Hegseth’s Defense Is the Same Script Used to Sell Torture

Résumé détaillé

Defense Secretary Hegseth’s press conference Tuesday was a textbook play to make potentially unlawful violence sound acceptable.

"These are not high crimes," Pete Hegseth told the Pentagon press corps on Tuesday. "This is the job, and it's the job well done."

The defense secretary was responding to eight articles of impeachment introduced by Republican Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky. They accuse him of conducting unauthorized military operations, disregarding laws intended to protect civilians and carrying out extrajudicial killings in U.S. strikes on suspected drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Massie's resolution alleges that the maritime strikes killed at least 243 people.

I spent decades as a Reuters journalist reporting on conflicts, including what governments do. I covered U.S. foreign policy in Washington when the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal erupted during the early stages of the Iraq war. I later traveled with then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Europe on a trip dominated by debates over secret CIA black sites and the treatment of detainees. Some U.S. diplomats dubbed it the “Secret Prisons Tour.”

First, rename the act. In the 2000s, waterboarding became "enhanced interrogation" and prisoners labeled "unlawful enemy combatants." On Tuesday, when defending U.S. strikes Hegseth referred to the dead as "narco-terrorists" whose boats carried "poison into our communities." No criminal trial preceded the killings. The administration asserts wartime authority for the strikes, a legal premise human-rights organizations dispute. But the label lets the administration claim a moral verdict before the evidence about those killed has been publicly tested.

Second, say it worked. Hegseth said he stood behind every operation and "would do it again tomorrow." In December 2014, days after the Senate Intelligence Committee published its report on CIA interrogations, then-Vice President Dick Cheney went on NBC's Meet the Press. "It worked," he said.

Third, stand behind the troops. Hegseth said impeachment "puts a target on the backs of American warriors," and…

Début de l'article, extrait de Newsweek. Pour lire la suite, ouvrez l'article chez le média.