America's Lunatic Weekend

Lies, accusations and counter-accusations, and rising temperatures at home and abroad. When does the good part begin?

Off the rails we go, with nothing to do but keep score. The weekend madness tally:

Donald Trump’s White House unveiled a new “Media Offender of the Week” site that puts a bizarre twist on the bully pulpit, complaining among other things about coverage of the white-hot “Don’t Give Up the Ship” controversy. The site describes as “subversive” media outlets that give sympathetic coverage to Democratic lawmakers like Senators Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly, who two weeks ago told military and intelligence officers “You can refuse illegal orders”:

The Democrats and Fake News Media subversively implied that President Trump had issued illegal orders to service members. Every order President Trump has issued has been lawful.

At a time when Trump is throwing around terms like “sedition” and “punishable by DEATH,” it’s scary to hear his White House hinting at the idea that news reports can also be “subversive.” The “media offender of the week” does that and more. It also complains about outlets like CBS News (!) and The Independent calling deportees/detainees names like “Colorado Grandfather” in headlines instead of pointing to lists of drug arrests, or describing Kilmar Abrego Garcia as a “Maryland Dad” instead of “a pedophilic illegal migrant gangbanger.”

On one hand, demanding journalists call someone who’s never been convicted of either thing a “pedophilic gangbanger” fundamentally misunderstands media. Immigration officials might be able to make such assumptions, but for press, that’s a libel case. On the other hand, no reporter who’s seen the relevant police/probate reports or video of Abrego Garcia stammering excuses about his expired license while ferrying eight mute passengers back from the border — our own Greg Collard put together a painstaking timeline earlier this year — could put “Maryland Dad” in a headline with a straight face. Doing so is politics, not news. Unfortunately, this is fast becoming standard in the informational totaler Krieg this showdown has become.

The battle of narrative provocations escalated dramatically this weekend:

Republicans and Democrats are challenging each other’s legitimacy, deploying terminology as weapons. From the Washington Post:

PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump on Saturday said that commercial airlines should consider Venezuelan airspace closed, increasing pressure on the country’s leadership after weeks of escalating tensions between Washington and Caracas and the growing threat of a U.S. attack against the country.

Though Trump does not have the legal authority to close the airspace over another country, such a move is sometimes a first step ahead of airstrikes…

If the phrase “does not have the legal authority” jumps out, it’s because you heard it elsewhere in the last 24 hours. It’s everywhere. News agencies increasingly repeat whole phrases used by would-be competitors, exaggerating the propagandistic vibe of the news space. BBC: “The U.S. does not have the authority to close another country’s airspace.” PBS: “Trump declared Venezuela’s airspace to be considered closed despite not having the legal authority to do so.” UPI: “Trump… does not have the legal authority to close Venezuelan airspace.” Newsweek nearly repeated the BBC construction word-for-word. Bloomberg joined the party, too.

It’s not right, at least not exactly right. Administration sources say their recent designation of the Cartel de los Soles as a Foreign Terrorist Organization puts Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the Venezuelan government in the crosshairs of the post-9/11 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF). It’s why Defense (excuse me, War) Secretary Pete Hegseth said the designation opened up a “bunch of new options.” The Miami Herald seems to be alone among major papers in pointing out that the AUMF is “the law underpinning most U.S. counterterrorism operations over the past two decades.” If what Trump is doing isn’t legal, that has implications for two decades of previous operations.

Every president since 9/11 repeatedly invoked the AUMF to justify bombing campaigns, NSA surveillance, acts of “anticipatory self-defense,” and a long list of other dubious policies. The law gives the president the power to conduct operations against any “nations, organizations, or persons” that he or she “determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” One would think that excludes actors not involved with the planning of 9/11, but the U.S. has conducted military operations in nearly two dozen countries based on this law, sometimes secretly, and including against groups that didn’t even exist on 9/11. This is why Kelly stammered when asked by Kristin Welker on Meet The Press if the drug boat operations were illegal.

At minimum, reporters concerned with giving the whole picture of the Venezuela no-fly action should mention that decades of military gambits have been similarly self-sanctioned, and I say that as someone who always opposed “regime change” wars of the type unfolding in Venezuela. If you didn’t offer a “no legal authority” caveat before moves into Syria or Libya or Yemen or Niger, why are you doing it now?

The news cycle is turning over so rapidly that it already feels a lifetime ago that a CIA-trained Afghani named Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who entered the country via the “Operation Allies Welcome” post-withdrawal program, reportedly drove across the country and shot two National Guard officers in the capital, killing 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom. “National Guard Member Dies After Shooting” was the BBC’s headline.

Because this news came in the immediate wake of the “Don’t Give Up The Ship” ploy, it transformed into a pointing-Spiderman Internet blame game. Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem said Lakanwal was “unvetted” by the Biden administration, while “former military and intelligence officers” told NBC he would have undergone “extensive vetting” before being welcomed into the CIA’s arms abroad. (Both the Biden and Trump administrations played roles in the process that led to Lakanwal being granted asylum earlier this year.) The NBC feature was one of several that described Lakanwal as being from a “CIA-backed unit whose veterans have struggled in the U.S.,” as if this were Deer Hunter or Coming Home.

The shooting prompted a slew of heartfelt defenses of “partner forces” who “fought the Taliban,” with Democrats like Chris Van Hollen declaring that “in this case, there’s no evidence that there’s something that escaped the vetting.” (Except the shot Guardsmen?) The AP and PBS News meanwhile told a happier story:

One of the Afghans who made it to the U.S. was Mohammad Saboor, a father of seven children, worked as an electrician and A/C technician with international and U.S. forces for 17 years. He resettled earlier this year in California and… looked forward to sending his kids to school and giving back to the country that took his family in.

“I believe that now we can live in a 100% peaceful environment,” Saboor said.

In this way “Evacuated Afghanis Peacefully Raising Large Families” somehow became an element of the Washington, D.C. shooting coverage. These stories in turn prompted rejoinders pointing to a fatal May incident involving 36-year-old Jamal Wali, who screamed “I should have served with fucking Taliban!” and “I died when I was serving with you liars!” and ‘Why are you trying to kill me?” before shooting three policemen in Fairfax, Virginia:

None of these tales is entirely representative, but neither is choosing one or the other, which is how most outlets handled it. No editorialists meanwhile wondered if starting faraway wars of choice that never end and lead to an obligation to evacuate and resettle legions of CIA-trained assassins is a good idea generally. Trump, who complained that “if they can’t love our country, we don’t want them,” might want to take this into consideration before he moves into Venezuela, a decision that sounds imminent. “The land is easier, but that’s going to start very soon,” he said, in a quote that would have dominated the news in any other era.

While CIA-trained fighters earned a passionate but mixed smattering of reviews, National Guard troops — who aren’t responsible for Trump’s controversial decisions to deploy their units to cities like Washington, D.C. — became fodder for the blame game. They were somehow compared to the Gestapo on MSNOW and CNN over the holiday, while NBC’s Ken Dilanian earned viral attention for saying after the shooting, “People walking around with uniforms in an American city. There are some Americans that might object to that.” These troops are squeezed between the sides, sent on controversial deployments by their commander, but also denounced as Brownshirts and threatened with future prosecution on cable TV by people like Jen Psaki and former Judge Advocate General Glenn Kirschner, who warned that “just following orders” didn’t work out so well in Nuremberg.

The DC shooting was followed by a classic Trump-era “bombshell” report in the Washington Post, “Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all.” According to “two people with direct knowledge of the operation,” a boat bombing operation from September 2nd took place under a “spoken directive” from Hegseth. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of the Post sources said. The central issue in this story is the notion that a second shot was fired at the boat to finish off two survivors. The Post bent its copy to a pretzel to tie the anonymously-sourced “Kill them all” quote to the second missile launch:

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack… ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

The obvious PR response would be to question any story built on “two people familiar with the matter” saying the Special Operations commander only fired the second shot to comply with a “spoken directive” that another anonymous source attributed to Hegseth. Or, the White House could have pointed out that the media outlets that went bananas over this news were the same ones who just moments before were warning troops that “just following orders” is not a defense. Instead of taking either path, Hegseth tweeted:

As we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be “lethal, kinetic strikes.”

The legal authority the Trump administration relied upon to conduct these operations was already a microscopic fig leaf, but Hegseth flicked even that off, essentially saying, “Hell yes, we were trying to kill them!” Answers like this add to the general unease around Trump, who seems to think removing the mask of executive power is a clarifying virtue, like switching out the mealy-mouthed “Defense” for a “War” Department. It’s the difference between a country that brazenly flouts domestic and international law, and one that wraps its lawbreaking in two-faced, sanctimonious bureaucratese. Do we have to pick one?

Twelve years ago we had reports that the U.S. killed 76 children and 29 adults across eight years of failed efforts to drone one suspected terrorist, Ayman Zawahiri, and killed about 1,000 more bystanders while targeting 40 others. I covered that story, but few others did, while outlets like the New York Times and Newsweek ran fawning portraits of Barack Obama’s “Terror Tuesdays” drone-targeting ritual, through headlines like “How Obama Learned to Kill.” The “Kill List” was not portrayed as crime, but as a “responsibility,” as then-counterterrorism adviser John Brennan put it. To hear Brennan acolytes now mourning drone victims is bizarre, though it doesn’t change the legal picture for Trump. It sure as hell makes the reporting complicated, though.

Our government moved into an extralegal zone over twenty years ago, over-endowing the executive with war and surveillance powers. Congress has since repeatedly resisted calls to reassert its Constitutional oversight role, seemingly in fear that the public might too often veto military operations. Donald Trump just wants to ignore the law and launch wars of questionable necessity just like every other president. A competing group of lawbreakers wants to stop him. Could that argument be anything but farce?