Will military leaders stand up against illegal orders?

If KILLING MEN in boats at sea were truly legal, we wouldn't need a secret memo to say so.

- JON DUFFY GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

SENIOR military leaders are addressed by President Trump at Marine Corps Base Quantico in September.

ALEX WONG Getty Images.

According to the Washington Post, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel quietly assured the Defense Department last week that U.S. service members cannot be prosecuted for the more than 20 “boat strikes” that have killed at least 80 people in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. A memo like that does not speak the language of lawfulness. It speaks the language of guilt management and accountability avoidance. When a government must preemptively promise its warriors immunity, it is conceding that it has crossed a line.

This is not an isolated excess. It is the continuation of a moral collapse that has unfolded, memo by memo, across decades of American warfare. The George W. Bush administration wrote the first of these permission slips when its lawyers redefined torture as “enhanced interrogation.” The Obama administration rescinded those opinions — then used the same machinery of justification to rationalize drone strikes, including one that killed an American citizen in 2011 and another that killed his 16-year-old son. The party in charge may change, but the grotesque logic endures: If you can’t make it right, make it legal.