There is part of me that thinks that having Trump invoke the Insurrection Act and put troops on the streets of the United States would be an improvement over having his hateful, half-baked paramilitary do whatever the hell they feel like. I also can't help wondering how well the DHS goons' [...)

This is an invaluable explainer on the different agencies (mostly DHS) that are referred to as "ICE" in the vernacular, what they're supposed to do, how they differ, and why ICE ERO and Border Patrol are utterly out of their depth doing what they're currently doing.

Two good (in my opinion) perspectives on the killing of Renee Good: Harry Litman is a formed federal prosecutor. harrylitman.substack.com/p/a-prosecut... Asha Rangappa is former FBI agent. asharangappa.substack.com/p/friday-rou... (She's on BlueSky but I don't have her handle to hand atm.)

The unjustifiable killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent has me thinking about the problematic notion that any interaction between government and private citizen that isn't initiated by the citizen can be a matter of civil rather than criminal law. 1/🧵

In their book The Ethics of War (Duckworth, 1981), Paskins & Dockrill coined a tentative definition of terrorism as "the indiscriminate waging of evasive warfare" (with "evasive warfare" being more or less what is now termed "asymmetrical warfare"). It is worth noting that their definition [...]

It would be really nice if the news media did a better job of pointing out that "narco-terrorism" is Not A Thing under federal law. The indictment indicates there are two distinct concepts of the term. 1/🧵 www.npr.org/2026/01/05/n...

There are some very curious effects going on in which folks both on the right and the left seem to be unaware that all of the Americas were colonized by Europeans centuries ago. When Anglophones confront hispanohablantes, both are "colonialists," "colonizer-settlers," or terms to that effect. [...]

My first thought, in response to this morning's news, was to look up the rationale behind Operation Just Cause, the invasion of Panama and the seizing of its dictator, Manuel Noriega. There are similarities but also key differences, one of which is that the Panamanian national assembly had [...]

I got taken out of the Little Drummer Boy challenge on Day 1; fell in the Muddle Through challenge* a week ago; but I did make it to Whamhalla! * - a challenge of my own devising that relies on not hearing the original lyrics of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas."

Balko's excellent review raises the unpleasant thought that American law enforcement has been riddled with personnel who have been itching for years to behave the way ICE ERO and Border Patrol are now behaving.

"Kill them all, God damn it. [...] Not a single one must be left alive." -- Radislav Krstić, commander VRS Drina Corps by radio to Dragan Obrenović, deputy commander 1st Zvornik Brigade, 19-JUL-1995. Krstić is still in prison in Estonia.

Dutch political scientist Alex P. Schmidt posited some 40 years ago that a quick & dirty definition of terrorism is "anything that would be a war crime if you committed it during a war." Since there's no state of war in the Caribbean, what does that make "Operation Southern Spear"?

Pleased to share my new essay in @foreignaffairs.com on the broader implications of the Trump administration’s killing spree at sea. www.foreignaffairs.com/central-amer...

It's rather disconcerting to read that the regime is increasingly relying on the Border Patrol as its goon squad because even ICE ERO has some standards about using force in population centers.

This story has weighed on my mind since the verdict came back: www.lawfaremedia.org/article/sand... The reason for this is that, about four years ago, I was tried on a charge of 3rd degree assault under Alabama state law. The criteria for this offense are (law.justia.com/codes/alabam...) [...]

"If you cannot recognise the will of the Führer as a source of law, then you cannot remain a judge." -- Third Reich justice minister Franz Gürtner to district judge Lothar Kreyssig, after the latter protested regarding illegality of Aktion T4

Montgomery, AL

For some feline relief from the doomscrolling, the outdoor cats from the house next door discovered my car... (I moved in last week.)

In anticipation of today's ill-advised convocation of flag-rank officers, there were references online to the officers of the Reichswehr supposedly being gathered in 1935 and told that they should pledge allegiance to the Führer in person, or else. So that sort of happened, but not quite.

I'm a history major, trying to discern patterns in human behavior is part of what I do. It's hard to identify patterns in "mass shootings" because that term is so amorphous, but there's a category of killer that this addresses. www.bellingcat.com/news/america... 1/?

Dear Microsoft, a propos of nothing in particular... remember how everyone hated Clippy? Remember how you got rid of Cortana because nobody wanted that either? And let's be honest: nobody wanted Bing--not even your employees--and nobody wants Edge. Why would you think anyone wants Copilot?

American right wing suddenly realizes that political violence is undesirable when it's pointed at them.

I have a sneaking suspicion that one of the classes I registered for this Fall semester just got canceled because of Alabama SB129 (state law prohibiting "DEI" and certain "divisive concepts" in public education).

I can't help feeling the end of the Cold War enabled the idiot tendency in American politics. Before that, the idiots could be shuffled aside because "we have to beat the Soviets, and the adults are talking" on just about any subject.

In late 2023, I wrote a paper about the "subsequent proceedings" at Nuremberg, the US-run trials that followed the IMT, and in researching it, I learned way more about the workings of the Third Reich than I perhaps wanted to know. This included the existence of the SS-WVHA, the "economic office." /1

"We've got skulls on our hats..."

Not a great article, in that it doesn't clarify the existence of both criminal denaturalization (which has a 10-year limitation) and "civil" (which cannot result in incarceration, at worst in deportation). From what I understand, even in a civil proceeding [...] www.npr.org/2025/06/30/n...

With a lot of people claiming that DHS is paying bounties for suspected undocumented immigrants, let's turn to Snopes: www.snopes.com/news/2025/06... Spoiler: there's no solid evidence to support the idea, as worded. However... /1

There are a lot of people drawing parallels with early 1930s Germany these days (with reason) and I'd like to hold forth for a bit about "anti-fascism." 🧵

Pete Hegseth once scared America’s allies. Now he reassures them www.economist.com/united-state... From The Economist But then he said ISAF stood for "I Saw Americans Fighting," blithely ignoring the casualties. So much for allies being "force multipliers" and all that jazz.

"Trump won a narrow victory in a close election. He did so on a promise to lower prices and close the United States to foreign criminals." This. Hence the protestations of people who voted for him that, "I didn't vote for" increased tariffs, prices not coming down, and troops on the street.

Money quote: "Just as Trump and Miller needed to paint all migrants as criminals but now are reduced to scouring Home Depot parking lots, so too must they wildly inflate the violence in L.A. [...] to keep the MAGA Media Complex happy." newrepublic.com/article/1966...

Hat tip to @parkermolloy.com for this: a cartoon by Charles Brooks in the Birmingham News from the "long hot summer" of 1967. Brooks was in a position to know better, because the Birmingham riot had taken place four years prior, at the trail end of Project C(onfrontation). [...]

So I'm seeing reports of criminal non-state actors piggybacking on the behavior of state actors disregarding the rule of law to do Bad Things, like running phony immigration sites and robbing people while pretending to be ICE thugs. Part of me deplores this, another part says [...]

IANAL, but I am a historian who happens to have spent 3+ years working in the back rooms of the prosecution of a UN ad hoc tribunal, and I wrote an award-winning paper on the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, so let's talk about what a tribunal is and why it can do what it does.

"Let's run government like a business! The kind of business that's operated by a monomaniacal CEO who thinks he shouldn't have to answer to anyone!"

I wonder how long it will take before the deputization of Musk's private security detail by the US Marshals Service is rescinded. Assuming it hasn't already.

"That is, why not just use dollars instead of tokens that are supposedly backed by dollars?" is something I've been wondering as well. (NB: "supposedly backed") paulkrugman.substack.com/p/digital-co...

www.justsecurity.org/113882/civil... fantastic piece

This is how I felt... what feels decades ago. Except decades ago, Israeli politics hadn't taken this weird twist to the ultra-Orthodox Right and Labour mattered, and the two-state solution seemed viable.

As a former staff member of one of the UN ad hoc tribunals, and someone who's written a paper for college on the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, I like this idea. newrepublic.com/post/195324/...

Gift link to one of my favorite things I wrote as a Washington Post columnist. I share it as a farewell salute — because I am proud of it and moved by what it represents: the Post’s editorial care; the talent of its art, audio, and audience departments; its institutional courage. wapo.st/42qvWE6

The staggering Atlantic report about the administration’s sloppy preparation for military action is hands-down the most obvious demonstration that the right’s rhetoric about Clinton’s server was bullshit. Gift link: wapo.st/4c2yQCj

Rethinking the "ticking bomb scenario" to justify torture, or for that matter, the death penalty: a modest suggestion to counteract mission creep.

One thing to bear in mind with the time-line of how quickly the Nazis managed to dismantle democracy is that Germany had, at the time, been a democracy for less than 15 years. The American experiment, for all its flaws, has been going on a bit longer than that.

Okay, so I can't help feeling that "Celui qui sauve sa patrie ne viole aucune loi" works more than one way.

It doesn't matter whether you're intentions are nothing but benign: do not help ICE pretend to be more powerful than it is. Bullies thrive on fear. www.npr.org/2025/01/31/n...

A helpful explanation of the difference between a judicial warrant and a DHS "administrative warrant": www.benachcollopy.com/blog/when-is...

Once again, Teen Vogue(!) steps up as Big Damn Heroes of the fourth estate. www.teenvogue.com/story/ice-wa...