Much of the chatter across the Pacific today concerns the Trump administration’s sustained bombing of alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean, and whether it has committed at least one serious war crime.
Over the weekend multiple media outlets, including The Washington Post and CNN, reported that the US military had deliberately killed two helpless survivors of a strike off the coast of Venezuela, who were stranded in the water.
Today the conservative legal expert Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, delivered a withering assessment of the incident.
“If this happened as described in the Post report, it was, at best, a war crime,” Mr McCarthy wrote for National Review.
“Even if you buy the untenable claim that (the targets of these strikes) are combatants, it is a war crime to intentionally kill combatants who have been rendered unable to fight.”
Meanwhile, in remarks to reporters on Air Force One, President Trump has doubled down on his description of a Democratic governor as a “retard”, explained why he’s decided to pardon a “notorious drug trafficker”, and offered a worryingly vague answer when pressed for details on his recent MRI scan.
The scan took place during Mr Trump’s medical check-up last month. Reporters asked the President to explain what his doctors were looking for.
“What part of your body was the MRI looking at?” one asked him.
“I have no idea,” he claimed.
“It was just an MRI. What part of the body? It wasn’t the brain, because I took a cognitive test and I aced it. I got a perfect mark, which you would be incapable of doing.”
Mr Trump was referring to a basic test, designed to pick up signs of cognitive dysfunction, that he took in 2020.
His non-answer today frustrated some observers, such as veteran journalist Chris Cillizza.
“It’s impossible for him not to know what the MRI was focused on. He can choose not to say. But it doesn’t pass the smell test to say he had no idea,” Mr Cillizza said.
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