Secret squirrel logic is being given by the American government during an offensive military campaign targeting and killing civilians at sea.

“There is no evidence – none – that this strike was conducted in self-defense,” Sen. Jack Reed, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said last week. “That matters, because under both domestic and international law, the US military simply does not have the authority to use lethal force against a civilian vessel unless acting in self-defense.”

No evidence is a problem, because without it such targeting and killing of civilians is clearly illegal. America becomes a criminal state.

According to the Kafkaesque system apparently now running the Pentagon, a throwback to assassinations of leadership deemed “too leftist” by the Nixon administration, the public now isn’t allowed to know who may be killed next by the current President or why.

“We knew exactly who they were, exactly what they were doing, what they represented, and why they were going where they were going,” Hegseth told reporters on September 4 during a visit to Fort Benning, Georgia.

“How did you know?” a reporter asked.

“Why would I tell you that?” Hegseth responded.

Why explain?

Well, Hegseth should know Senator Frank Church already conclusively explained why, way back in 1975. And that is not to mention all the explanations from the post-WWII tribunals at Nuremburg. Such a refusal, by what amounts to a war mongering executive claiming no accountability, marks an end of democracy.

The Church Committee’s work in the 1970s established that democratic oversight requires transparency about targeting criteria and legal authority. Without it, democracy ends.

Civil Rights campaigners of the 1960s certainly would recognize this “shoot first, justify second” mentality of white men claiming their invisible empire can’t be questioned. The Secretary of State Rubio admitted the civilians in a boat “could have been interdicted rather than destroyed” yet the President overruled everyone to dictate immediate lethal strikes “as a matter of first, not last, resort.”

When Hegseth refuses to explain any basis at all for such offensive thought, he’s essentially claiming an executive authority has been invented to designate kill lists. He overtly rejects any balance of judicial review or meaningful oversight. To put it another way, a few months ago he fired the top legal authorities of the Army and the Air Force to enable today’s patenly illegal use of force on civilians.

As one expert reviewing Hegseth’s actions has precisely explained:

There is a word for the premeditated killing for people outside of context of armed conflict. That word is murder.

This campaign of assassination, designed to bypass not just American legal protections but any legal system that might provide due process or accountability, could now pivot to the military troops Hegseth deploys to target Black-led cities.

The pattern should remind us of Nixon’s Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which did the same by claiming certain categories of people could be killed without due process based on intelligence assessments that could never be challenged or verified. The Church Committee specifically identified how such programs inevitably expand beyond their stated parameters because there are no meaningful constraints on their application.

They assassinated JFK, Lumumba, Mondlane, Hammarskjold, MLK, Malcom X… which reveals a continuity of this system. The same networks that eliminated leaders who challenged white supremacy and American imperial power are now operating with open impunity, using Nixon’s racist “war on drugs” and “counter-terrorism” as pretexts for a campaign of state-based terror.

The Venezuela news serves as a very simple yet critical boundary test by white nationalists.

Once the principle is established that their unitary executive model is established and can designate any group for extrajudicial killing based on secret criteria, the categorical thinking is transferable to any group or individual for elimination.

And that’s why recent government campaigns, arguing they can target people based on race alone, should be seen for exactly what they are, a state building the scaffolding for mass detention and murder.

…the supreme court has “effectively legalized racial profiling”, granting federal agents the power to stop people in Los Angeles simply for speaking Spanish or appearing Latino…

This goes beyond policy disagreement into America once again deploying infrastructure and plans for state-sponsored mass violence against targeted populations. Hannah Arendt identified this process: the intentional creation of stateless populations who exist outside legal protection in order to normalize mass human oppression and extermination.