By Kary Love
Well, I preferred it when I could pretend I was not hiring the hit men to kill outside the law. Yeah, those idyllic MAGA days, when the US denied it was killing illegally, criminally, and claimed with some degree of plausible deniability that it was not invading in wars of aggression, but was engaged in “building democracy.” In those halcyon days one could believe George W. Bush that we paid our tax dollars in a just cause. Or when Barack Obama drone-killed, without due process of law, a 16-year-old American citizen, it was because he deserved it as a terrorist.
Now, though, with the apparent murder of people on boats in the Caribbean, the pretense has been dispensed with, justification or evidence not needed, we are having the trials after the hangings. Mr. Trump brags about taking out drug dealers without due process, without charge, without trial, without a scintilla of evidence, without a presumption of innocence, without Congress declaring war or even granting a vague authorization for use of force. Today, none is needed. The President, immune from punishment for crimes, thanks to the so-called Supreme Court, is now apparently committing naked murder on the high seas, like some modern day pirate.
Of course, the fact someone is granted legal immunity for their crimes, does not negate the fact they are crimes. The fact that a serial killer could be granted immunity from prosecution, does not magically change their reality—they are still a serial killer. One might find it sickening that in a nation of laws, a serial killer would be immune from prosecution, while others who kill only one person go to prison for life or get the death penalty. I ask, what about the person who pays the serial killer, the one who hires the hit man, what responsibility has he or she?
That great humanitarian, Joseph Stalin was quoted in 1947 by a popular syndicated newspaper columnist Leonard Lyons in “The Washington Post” to have said: “If only one man dies, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.” Later equally great leaders have made similar remarks, such as “one murder makes a villain, millions a hero.” I used to think such remarks were despicable, but now I find I may want to adopt them, since I am paying the serial killer.
The recent killings of alleged drug traffickers by Mr. Trump’s order in the Caribbean off Venezuela appear to have zero legal justification. They appear to have been extrajudicial killings contrary to the Constitution which requires either a war authorization by Congress or a judicial proceeding in which the accused is presumed innocent, afforded a fair trial, allowed to present a defense, and only punished if found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Lacking either of those paths to justice, killings without them are, in law, murder. Pathetically, on top of the foregoing, it appears those killed were low level drug mules at best, poor folk desperate to live, to provide for families, taking drug running jobs to eat. In any event, their boats could have been easily stopped, boarded and the crew taken into custody along with evidence, if any, of their crimes.
But I am not concerned with them, I am concerned with me. I ask, If I pay my taxes to the US government, and it uses my tax money to kill, arguably murder in violation of US law and the Law of Nations, am I hiring the hit men? Am I guilty of conspiracy or complicity to commit murder? Frankly I do not care that the US government says I am not, that my obligation to pay taxes does not make me culpable over what they are used for. Rather, I am concerned what a just god of the universe may think.
Of course, US taxes are voluntary, according to the US tax code. That is complete fiction in the real world. I have represented tax protesters, people who have claimed a moral opposition to paying taxes to prepare for mass murder by nuclear weapon, or other illegal wars, and I have learned there is nothing voluntary about it. You pay Caesar and shut up. But in the past one could pretend, make believe, that the US government was not a criminal entity. In Gaza for example, we wash out money through Israel and wash our hands of culpability. That used to be so morally reassuring.
In the Venezuela boat interdiction cases, however, there is no middle man between us and the killings. Those were conducted by our heroic troops, the most lethal military in the world, on orders of the Commander in Chief. All carried out by our tax dollars. No room for confusion, no place to hide.
So, I ask again, by paying taxes to the US government are we just hiring the hitmen? And if yes, who is more culpable, the hit man or the one who pays him, the one whose money enables the hit man, and without which there would be no hit?
I have represented people of whom I have said, “If Jesus did return, He would be proud to call them friends.” These are people who walked the Jesus walk, giving to the poor, clothing the naked, ministering to the imprisoned, healing the sick, and teaching do not kill, and love your enemy. Many of them refused to pay taxes to the US government because of what they regarded as its crimes, though I was able to demur by accepting some propaganda explanation or another.
But now? Naked piracy right in America’s own backyard, or as Mr. Trump has it, “The Gulf of America?” The US government being the pirate rather than the sheriff hunting the pirates, as Jefferson did with the Barbary Pirates? Surely, the Gulf of America ought be a place of the rule of law not rule by pirate? But the facts seem to say no.
Today I find I am compelled to pray that there is no god. For if there is, and that god is just, I now find I have no plausible defense to the charge I am hiring the hit man and paying him with my taxes. I can no longer blunt that I knowingly and intelligently fund the killer(s). I can no longer pretend I, too, am not guilty, unless I loudly proclaim: “No taxation for killers!”
That would actually Make America Great for the first time.
Kary Love, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Michigan attorney who has defended nuclear resisters and many others in court for decades.