"These are not high crimes," Pete Hegseth told the Pentagon press corps on Tuesday. "This is the job, and it's the job well done." The defense secretary was responding to eight articles of impeachment introduced by Republican Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky. They accuse him of conducting unauthorized military operations, disregarding laws intended to protect civilians and carrying out extrajudicial killings in U.S. strikes on suspected drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.
Massie's resolution alleges that the maritime strikes killed at least 243 people. Whatever comes of the impeachment process (the House on Tuesday voted 211-204 to refer the articles of impeachment to committee, effectively blocking the effort), Hegseth’s press conference was a textbook play to make potentially unlawful violence sound acceptable. It’s a script that is at least 20 years old.
I spent decades as a journalist reporting on conflicts, including what governments do. I covered U.S. foreign policy in Washington when the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal erupted during the early stages of the Iraq war. I later traveled with then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Europe on a trip dominated by debates over secret CIA black sites and the treatment of detainees.
Some U.S. diplomats dubbed it the “Secret Prisons Tour.” I have heard Tuesday's defense plays before. The legal questions differ, but these are the arguments the Bush administration used to defend torture and persuade Americans to accept it after 9/11. There were four moves then, and Hegseth made all four in 25 minutes.
In the 2000s, waterboarding became "enhanced interrogation" and prisoners labeled "unlawful enemy combatants." On Tuesday, when defending U.S. strikes Hegseth referred to the dead as "narco-terrorists" whose boats carried "poison into our communities." No criminal trial preceded the killings. The administration asserts wartime authority for the strikes, a legal premise human-rights organizations dispute. But the label lets the administration claim a moral verdict before the evidence about those killed has been publicly tested.
Hegseth said he stood behind every operation and "would do it again tomorrow." In December 2014, days after the Senate Intelligence Committee published its report on CIA interrogations, then-Vice President Dick Cheney went on NBC's Meet the Press. "I'd do it again in a minute." In reality, the Senate Intelligence Committee found that the techniques had not produced the information originally claimed, and that 26 of the 119 CIA detainees had been wrongfully held. In Hegseth's version, success is measured by the act itself: boats sunk, capabilities destroyed.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
