“Shot while escaping” George Grosz circa 1936.

Nazis know that it is best to hide illegal actions to the fullest extent possible, particularly while committing atrocities.  When writing up the minutes of the Wannsee conference of January, 20, 1942 — a meeting among top Nazi officials to set up the Final Solution, the administrative mass killings in the countries conquered by Hitler’s army — special neutral words were used to mask goals like “liquidation”, “annihilation” and “mass murder”.   Anodyne substitutions were employed according to strict Nazi sprachregelung, “speech code”, now a staple of authoritarian and corporate communication strategies.  The notes of that meeting were kept top secret and all but one copy was destroyed by the time Hitler shot himself in the mouth after condemning the weakneyss of the German nation that had betrayed him.  That surviving copy of the carefully worded minutes of the Wannsee conference was produced as evidence of deliberate mass murder in the Nuremberg trials

When the aptly named Dick Cheney announced that America needed to go to the “dark side” after the 9/11 terrorist attack, to render suspects to “dark sites” to torture them, in violation of American and international law, and treaties signed by the United States, he kept the details as quiet as possible.  A secret torture memo was written to offer a fig leaf of legal rationale for these illegal, barbaric practices.  Written by two far-right wing lawyers, now tenured constitutional law professor John Yoo and now federal judge for life Jay Bybee, the secret memo narrowly defined torture by torturing the definition of torture until it succumbed to the policy needs of the fascists then intent on torturing whoever they felt like torturing.   President Obama later cleared things up by candidly, almost nonchalantly, admitting that, in terrible times, some well-meaning Americans “tortured some folks.”  

Then Obama ordered the killing by drone, of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, not charged with any crime, but condemned publicly for months as an Al Q’aeda propagandist and organizer.   Shortly thereafter al-Awlaki’s teenaged American son was turned into chopped meat by another drone, in what the US classified as a “mistake”.   In 2017 Trump had al-Alwaki’s eight year-old daughter killed, for reasons still unclear.  Shit happens in war and very few people made a peep about any of this.  Jeremy Scahill’s book, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, details the radicalizaton of  al-Awlaki, a once moderate Muslim imam who apparently was being blackmailed by the FBI when they uncovered his regular visits to prostitutes.  The authors of the Wikipedia piece on al-Awlaki don’t seem to be aware of Scahill’s research (though FN 246 cites the book), but this is from Wikipedia [2].  The New York Times wrote that the government report on the extrajudicial killing of al-Awlaki (released under FOIA) “provides little confidence that the lethal action was taken with real care”,  describing it as “a slapdash pastiche of legal theories—some based on obscure interpretations of British and Israeli law—that was clearly tailored to the desired result.”^[220]

[1] why use “appear”, twice, in both the headline and the lede, Grey Lady?  The executed man had no gun in hand at any point in the video, only a camera; the Trump admin says he was killed in self defense.  The three “suggestive” bullets in his back “appear to contradict” the official story that he was a crazed gunman intent on inflicting mass casualties on ICE and CBP agents who shot him ten times while he was on the ground, in self defense?  You appear to squeamishly suck ass, Grey Lady.