USSR border guards & internal security. Stephen Miller’s fascinated by Nazism but Putin knows the Soviet playbook better,

Ship them to The Hague.

such transparent BS

While establishing consciousness of guilt as well.

‘Dead men tell no tales’ is a proverb of pirates.

The problem being that the regime can use their fear of accountability as leverage to force further atrocities: it’s classic mob tactic.

🎁Gift Article
Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all
As two men clung to a stricken, burning ship targeted by SEAL Team 6, the Joint Special Ops commander followed the SEC Defense's order to leave no survivors.
By Alex Horton Ellen Nakashima wapo.st/49KbUJ1

It's not often that "simple morality" and "effective politics" line up so perfectly, but we have to hope DC's Democrats are smart enough to seize the moment with both hands

Also, Hegseth is coming for Sen. Mark Kelly because he reminded troops that they have a duty not to commit crimes *like this one*

Making an appropriately big deal out of this blunts that attack and demonstrates the need for what Kelly and company did.

Although, conversely, the absence of a paper trail suggests consciousness of guilt on the part of superior officers — Hegseth especially. 3/

In the absence of a paper trail, the discussion becomes ‘on whose authority did you commit mass murder?‘ — even more tenuous legal grounds than the Nuremberg defense. 2/

Not necessarily the best strategy, but it does have the ‘virtue’ —from their perspective — of distracting from their efforts to build Border Patrol/ICE into their equivalent of the NKVD. 6/

But Trumpco may ’go back to the well’ and use the murder of Guard soldiers as an excuse to widen the conventional military’s role in domestic repression. 5/

Spoiler: the “Border Patrol” probably wins this contest because of size and extant training, though it is also a bit more of an independent organization than ICE. 4/

While also adjudicating Border Patrol and ICE’s auditions to serve as a domestic, armed manifestation of regime’s power. 3/

I do tend to think of these ‘legal grey areas’ as a kind of mirror image of an Overton Window: active ‘lawfare’ can have an impact in shaping the military’s perceptions of what is legal, much as Trumpco is ‘exploring/exploiting’ the boundaries of domestic military deployment. 2/

Is that because ‘standing around doing nothing’ — and a degree of malicious compliance in conspicuous trash detai — was the limit of what their COs deemed lawful? Presumably, given its druthers, Trumpco would have had them rappelling onto high rise buildings but they were deterred…1/

The other, probably more significant legal/strategic question is who were the accessories to these murders/wrongful deaths: some of those legally exposed have much more power to slow or halt these atrocities — and more to lose — than the individuals pulling the triggers.