UK Pulls Access To Intel Since It Doesn’t Want To Be Part Of Trump’s ‘Murder People In Boats’ Program

from the you’ll-have-to-kill-without-us dept

This won’t matter to Donald Trump or the dozens of administration officials who live to please him. In all likelihood, it will just lead to Trump and his administration smearing one of this nation’s allies for being weak on crime and too supportive of people who are being murdered by the US government.

But it should matter to everyone else. The United States was once the leader of the free world, even with all of its current and historical flaws. It’s no longer interested in any version of “freedom” that doesn’t involve making people feel it’s alright to engage in open bigotry. And it no longer deserves to be called the “leader” of anything, since it’s in the process of devolving into an authoritarian state with white Christian nationalist desires.

The mass deportation program that has been running at full speed since Trump retook the Oval Office has been abjectly and objectively miserable. Irrational hatred is now just public policy, overseen by grinning “Village of the Damned”-esque kids with swastikas pinwheeling in their creepy, dead eyes.

Not the UK has been much better for most of its history. It spent a lot of its history engaging in open racism and bigotry-as-public-policy colonialism. Even now, its desire to be more harmful to immigrants, privacy rights, and anything not completely Union Jacked has seen it devolve in the same direction the United States is now headed, albeit with a bit more internal division.

But Trump has gone so far that not even this new wave of UK Exceptionalism is willing to endorse it. Sure, it’s willing to be awful towards its own populace regularly, but it’s not exactly ready to sign up for an eventual appearance at The Hague. Here’s Natasha Bertrand, reporting on a sudden severing of surveillance access by the UK government in response to the administration’s killings of people in international waters.

The United Kingdom is no longer sharing intelligence with the US about suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean because it does not want to be complicit in US military strikes and believes the attacks are illegal, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

[…]

[S]hortly after the US began launching lethal strikes against the boats in September, however, the UK grew concerned that the US might use intelligence provided by the British to select targets. British officials believe the US military strikes, which have killed 76 people, violate international law, the sources said. The intelligence pause began over a month ago, they said.

The UK government did the right thing. Even if some in the UK government might be aligned with Trump in terms of going full Duterte, there’s no reason to continue to act as an accomplice in the extrajudicial killings. Even if the political winds fail to shift in the United States at the end of Trump’s second term, the man who has spent his entire presidential career antagonizing most of the rest of the world has made enough enemies that he won’t have many supporters if an internationally-backed prosecution attempt arises in the future.

Even military officials are starting to back away from the boat strike program, even as the Trump-beholden DOJ Office of Legal Counsel continues to issue questionable memos that claim “this all very legal, actually.” It certainly doesn’t look legal, which creates some problems in the court of public opinion. In courts that actually have the power to do something about it, these outrageous claims of absolute executive power have already worn thin.

As for the official US response, it’s limited to this for the moment:

The British embassy in Washington and the White House did not respond to requests for comment. A Pentagon official told CNN that the department “doesn’t talk about intelligence matters.”

LMAO. The Defense Department talks about “intelligence matters” in chats that have included journalists, family members, and family lawyers. And Trump himself has unilaterally (and very unofficially) declassified intelligence information by splattering it all over the pages of TruthSocial and X. All that’s being said here is that the government won’t talk about things it doesn’t want to discuss, right up until an administration official (or Trump himself) decides it’s time to get bitchy about this regime being treated like the untrustworthy piece of shit it is.

That will probably happen sooner, rather than later. As the CNN report notes, both Canada and Colombia have done the same thing, preventing the US military from using intelligence these countries have collected to target people in boats in international waters. Make America A Pariah Again is going just great.

Filed Under: boat strikes, defense department, extrajudicial killings, mass deportations, murder, trump administration, uk, venezuela, war on drugs