BY ED FELIEN
As two men clung to a stricken, burning ship targeted by SEAL Team 6, the Joint Special Operations commander followed the defense secretary’s order to leave no survivors. Hegseth gave a verbal order to kill everybody in the first Caribbean boat strike, officials said.
Admiral Alvin Holsey, the head of the U S Southern Command in charge of those strikes, resigned—probably because he felt these were unlawful orders and he would be guilty of murder for carrying them out.
From Alice in Wonderland: “Off with his head!” The Queen of Hearts is an impatient tyrant who rules the Wonderland with a heavy hand. “Sentence first… Verdict afterwards!”
But guilty until proven innocent is a remnant of feudalism and the absolute power of despots. The Magna Carta was supposed to have ended all that in 1215.
In a democratic republic we believe people are innocent until proven guilty.
Trump and Hegseth justify these extra-legal killings as part of the war on drugs, yet at the same time Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernaìndez, the former two-term president of Honduras, who was convicted last year by a U.S. jury for “conspiring to distribute more than 400 tons of cocaine and related firearms offenses,” according to the Justice Department. Trump said, “I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.”
