What My Lai Massacre Has to Do With Minneapolis

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During the Vietnam War, “success” was measured primarily by the numbers of the enemy killed and wounded. Soldiers were under intense pressure to deliver impressive death statistics. Such pressure led to the infamous My Lai Massacre, where hundreds of unarmed villagers — almost all of them women, elderly men, children, and babies — were massacred.

Today, federal agents, too, are under top-down pressure to generate statistics. They must capture and deport large numbers of undocumented individuals. In the process, they’re racking up another statistic: dead Americans. 

It is the unrelenting pressure for numbers — combined with the reckless hiring of unqualified people lacking the requisite skills for crowd control at demonstrations — that is bringing this country to a breaking point. 

But let’s go deeper. 

TheTrump administration did not, after the Good killing, step back to reconsider this dynamic — they doubled down. Why? As my colleague Jonathan Simon pointed out to me, the answer is not unlike the answer to the question of why, after dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the US doubled down by also bombing Nagasaki. That “signal” was directed at the Soviet Union — a clear “keep your hands off Japan.” This signal is directed at the American people. It’s basically state-sponsored terrorism — a nonverbal proclamation of fascistic intent — we can do whatever we want wherever we want, laws, tradition, and the Constitution be damned.

Renee Good and Alex Pretti may not be the only names we come to memorialize.

One can argue about the extent to which Americans have the right to protest, up to and including impeding actions they deem immoral. But one cannot argue with the numbers and the toxic values demonstrated in Minneapolis — or with the ultimate cause of our national spiral into chaos. 

We know from experience that the immigration problem is complicated, and the process of identifying, adjudicating, and removing those who have no legal right to be in the country and may present a threat to the public good is a time-consuming and at times frustrating one for those who believe the country is being overwhelmed. 

But proceeding lawfully with due process is just the way it has to be in a democratic polity. Nothing is easy, and if the sense of the public is that this removal process must be continued, then it must be done responsibly, and humanely, over time. 

The pressure of quotas is, we now see, deadly. And the mindset behind it must be brought into the open and discussed if this ship of state is ever to sail upright again. 

ICED in Minneapolis… Again

One version of the January 24 killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by ICE agents comes from US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem: A man she labelled a “domestic terrorist” approached some Border Patrol officers with a handgun and violently resisted when they tried to disarm him. “Fearing for his life and for the lives of his fellow officers,” she said, an agent fired “defensive shots.” 

A different version, according to video analyses by The New York Times, CBS, NBC, CNN and others: Pretti approaches the agents holding up a cell phone. He tries to help a woman who was shoved to the ground by an ICE agent. That agent pepper-sprays both of them in the face. Several officers pile onto Pretti, beating him for several seconds, when someone (as yet unidentified) yells, “He’s got a gun!” 

Apparently in response, an officer reaches down and retrieves the newly discovered gun from Pretti’s waistband. Immediately after — at a time when he no longer has his gun and while he is still being beaten — an officer shoots him at least nine times. The victim, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse at a veterans hospital, had a gun permit.

Now that practically the whole world knows that the Trump administration’s claims are conspicuously false, how will they ever recover from being exposed as unambiguously lying about what amounts to state-sponsored murder of a US citizen who is clearly innocent of threatening law enforcement agents with deadly force?

I watched a disheartening display on Sunday: US Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche responding to Kristen Welker on NBC’s Meet The Press, as she tries in vain to get a straight answer out of him on, well, anything concerning the shooting.

She persistently asks him, does he not see that Pretti approached the ICE agents holding only a cell phone? That he was fatally shot after his legally permitted gun had been removed, when he was not possibly a threat?

Blanche’s performance is an embarrassment. He clumsily bobs and weaves, challenges her “perception,” changes the subject, claims no one knows what happened, no one can see anything, tries to distract with irrelevancies, and adopts one of the most abused concepts in the history of disputation — claiming NBC’s Welker was viewing the event “out of context.” 

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One thing that may never be investigated: the extra ammunition Pretti allegedly carried.

In an apparent effort to make Pretti seem even more dangerous, Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino said, “The suspect also had two loaded magazines and no accessible ID. This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Pretti’s 9mm semiautomatic gun was the same kind carried by many ICE agents. 

With this in mind, as my colleague Milicent Cranor noted, and given all the other examples of deception in this case and wide-ranging cover-up in general, it’s not unreasonable to withhold trust on the matter of the claimed extra ammunition. 

This is especially so because of the incredibly high political stakes in a crucial election year — and the fact that DHS has shut out state and local authorities from the investigation of both fatalities. And blocked an investigation by the FBI. 

Any honest inquiry would take a look at something we brought up in our newish weekly series Saturday Hashtag: What ICE officer Jonathan Ross did just before shooting Renee Good — position himself in front of a moving vehicle — is actually a thing. 

The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF)’s “Use of Force Review” of 67 cases between 2010 and 2012 (released in 2013) focused on this tactic as an excuse to fire. In fact, The Nation magazine, to which I was an erstwhile contributor reported on this back in 2014. 

Now, one cannot be sure whether ICE agent Ross was doing that when he fatally shot Renee Good in the head through the open driver’s window. But certainly he was aware of the Border Patrol practice because he himself was with the Border Patrol in El Paso from 2007 to 2015 — the period during which CBP agents were employing the above-mentioned tactic. 

This seems like a very big deal but, aside from Raw Story and a few individuals posting about it on social media, it has gotten little of the attention it deserves. Legacy corporate media certainly hasn’t seized the opportunity to raise the matter. 

In fact, back in March of 2014 (soon after The Nation article), The New York Times published a story based on the PERF report — but look at the headline: 

Border Patrol Instructed to Show Restraint  

The article was all about handling oneself when assaulted with rocks, the dangers that agents face, etc., and at the end of a paragraph, where you’d almost miss it:

The memo also instructed them not to shoot at fleeing vehicles and reiterated a policy that forbids officers to place themselves in the path of moving vehicles — an apparent response to accusations that agents had stood in front of vehicles to justify firing their weapons.

In contrast, on February 27, 2024, The Los Angeles Times began with this:

WASHINGTON — Border Patrol agents have deliberately stepped in the path of cars apparently to justify shooting at the drivers and have fired in frustration at people throwing rocks from the Mexican side of the border, according to an independent review of 67 cases that resulted in 19 deaths.

According to that same Saturday Hashtag, some of these ICE tactics may have originated with Israel’s military, national police, and intelligence services, which have been training American law enforcement for years, much as Americans for decades provided training to other countries, notably those south of the border. 

Bloodying the Muddy Waters

This outstanding analysis of multiple, clear videos of the shooting of Renee Good make it abundantly clear that, after firing through the far left side of the windshield, the agent quickly moves to the driver’s window and fires more shots. Then he walks away. By no stretch of the imagination was he “run over” as claimed by Trump et al.

Now compare the above with right-wing podcaster Megyn Kelly’s analysis, “What Shooting Videos Really Show.” In Kelly’s version of the ABC video, agent Ross is a dark gray blob — in contrast to clearer objects around him. And it is impossible to see what happens with this blob. (Kelly also looks the viewer in the eye and says, with emphasis, the hole in the windshield is “in front.” Well, it is in the windshield, but so far to the left on the windshield glass, right next to the metal frame, that it can most reasonably be considered a side shot.)  

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Now, back to our story. On January 14, not long after the media coverage of the Good shooting — coverage that paid scant attention to the PERF report — CBS News announced: 

ICE agent who shot Renee Good suffered internal bleeding, officials say

CBS staffers were skeptical of the claim, especially since the agent was seen walking around for several minutes after the incident before driving himself, not to a hospital, but to a federal building. We do not know exactly when he was taken to a hospital.

One CBS staffer anonymously told The Guardian, “It was viewed as a thinly veiled, anonymous leak to someone who’d carry it online.” Another said, “Felt to many here like we were carrying water for the admin’s justifying of the shooting to keep our access to our sources.”  

And, they implied, Bari Weiss, the recently appointed editor-in-chief of CBS, seemed to be pushing that ICE-friendly detail of the story; a CBS News spokesperson said the network “went through its rigorous editorial process and decided it was reportable based on the reporting, the reporters, and the sourcing.” 

Repeating flimsy, vague assertions from an administration universally known for nonstop lying is a “rigorous editorial process”? And when has that administration ever not instantly weaponized advantageous information, like unquestioningly reporting the (still not substantiated) claim that ICE agent Ross sustained internal injuries (a category which sounds bad but encompasses everything down to small bruises).

In light of which, my question is this: Why did “officials” wait seven days to make this claim?  

In any case, by making Ross seem like a bleeding victim, it would also seem that he had to shoot to protect himself. And it might distract from, if not neutralize, the PERF exposé.  

But how will they ever prove “internal bleeding”? If it was more than a bruise, why let him out of the hospital the same day? Will we see scans of this “internal” damage?

And now this: ICE has proposed cutting funding for bodycams — and House Republicans do not want to mandate that ICE officers even wear them. Now, why would it do that, do you suppose? 

Trump, F*** OFF

It’s worth keeping in mind the Trumpian tendency to lie and cover up potentially damaging material when we consider the interminable foot-dragging on the congressionally ordered release of the Epstein files. “Even” GOP representatives like Anna Paulina Luna and Lauren Boebert — who have been championed by some as seriously concerned with transparency — now say they don’t care that Trump failed to release 95 percent of the Epstein documents, or only care about seeing dirt on Bill Clinton. 

With his back to the wall, on Epstein or any other perceived threat, we know Trump’s longtime solution, as mandated by his mentor Roy Cohn: distract, distract, distract.  

Recruiting large numbers of unbalanced and unqualified people into ICE, then inviting them to wreak havoc, is another thuggish power play to command the news cycle. And it will create fear — as will his effort to roll back already ineffectual gun regulation, a dangerous signal to his heavily armed base, to whom he constantly dogwhistles about violence against his enemies. 

We do have reason to react with growing consternation. Especially when considering what may be yet to come. I keep hearing Franklin Roosevelt’s timeless line from his 1933 inaugural speech: “All we have to fear is fear itself.” 

Of course, fear itself is paralyzing, and generally makes everything worse. But let’s face it: The reality is that the threat of dictatorship, fascism, cruelty, unjustifiable punishment, total disaster — is terrifying. 

Here’s the thing, though: Facing a threat head-on can be empowering. That is, I think, what FDR meant.

Because courage often arises out of even temporarily conquered fear. And then the challenge is to sustain that courage. Fortunately, this sentiment seems to be spreading rapidly. Our fellow citizens — in Minneapolis and elsewhere — get it, and now, so do our friends abroad. 

In fact, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s bold challenge to Trump at Davos has Trump panicking and threatening Canada with 100-percent tariffs. He’s really starting to lose it and will begin to be overwhelmed if, as one hopes, more and more speak up. And they are — from religious leaders to a Danish member of the European parliament literally telling Trump to “F*** OFF.” 

It’s no longer unimaginable that Europe — perhaps with help from Canada and Mexico — might save the United States from Trump/MAGA, much as, in World War II, the US came to save Europe from the Nazis. 

There’s my glimmer of hope.