Let me catch my breath, calm myself, wipe my face. The cutting edge is raw. A hundred deaths, a thousand deaths, quickly turn into “collateral damage.” But the killing of two desperate men, clinging to the wreckage of their boat in the Caribbean – their boat that has just been bombed – rips open the abstraction of military public relations. They’re just ordinary human beings – like you, like me, like our parents and our children – rather than . . . uh, narco-terrorists. And suddenly this new war the Trump administration has launched is more than just a videogame. Hey, Pete, this is not keeping us safe!
Browsing: morality becomes the first casualty. Without public scrutiny and full transparency
That was the opening image delivered by the Pentagon in early September: a tightly edited video of a U.S. military aircraft obliterating an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean. It was released with cinematic timing, framed as a bold success in the Trump administration’s newly intensified campaign against “narco-terrorists.” But the more Americans have learned about what followed, the killing of two dazed, shipwrecked survivors in a second strike, the more the narrative has begun to disintegrate.