Department of War Crimes

One more chapter in the Age of Incoherence. There is apparently controversy about the legality of the US military killing civilians of foreign countries who are on boats, or survivors clinging to the wreckage of boats blown out of the water by the Trump Department of War [sic]. Six former service members, now in Congress, made a video reminding active service military and intelligence personnel of their duty to disobey unlawful orders. They were immediately threatened by Mr. Trump, who has never been more sane or measured — prosecution for sedition and execution!

Maximum lethality, baby. We are the department of death, destruction and faithful devotion to our savior, Jesus of Nazareth.

First of all, according to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, ordering the killing of survivors of an illegal drone attack in international waters, ordering an admiral to “kill them all”, is presumed to be a totally legal order, entitled to the strong presumption of legality, if done by the Department of War. The real problem Secretary of War [sic] Pete Hegseth faces is the stream of seditious leakers who make these legal orders public. These traitorous leakers will be found by the most transparent administration in history, and they will be secretly tried and executed for treason, presumably.

Secretary Hegseth posted a reminder to troops that orders from superiors are presumed legal and disobeying orders presumed legal is a crime punishable by court martial and what Senator Mark Kelly is facing from the newly lethal Department of War. I couldn’t find that post anywhere, though it appeared in a news feed on my phone this morning. I was too slow to do a screen shot…

There’s also the small matter of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

U.S. service members take an oath to uphold the Constitution. In addition, under Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the U.S. Manual for Courts-Martial, service members must obey lawful orders and disobey unlawful orders. Unlawful orders are those that clearly violate the U.S. Constitution, international human rights standards or the Geneva Conventions.

Service members who follow an illegal order can be held liable and court-martialed or subject to prosecution by international tribunals. Following orders from a superior is no defense.  source

This will have to stand in for the latest example of Secretary Pete’s wise, sober and inspiring leadership via X, a repost from the man who made him Secretary of WAR [1]. But first, here’s what Mr. Trump himself posted about the military taking an oath to the Constitution and not a dictator on day one.

[1]

The eternal horror of things like the so-called Epstein files

I woke up thinking how the longtime operation of Jeffrey Epstein and his wing-woman Ghislaine Maxwell (including Epstein’s convenient death in federal detention during Trump 1.0) is the perfect illustration of how the powerful always prey, unaccountably, on the vulnerable. The privileged elites, rightfully hated by virtually everyone else, live by a different set of laws, rules and morality than the rest of us. They have always felt truly feel entitled to own everything and to make every decision for everybody else.

The rest of us are fungible, expendable pawns to be used to their best advantage. Their logic is impeccable, if self-serving. If 60,000 more poor people die preventable deaths, or 600,000 (estimated deaths so far from Musk canceling USAID) a million, or a hundred million, as the direct result of policies that ensure that the wealthiest can hoard even more wealth, how is that the fault of the super-wealthy? It’s simply democracy.

These rich powerful men saw the needy, cute 14 and 15 year-old girls Epstein and Maxwell collected from broken homes in working class neighborhoods as disposable receptacles for their desires. Most kids that age are insecure and easily seduced by praise and promises. Epstein literally groomed them, using his ultra sophisticated and charming procuress Ghislaine Maxwell to gain their trust. Epstein and Maxwell showered attention, praise, money, expensive gifts and the promise of a bright future on susceptible girls. They carefully screened the girls so they could be freely exploited without any fear of anything ever happening to Epstein and other the powerful men who used them. The girls were just objects of lust for them.

To the girls, the attraction was being made to feel special and the promise of money and class like the elegant Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell was a spoiled, entitled, self-hating, pathetic, deeply damaged exploiter who was drawn to Epstein because he was like her beloved father, the ultimate scumbag billionaire who ripped off the pension funds of his own workers because he somehow wasn’t rich enough. Never having really had her shady, preoccupied father’s love (he left her nothing in his will) and in desperate need of wealth, she found another rich monster to cling to and became an abuser herself in order to feel some kind of power and self-worth.

The wealthy, well-connected men who sexually used these girls probably got off as much on the fact that the girls were garbage they could do whatever they want to as any other aspect of it. They were powerful and untouchable and these girls were cute, safe and ready for use, otherwise disposable instruments for the gratification of the mens’ undeniable desires. 

A highly respectable older man I once knew, who was likely a pedophile, asked me once why pedophiles were so hated, why they were so often killed by rapists and murderers when they got to prison. I stated the obvious — it’s probably because they prey on the most vulnerable and defenseless among us and the harm they do to their innocent young victims scars them for the rest of their lives. Even a psychopathic serial killer with a life sentence can probably grasp the evil of this on some level. If anyone deserves a harsh, violent end it’s someone who takes advantage of a trusting young person, and inflicts lifelong damage, for their own twisted gratification.

Of course, because of the wealth and power of the men Epstein secretly videotaped having sex with girls, the essential ugliness of the issue becomes obscured. It turns into an abstraction, a 1,000,000 page file to be haggled over by politicians, like the JFK assassination files. 62 years later, the true story of how JFK was killed, and who arranged his murder, is still shrouded in officially sanctioned bullshit. Anyone who questions the highly unlikely official lone gunman version is called a conspiracy theorist, though the real conspiracy appears to involve the obfuscation of what actually happened in Dallas and which powerful, unaccountable men arranged it.

A group of survivors of Epstein’s empire of lifelong trauma has shown great courage and resolve and they deserve a measure of justice for the abuse they were forced to endure. Their suffering is the heart of the Epstein files, whatever the rich fucks who scramble to protect themselves from shameful revelations about themselves may have to say about it. And, of course, it’s not as if Trump, Epstein’s lustful running buddy for decades, is mentioned in the files thousands of times, more than any other powerful man associated with the late pervert. Why would he be? There was no reason for the FBI to reassign 1,000 agents to spend thousands of hours scrubbing his name from files that are a complete hoax and don’t actually contain anything incriminating about anyone, was there?

And besides, while Trump pardons, the day after two ceremonial turkeys, a felonious former president of Honduras, imprisoned for importing tons of cocaine into the US, he is illegally killing men on boats (86 to date, that we know of) he accuses, with all evidence of their theoretical crime at the bottom of the ocean, of being terrorists bringing deadly drugs into the USA.

Welcome again to the Age of Incoherence. This is what happens when billionaires promote a power-crazed, vain, incurious, grandiose, crazy, manipulable, infinitely covetous idiot to power and age and genetics add dementia to the mix. What could go wrong?

Pam Bondi on the guilt of all Trump enemies, real or imagined

During a press conference after the dismissal of the cases against James Comey and Leticia James, AG Pam Bondi, who makes Bill Barr look like a straight shooter, was asked:

If I could just get your reaction to the James Comey and Leticia James cases being dropped today back in Washington.   James Comey put out a video, he said this matters most because a message has to be sent — the president of the United States could not use the Department of Justice to target his political enemies.  Your reaction to the cases being dropped and to that specific investigation.

“Sure, we’ll be taking all available legal actions including an immediate appeal to hold Leticia James and James Comey accountable for their unlawful conduct. I’m going to keep going on this, I’m not worried about someone who has been charged with a very serious crime. His alleged actions were a betrayal of public trust.”

Betrayal of public trust? 

The sitting attorney general, for the time being, anyway, stating “held accountable for their unlawful conduct” of two people hated by Trump who she was instructed to prosecute whether or not there was a likelihood of conviction in either case. She’s not worried about the feelings of someone she’s charged with a “very serious crime”.  She’s not worried about the fact the attorneys who work for her already wrote memos about all the good reasons to decline prosecution of these two. She’s not worried that her boss was credibly charged with very, very, very serious crimes he clearly committed, which would have been proved at trial with a mountain of evidence.  His crimes were especially heinous, like his ongoing mass murder of people on boats,  compared to the contrived “very serious crimes” that these two were vindictively charged with, at Trump’s command. Compared to Tom Homan taking a $50,000 cash bribe on videotape from the FBI? Commie talking point.

The presumption of innocence?  Not for people Trump tells me are evil! 

No wonder the Qataris used to pay Pamela Jo Bondi $115,000 a month for her lobbying and legal expertise…

Quickly forgotten atrocity by the deadly dotard in chief

Trump rage posted this in response to a viral short video in which elected veterans of the armed forces and intelligence services reminded serving members of their oath not to follow illegal orders.

The video was difficult to find on the YouTube search engine or any other search engine I tried.  Fortunately I had it in my history from viewing it the other day:

In fairness to the NY Times, a paper that regularly publishes important investigative pieces and blurs crucial lines with equal frequency, it ran this article yesterday.

Here are a few recent favorites of mine from the front page of the journal of record for the United States of America, but first:

You go, girl.

Jeffery Epstein — blackmail billionaire

There were as many as 1,000 girls, in a pyramid scheme (get some of your junior high school classmates, bring ’em to Epstein’s, earn $400 each) who were sexually exploited, and harmed for life, by “financier” Jeffery Epstein over several decades. These abuse survivors are calling for release of the Epstein information the Department of Justice is hoarding. This material most likely includes the videotapes master blackmailer Epstein compiled as kompromat for shakedowns of wealthy, public men, as well as compromising photographs of adult men (Trump for one, mentioned by Michael Wolff who was shown the Polaroids by Epstein) with topless teenagers confiscated from his safe.

It could all be released today, of course, if Trump ordered it. Even after the Trump DOJ closed down the Biden DOJ’s investigation claiming there was nothing in the files to predicate further investigation. This was right after Trump’s weaponized DOJ flagged Trump’s own name thousands of times in an emergency FBI audit involving 1,000 agents working 24 hour shifts to comb through the entire file. A parliamentary trick, a discharge petition, worked, once the House was back in session, and, after months of shut downs by Trump and MAGA Mike, the House voted 427-1 yesterday, and the Senate, by unanimous consent, to release the files that Trump could order released today, without votes in the House, Senate, a veto, an override of the president’s veto, a claim that the files about the Democrat [sic] “hoax” are part of an ongoing criminal investigation into Bill Clinton and Rosie O’Donnell, and yet another emergency application to the Supreme Court.

Something I’ve been thinking about every time I hear how rich and influential “financier” Jeffrey Epstein was. You never hear about the source of Epstein’s fabulous wealth and influence. He was a high school graduate with a head for numbers, first hired as a teacher by Bill Barr’s father who ran an exclusive Manhattan private school, after Epstein lied about his education — and the charmer was kept on after the lie was exposed. Epstein’s genius appears to have been gaining access to and influence over very wealthy and influential white men, and getting large sums of money from them.

Occam’s razor — the simplest explanation is usually correct — suggests that the source of this super wealth was blackmail. Epstein was a psychopath with a well-known sexual preference for “barely legal” (in the hideous phrase of former Trump antagonist Megyn Kelly) girls around 14-15 years old, but who looked younger than their years. Every room in his various mansions was wired for sound and video. Many rich and influential men, and a few women, were his guests, friends and shot the shit with him via text, phone and while enjoying his hospitality. You connect the dots.

Trauma as a competitive sport

Narcissists are infuriated by other people talking about their own trauma.   Trauma, like everything else, is a competitive sport for those grandiose souls whose suffering is always greater than anyone else’s.   I recall Gina’s rage, Flack’s rage, when I tried to describe how Gina’s anger had reawakened a trauma in me I thought I’d healed from.  In hindsight, if we take their insane behavior into consideration, they were both much more seriously traumatized in their early lives than I was.   They win, I give up.    This is a game for mad people.

I often think of this competition for greatest victim when I encounter comparisons of historical, and present day, atrocities.  Who had it worse, the millions packed into cargo holds for the deadly trip to slavery in the New World, the Armenians whipped and herded into the desert to die, or into raging rivers to drown, the Jews lined up at the side of a ravine and shot in the back of the head, the two year-old orphan in any bombed out, war-ravaged region of the world?   What a sick question to even pose.  Every one of them is the worst thing a human can experience, where does the need to compare and contrast them come from?

Being a victim justifies an aggressive counter-attack.  I killed thousands because they killed thousands!   I’m not evil, you are!

Bully for you, responding to mass murder with mass murder.   Way to make a more ethical world, Nazi.