. Or maybe you drafted a talking point you knew was a lie, or relayed an order you knew was unlawful. Right now, you’re telling yourself the comforting thing that everyone in your position tells themselves. They’ll forget about me. I’m too far down the list. I’ll keep my head down, and this will pass.
I’m going to break the hard news to you. We won’t forget.
