Who killed Alex Pretti?
Who killed Renee Good?
It’s no grassy-knoll mystery. Developer fluid didn’t yield an old man’s home movies for us to know. Moments after either incident, evidence circled the globe in a gasp.
How did their trials go? Any arraignment? Anything at all?
Nothing. In the land of the free and home of the brave, the killers haven’t been tried. They haven’t even been charged.
An administration that never acknowledges such a thing as an error continues to obstruct both criminal cases. It wasn’t until July that federal officials allowed Minnesota access to the evidence in the two cases.
The only evidence we have is that our government isn’t interested in justice it can’t spin.
What about the airborne actors who recently drone-bombed three Ecuadorian fishing boats in the Pacific? At least eight were killed. Survivors said they were taken into custody momentarily by “gringos” who spoke English and had American patches on their shoulders.
Who were these assailants? What business did they have doing this? The government – our government – is tight-lipped.
“Mum” wasn’t the word in December when our military took aim at pint-sized vessels near Venezuela on the unfounded pretext that they were transporting drugs. (The better to frame our invasion of Venezuela as a strike against “narco terrorism.” Yep.)
Tight-lipped? No, our secretary of “war” was boastful of having blasted little boats out of the water. Then: major blowback — particularly when U.S. forces returned to kill survivors of one vessel as they screamed for help.
Judges. Juries. Executioners.
Conservative icon George Will wrote that the actions in the Mediterranean should “nauseate Americans,” calling this administration a “sickening moral slum.”
Further: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.”
The thing is, these crimes have not stopped. The New York Times reports our military has sunk dozens of vessels and killed at least 221.
No wonder this president doesn’t want to share a subway car with the International Court of Justice.
We didn’t need the My Lai massacre to inform us that atrocities emanate at the hands of those locked and loaded with our ammo. From Kent State to George Floyd, we’ve seen innocents die at the hands – and at the knee – of someone in power. We’ve seen the coverups and the whitewashing.
But this administration has blown any previous standards out of the water.
The capricious use of the National Guard. The transforming of ICE into a paramilitary Legion of Goons. Nothing shames Hegseth, Stephen Miller and their boss, Conman the Barbaric.
It turns out that the real problem about building border walls to keep out peaceable laborers is that on the “safe” side among us are miscreants like these.
Don’t you know all sorts of good is to come from the $20 million purchase of truckloads of electric charge-emitting gloves for ICE agents? Twenty million dollars’ worth of good, don’t cha know?
Add these “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices” to our Overkill Euphemisms Glossary along with “enhanced interrogation” (waterboarding) and “collateral damage” (obliterating a girls’ school).
We know who killed Renee Good: ICE agent Jonathan Ross. We know who killed Alex Pretti: Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs officer Raymundo Gutierrez. Will they ever face trial for their actions? Who knows?
We do know, however, if a bystander were to handle a floating blue piece of coating up from the bottom of the Lincoln Reflective Pool, an arrest and an indictment would be swift.
And don’t go photographing sea-shell messages this president doesn’t like, either.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
