Opinion: Do U.S. military leaders have the backbone to disobey illegal orders?

"If killing men in boats at sea were truly legal, we wouldn't need a secret memo to say so. According to the Washington Post, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel quietly assured the Defense Department this month that U.S. service members cannot be prosecuted for the more than 20 boat strikes that have killed at least 80 people in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. A memo like that does not speak the language of lawfulness. It speaks the language of guilt management."

"When a government must preemptively promise its warriors immunity, it is conceding that it has crossed a line. This is not an isolated excess. It is the continuation of a moral collapse that has unfolded, memo by memo, across decades of American warfare. The George W. Bush administration wrote the first of these permission slips when its lawyers redefined torture as enhanced interrogation."

The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel assured the Defense Department that U.S. service members cannot be prosecuted for over 20 boat strikes that killed at least 80 people in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. Such preemptive legal assurances function as guilt management and signal a concession that a moral line has been crossed. This pattern continues across administrations: torture was redefined as enhanced interrogation, drone strikes were legally rationalized including killings of civilians, and now missiles obliterate suspected drug boats without declarations, charges, or trials. No law of armed conflict permits execution without combat; those killed in open boats are not combatants.

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