Beyond the Pale

USNI News:

4 Dead in Latest U.S. Strike on Suspected Narco Boat

U.S. forces struck a suspected narco drug boat, killing four people on board, Thursday in the Eastern Pacific following a three-week gap in publicized strikes.

The death toll has climbed to 87 killed, of which 86 were killed in the strikes and one person was presumed dead after being lost at sea. Two wounded survivors were repatriated to their home countries.

The Independent:

President Donald Trump raged at a female ABC News reporter, calling her “the most obnoxious,” after she asked whether his administration would commit to releasing the double-tap boat strike video.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said he didn’t order the second strike against an alleged drug-running vessel on September 2, the first of more than a dozen U.S. strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific against what administration officials call “narcoterrorists.” In a tense exchange at a White House roundtable Monday, Trump insisted that he never said he’d release footage of the double-tap strike — which he’d promised to make public just four days earlier — and simultaneously fired off his latest attack against a female reporter.

We join the ‘liberal’ press in chronicling America’s descent into violence and corruption. But unlike the New York Times and the Washington Post we see it as a bi-partisan affair and take no pleasure in reporting it. Our guess is that, like an invasive peste on a banana boat, a dreadful worm came in with our maggot money…and now…

Foreign policy. Domestic policy. The Budget…the dollar…the Department of Justice…the Pentagon — the worm chews through the essential organs.

The most dramatic expression of this slimy wiggler is neither $38 trillion of national debt nor a 35x increase in the price of a new Ford F-150 (since 1971). It’s more than just money; as the dollar declined, decency went down with it.

The US began assassinating people, or attempting to do so, in the 1960s. The first target, arguably, was Patrice Lumumba, who led the Congo to independence from Belgium. The CIA thought he had been ‘bought’ by the Soviets. Others simply saw African independence as a disagreeable trend. Even the usually sensible Dwight Eisenhower thought the world would be better off without him.

But when it was suggested to Ike that the African leader should be assassinated, he replied: ‘That would be beyond the pale.’

That was in the early ‘60s. But the pale moved. Come the Vietnam war and the US was taking part in dozens of ‘extra-judicial’ killings. The Church Committee heard testimony of 634 different schemes that had been proposed to eliminate Fidel Castro.

Then, after a pause, the Bush administration opened up the throttle on the homicidal machine. Thousands of High Value Targets were struck in Iraq. Good people? Bad people? It turned out, nobody even knew who they were. When Daniel Hale released documents showing that more than 90% of the people killed were not the intended targets, he was charged with stealing classified documents and sent to jail.

As we reported yesterday, Barack Obama kept the tradition going with his ‘kill lists.’ And the press did not merely turn a blind eye…it reported the murders approvingly.

And now, once again, the US is on a spree. This time it is killing neither enemies nor terrorists…nor heads of state…nor politicians nor combatants. The US has declared ‘war’ against people with no large calibre weapons, no ships, no planes, no army, no service academies, no official ranks, no tanks, no personnel carriers, no veterans’ benefits, no military bases, no artillery, no uniforms…no nothing.

Karoline Leavitt says of the critics:

They are attacking the brave men and women who have conducted these strikes well within the law, following the orders from their commander-in-chief.

But what would Eisenhower say? He had faced professional soldiers…real enemies, with real weapons — the Luftwaffe, the Panzers, the Wehrmacht. And he went on to be commander-in-chief.

Where was the pale, he might wonder? Why couldn’t Admiral Bradley see it? Since when is it okey to whack civilians you don’t even know…who may or may not be transporting illegal drugs…that may or may not do harm to the people taking them (consumers can decide for themselves)… to people who may or may not be in the United States of America.

Are these High Value Targets? Or are they Negative Value Targets, whose deaths do more harm than good, each one further undermining the real value of US assets?