A well written opinion piece by former SECAF Kendall. (Had the privilege to meet in person)
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Well-written? Kind of.
Service secretaries, unlike the military service chiefs, are political appointees. Mr. Frank Kendall is a high-ranking Democrat, who also happens to have advised Democrat Presidents in his role as Secretary of the Air Force. In that context, his criticism of a Republican administration is not surprising.
Beneath the flowery vocabulary and verbose prose, his core argument is that the Trump administration has conspired to pack the JAG corps and DOJ with lawyers who will, as a conglomerate of several hundred people, violate their professional ethics to comply with the President's illegal acts. This puts senior military officers in a pickle between obeying the 'lawful' orders as interpreted by crooked lawyers or standing up for what they believe is right - with the potential consequence of going to jail.
He doesn't use the same concrete language I did because he's capitalizing on the average Americans' 8th grade reading comprehension.
Unfortunately, he doesn't offer any concrete evidence of this assertion, and merely attempts to tie it to the resignation of USSOUTHCOM, who he regards as a patriot standing up for his beliefs.
Examples of evidence could include: some evidence of purging the JAG corps / DOJ on a mass scale, evidence of the President installing people into key positions within the JAG corps / DOJ, evidence of the President overruling JAG / DOJ advice, etc.
They might exist, but Mr. Kendall didn't use them to support his argument.
It's a very weak argument that is predicated on trusting his expertise and former position as being apolitical... which is only a problem because, like most conspiracy theories, it relies on too many people to be complicit in order to work. The people who already disagree with Venezuelan Ops, most of whom never spent a day in uniform, will nod in approval and think "yeah, those poor GOFOs," which is what helps the NYT sell clicks.
And to hammer that home ... The excuse 60 minutes gave for editing Kamala Harris and Donald Trump interviews? The clips left on the cutting floor wouldn't be interesting to viewers.
You aren't consuming news, you're consuming what an editor thinks is entertainment.
From what I have seen, there was far more churn and gnashing of teeth about how the DoD went about axing "DEI" (along with any GOFO who was brown or had a vagina) than there is about eliminating narco-terrorists.
I sincerely doubt anyone who is "fully informed" is losing sleep over the latter. The scuttlebutt about USSOUTHCOM resigning is a rift between him and USSOCOM / JSOTF vis a vis authorities and lines of demarcation created largely by SECDEF. USSOUTHCOM didn't like being told to stfu and color so he resigned.