Bryan Del Monte worked for the Defense Department from 2003 to 2008, when the Bush administration was facing a firestorm of criticism over the treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib, a prison outside Baghdad, and the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp (GTMO) in Cuba.
Del Monte did a crash course in international law and the laws and practices governing the treatment of combatants and non-combatants in wartime. Tasked by the Bush administration with making sure these abuses didn’t happen again, he wrote the policy that has governed how the U.S. treats prisoners and detainees since that time.
He has a lot to say about exactly what’s been happening this fall, and how profoundly the Trump regime is blowing apart international norms and American practices, while decimating the heart and soul of the country’s military. Listen to our entire conversation below.
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TRANSCRIPT. BECAUSE SOME OF US WOULD RATHER READ!
JOURNAL: Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us at Journal of the Plague Years. I’m Susan Zakin. I’m the editor. And this is Bryan Del Monte. Bryan was recruited by the Department of Defense out of a graduate program at George Washington. And you were doing an international relations degree, minor in political methodology.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: Right.
JOURNAL: But then, and we can talk about this, but you were recruited to write to the Bush administration.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: Correct.
JOURNAL: As I understand it, just as Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, all that stuff was exploding. We should just briefly kind of get people up to speed with that in case they are too young. There were issues about the Geneva Convention.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: Right.
JOURNAL: Where basically American military people were torturing detainees.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: I’ll agree to that. But yes, those were the allegations. Detainees, yes. It was both in Cuba and in Iraq itself. So there was the war, generally what was called the global war on terror, right? We were engaged in Iraq and we were engaged in Afghanistan and we had detainees at a U.S. facility that was built in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
JOURNAL: What we’re going to talk about today, of course, is the news with our fearless leader, Pete Hegseth, because these issues have returned.
I know that, Bryan, you and I might not be too young to remember Guantanamo. But we were very young when the My Lai massacre happened in Vietnam. So this is not the first time the United States has faced these issues and gone through some questioning. Maybe we can talk about Guantanamo a bit and what the reaction of the Bush
administration was. And then we can do the old English major compare and contrast to what is happening now.
And then I’m really looking forward to your breakdown of an analysis of what’s happening now with Pete Hegseth allegedly giving the order to kill them all, and, basically, let God sort ‘em out. I want to say that I love the description that George Will came up with in The Washington Post: These are war crimes without a war.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: I actually think I was probably the first commentator to inject the idea that a war wasn’t present.
JOURNAL: You may very well have been. But first get us up to speed with how you walked into this shitstorm, basically.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: Real briefly, my family and I, we had moved to Washington, D.C. because I wanted to pursue a doctorate degree in international relations. And a funny thing happened on the way to that, 9-11. Okay, I remember, you know, for most people, they watched 9-11 on TV. I lived it.
For people who lived in D.C. and for people who lived in New York, it’s different for us. We experienced it first hand.
That’s not to diminish everyone else in any way, but it was not a television show for us. So when that event happened, obviously it was a galvanizing event. And I wanted to serve the country. I realized it was going to be a turning point in history.
So I, along with pretty much everybody else at GW [George Washington University] that was in international relations or comparative politics, we all threw our hats to the national security community, the agency, the NSA, DIA, DOD, et cetera. And it’s funny because a lot of my friends all got hired one after the other, largely because they were all quantitative experts.
A couple of years later, like three years later, I get this call from this man who would change my life forever. He was a colonel. And he was leading, unbeknownst to me at the time, an office called Detainee Affairs.
He calls me up and he’s like, did you send me a resume? And I’m like, yeah, like three years ago. I mean, I remember this day. We joke about it from time to time. I actually called him on the 20th anniversary of this phone call last year. And he’s like, yeah, I need somebody like you.
And I said, OK, well, why? And he made his pitch. The best part of this pitch was: “The work sucks. It’s going to be 17, 18 hours a day and I can’t pay you.”
I go, “You can’t pay me? The Pentagon makes like goddamn 600 billion dollars, what do you mean you can’t pay me?”
“Well because that’s not how this works at the moment. I need people with your skills. You’d have to be a special government employee.”
“So let’s see if i got this straight. The the detail is crap. The issue is crap. The hours are long and you can’t pay me.”
And he’s like, “Yeah i think you pretty much got it.” And I go, OK, well, let me ask this: “Is the work going to matter?”
And he’s like “Oh, yes.”
I go, “Is the work going to allow us to kill bad guys?”
He goes, “Absolutely.” So I said OK. That started me on a journey that took me to places that I would have never imagined. You know, the White House, the agency, the Situation Room, the tank. I’ve seen the big war board. You know, from Dr. Strangelove.
JOURNAL: Tell our readers what the tank is.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: Well, so the tank, they call it the tank. It’s a SCIF, which is a facility that allows you to handle classified information. But they call it the tank because it’s a bunker in the national command area. It’s in the pentagon but it allows our senior military leaders to be protected during crises and quite frankly nuclear attacks. And I testified before Parliament, Congress, the Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House. I mean, I have to go back and think about it all. For a guy who was studying international relations, I was like, whoa, this is like the Super Bowl, right?
JOURNAL: Yeah. Yeah.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: I wrote speeches. I worked on policies. I helped write laws. Policies and laws, by the way, that are still in existence to this day. So maybe I was okay at it.
JOURNAL: Guantanamo, the story was breaking just as you started?
BRYAN DEL MONTE: It was Abu Ghraib that had exploded, actually. So as you’ll recall, we had... essentially one of the most divisive human rights crises since the United States continued to believe in and execute the death penalty. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo became an issue that every one of our allies, every one of our partners, every conversation, it didn’t matter if they were there to meet about a trade deal, detention operations would come up with senior leaders. That was the level of that crisis at the time.
Essentially that was my training ground. As a consequence of my time dealing with that I got an intensive education on the laws of armed conflict. I got an intensive education on human rights law. I got an intensive education on the entire framework of how our alliances work, how international law works, how intelligence sharing works, how coordination of defense policy works. And so when the report from the Washington Post happened last week, I was like... holy cow, we have completely lost the bubble on this, if this is correct. Unfortunately, my first instinct was to believe it.
JOURNAL: Let’s talk about the Bush administration reaction to Abu Ghraib.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: Sure. I mean, I can’t speak for the former president, but yeah.
JOURNAL: Well, he’s not speaking much.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: Oh, he’s not. He’s not. Which, again, is totally expected in my view. I know people like Nicole Wallace are frustrated with him, but I’m like, you know who the guy is. That’s who he is.
JOURNAL: When we spoke earlier, what you told me about the reaction of the Bushies to these human rights issues was quite enlightening.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: Yeah.With Dick Cheney’s passing, there are going to be a lot of people who are going to get their doctorate degrees studying this man. In terms of the global war on terrorism one of the things I told you in our pre-interview which I think has led to in part where we are now, we made an unforced error okay? Colin Powell desperately attempted to stop this from happening but we made the statement that we said the Geneva Conventions don’t apply in our conflict with Al Qaeda.
It’s not true as a matter of law, number one. It’s also not true as a matter of policy as to what we actually did at the time, okay? So even with all of the things that happened on 9-11 - and I’m going to speak only to the Department of Defense, I can’t speak to what the agency did, I can’t speak to what the NSA did.
But in terms of what our soldiers did, the rule of law and the laws of armed conflict were applied. And when soldiers broke those rules and orders, they went to court-martial. They went to prison, a good number of them. Okay?
There were reductions in rank. I mean, people forget about that with Abu Ghraib. There were a lot of people who wound up going to prison and wound up losing their rank and everything else.
Now, war is messy. It’s inherently evil. It’s exceptionally ugly. But the United States did hold its soldiers accountable for the rules of engagement
and for the laws of armed conflict. Now, was it perfect? No, I’m not going to say it was perfect.
But when the vice president basically convinced the president to say that the Geneva Conventions don’t apply, all of our allies went nonlinear. They were disgusted.
I don’t want to go too deep into things, but there are divergences and breaches between us and predominantly the Europeans, largely with respect to, quite frankly, Yasser Arafat and the PLO, with respect to an amendment to the conventions called Protocol One. Essentially, the Europeans wanted anybody fighting to be treated as if they were soldiers. And the position of the United States is and remains, you have to be a lawful combatant to be fully protected by Geneva II, which is what protects soldiers.
We allow in war, just so people, listeners understand, we allow in war acts that are, without question, crimes in any other context. Murder. Mayhem, bombing people, destruction of property, occupation of property, taking property.
Now, even within all of that context, the laws of armed conflict, what don’t we allow? Well, we don’t allow shooting the wounded. We don’t allow rape. We don’t allow institutionalized torture. We don’t allow terror campaigns. This is what the conventions say. We don’t allow perfidy. In other words, you can’t pretend to be the enemy and sneak through their lines and then, surprise, kill them. Okay? That’s called perfidy. You can’t dress up as Red Cross members and actually be the enemy and sneak behind enemy lines and attack them. You can’t launch attacks from churches and schools and things like that. These are protected buildings.
So there are all kinds of rules to conflict, which may seem... problematic to understand but going all the way back to the earliest conflicts no one wants a war where the only outcome can be the full annihilation of the enemy and so at a very early stage the idea was, OK, look yeah we’re at
war but we need rules, otherwise things get so out of hand that It’s impossible to continue. And here’s the thing. Wars rarely end in the full annihilation of the enemy. And so what happens after war? Well, you gotta have peace. And you gotta somehow put the order back together. And if everyone conducted themselves with absolutely no quarter and no accord, that makes the peace impossible, which is why it’s like, well, then we got to fight to the death until one side gets annihilated. So in a very rough way, this is why international humanitarian law exists.
If people are like, well, why are there rules? Because the alternative is complete annihilation of one another. And that’s not an outcome that anybody is engaged in or wants. So we have rules. And the Bush administration, though, said, look, this is a new conflict. This is a new type of enemy. The Geneva Conventions don’t apply.
Well, that was wrong as a matter of law, and it was wrong as a matter of fact. So honestly, what I spent the better part of my time doing... was trying to put the pin back in the grenade on that and a few other issues that we made unintentionally. Because the Geneva Conventions did apply.
The problem is Al Qaeda doesn’t get a lot of protections because the Geneva Conventions and the laws of war presume states make war against one another.
They presume that states exercise enough authority over their own citizens that they hold them criminally responsible if they commit acts of war against aggressors that aren’t authorized by the state. So, like, let’s say a group of Frenchmen attacked the United States. Okay, well, we would expect France to hold those people accountable and we would want to hold them accountable under criminal law. We wouldn’t declare war against France, although with this president, I can’t speak to that.
That’s the idea, right? So, in the case of the global war on terrorism, we had a failed state. We had Afghanistan, that was run by a regime that was not universally recognized, the Taliban. They had allowed a non-state actor, al-Qaeda, to operate within their borders.
So I understand the idea that they tried to convey, which is these people are not combatants recognized under the law, and thus they don’t have combatant immunity.
That’s what we wanted to say, I think, if I’m being charitable. But instead we said the Geneva Conventions don’t apply, which was wrong. They most certainly applied. It was an international armed conflict. There was a declaration of military force being authorized. The United States was operating internationally. And we most certainly, as a matter of our practice,
DOD elements conformed to the Geneva Conventions to the extent that in something as heinous and messy as a conflict, people conform to the rules.
JOURNAL: Can I just back you up for one second? What I’m thinking, having written a novel based on the war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s and really looked at war, breaking the rules actually seems to define much of modern conflict. War is now all of those things. Look at what Russia is doing in Ukraine, bombing civilians, kidnapping children. Look at what happened in Sierra Leone. in Liberia, Sudan. I mean, so I just for a continuum now, as much as this Hegseth situation may be, as you have suggested to me, a screw up, but-
BRYAN DEL MONTE: It’s a criminal act.
JOURNAL: Does it also show us another point on that graph as these norms erode? The United States, kudos to the professionalism of the military here, has had a strong ethos despite the abuses that everybody talks about. Those are remarkable because they are not the norm.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: Like i said war is messy so there are going to be bad actors.
JOURNAL: Exactly. The question is not are there going to be bad guys or guys who do bad things when they are in fear for their lives, but to think about Russia, that’s a state actor that isn’t willing to hold anyone responsible, or even acknowledge war crimes. Up until Trump the United States was different. How do we go from Abu Ghraib where there were abuses, and the Bush administration took some accountability, you, as I understand it, were tasked with writing a framework so it wouldn’t happen again, to this bizarre deadly clown car of Pete Hegseth off the coast of Venezuela. If these are two points on a graph, how can you map that?
And then it’s terrible to ask two questions at once, but I do wonder in terms of this story, which I know you’ve been following very closely, how do you think this will affect the proverbial white male swing voter who
does care about the military, may have served in the military?
BRYAN DEL MONTE: Well, let me deal with that second question first. I can’t speak to all levels of the military. The people that I remain in contact with still are the people that I knew during my time in the Pentagon and in government service. Now, some of those people are very senior in rank, lieutenant colonel all the way up to four stars.
They are all beside themselves in the discussions I’ve had. Because going back to July, when they first started deploying soldiers to U.S. cities, I posed a question to all of them. I said, “What order do you believe is so obviously manifestly unlawful that they’ll say no?”
This is before Pete Hegseth came out at his little rally with the president about no fat chicks and everything else and all their nonsense, right? And I’m like, what’s going to happen if a Marine detachment is told to open fire on protesters? What’s going to happen if things go sideways?
In part, because my instinct was that the chain of command would not hold.
So I asked individuals for whom the burden of command...I’m talking about company and brigade, battalion. I mean, these are people who are trusted with leading thousands of people potentially into battle. These are not amateurs. And they were like, “Well, I feel pretty confident that any order to commit murder will be rejected.”
And I said, “Are you sure about that?”
And every person at the time, over the summer, explained to me how they wouldn’t place themselves in that type of legal jeopardy. They wouldn’t place their families in that type of jeopardy, etc.
I said, “Well, I really hope you’re right.” Then this happened.
I’ve had a chance to talk to those people again. And they’re like, you apparently were right. And I’m like, well, I’m not pleased about that fact, but it sure looks that way, doesn’t it?
This is, in my opinion, the greatest breakdown of military discipline and adherence to the values of the oaths that they all swore to since Lee led an army against the Union. It’s that level of seriousness.
I’m sorry. The admiral in the room should have said to the secretary [Hegseth], you can’t order me to get a pizza, let alone to kill someone.
They know what the law is.
And for any of you that are interested, go read 10 USC 113. It spells out what the secretary’s responsibilities and authorities are. He is not an operational element. So I don’t care what he said. Anything that comes out of his mouth is babble with respect to the execution of kinetic military activity.
I don’t think most people know that. The Secretary of Defense can’t give an order. So he acts like he’s the warfighter. He’s not. And since I worked with more than a couple of secretaries of defense, I hate to say this, their job basically is relatively straightforward. It’s hard. I can also tell you how to win the Stanley Cup and I can tell you how to win the Masters. That doesn’t mean I know how to do it.
The secretary’s job basically boils down to three things. Ensure that the Department of Defense has the resources necessary to defend the United States against the threats it believes are most likely. Ensure that the people who are in our services are properly trained and equipped. And ensure that the ability of the Department of Defense to meet the threats posed to the United States are thought through and addressed.
So basically, it’s training, equipping, and strategy. Those are super important things. It’s up to the combatant commanders and the war fighters to actually fight the war. So this four star and I can’t remember his name at the moment. I should, but I’m sorry.
JOURNAL: Yeah, I can’t either. [Admiral Mitch Bradley, the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command.]
BRYAN DEL MONTE: The head of of special operations [Bradley] should have said, I’m sorry, Mr. Secretary, you can’t order me to do anything. And if you want us to do this, I need to hear it from the president of the United States. But he didn’t say that.
And his deputy commander should have said, I’m sorry, Mr. Four Star. I’m a little bit fuzzy as to what the legalities are of these orders.
So how do we get from here to there? Okay. Because we took all our law and we just threw it out the window. That’s how you get from here to there.
The administration’s position, as far as I can deduce, goes something like this. Tren de Aragua and Cartel de los Soles, I think that’s how you pronounce those, are foreign terrorist organizations. As such, we may use the full panoply of power of the United States government.
It’s a neat theory. But it’s not consistent with the law. It’s not consistent with even prior practice.
JOURNAL: But is this a continuation of Cheney’s argument?
BRYAN DEL MONTE: No. No, it’s not. It’s a wholesale new argument. We’re basically saying, I mean, basically the Trump doctrine is...
JOURNAL: [Skeptical laughter]
BRYAN DEL MONTE: Well, OK, whatever. [Smiles] The observed behavior. It may be too hard to call it a doctrine. But if I wanted to characterize the observed behavior of the Trump administration, it’s the strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they must.
JOURNAL: Absolutely.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: There is no connection between designating an organization a foreign terrorist organization and allowing the use of military force against that organization. And to give you evidence of that fact, Bill Clinton declared the Taliban and al-Qaeda foreign terrorist organizations.
We did limited strikes, if you’ll recall, against al-Qaeda facilities while he was president. When 9-11 happened, nobody said, well, it’s on like Donkey Kong because we declared it an FTO 20 years earlier. No, they said, we have to go to Congress and get an authorization for the use of military force.
Because clearly, Al-Qaeda cannot be dealt with in the box of law enforcement. That’s where that whole FTO thing lives. It’s about criminal sanctions, right? It’s about punishing those who help terrorist organizations. It’s about denying them passports. It’s about denying them access to bank accounts. It’s criminal.
They’re declared an FTO. So again, that’s why I’m like, OK, well, apparently we don’t care about the law. What we care about is doing whatever the heck we want.
People may not like what I did for Bush. They may not like Abu Ghraib. They may not like Guantanamo. I get all that.
But we were serious people that looked at the law. There were serious discussions about how the law applied. Every view of was brought to the president and not in some haphazard, half-assed way. Those that believed in certain strong positions that were contrary to what we actually did, they got heard.
I was there at some of these meetings. And when things didn’t go our way in the court, I can honestly tell you that no one from the president down to the lowest guy said, well, screw what that judge said, we’re going to do whatever the hell we want.
So it’s not a continuation of what we were doing. It’s completely different. That’s why these former flag and field officers are like, holy Christ, we may have completely lost the bubble.
You don’t need to go to the Hague for this. This is just straight up crime and conspiracy to commit crime. It is not lawful to give these orders. And even if I want to accept there’s a state of armed conflict, which there isn’t, but okay, for the sake of argument, I will. “Admiral so-and-so, did you believe it was lawful under the laws of armed conflict to shoot the wounded and to shoot the combatants who were hors de combat?”
This is not ambiguous. These are not ambiguous concepts. These are things every flag officer knows. These are things every field commander knows about what the laws of war say. And it’s not like we give people a complicated explanation. We’re like, don’t shoot the wounded. Don’t shoot people surrendering. Don’t shoot civilians.
So let’s, but let’s talk about why is it, why was it so important? Because the way that these people behave in the regime is saying, well, you guys are all cucks and sheep and we’re out there killing people.
I have no sympathy for narco-terrorists. I had no sympathy for Al-Qaeda. What I do have sympathy for is how our soldiers should be treated if they’re captured. And what our expectations are in terms of reciprocity.
So, you know, John Rawls, I obey the laws I don’t like because I want others to obey the laws I do like. We have an obligation to follow the rules because we want our service members not to get chopped up into pieces, not to get summarily executed, not to be shot while surrendering. If you treat the enemy this way, they will treat you the same way.
If U.S. forces were to go into Venezuela and let’s say a squad got captured or a squad, you know, tried to surrender, I would expect the Venezuelans to completely mow them down. Look, I don’t care about these narco terrorists and I have no illusions about who is on the on these boats. I’m like, OK, fine. They’re narco terrorists. That doesn’t give you the legal authority to to blow them up.
JOURNAL: I just want to stop for a second because as I understand it, there has been no evidence presented. Some of them may be narco, you know, drug smugglers. But apparently it appears that not all of them are.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: Since I’ve actually gone through this process, let me tell you what seems to be missing based on what people have said in Congress and elsewhere. If you want to do this type of operation... you have to conduct a finding. Basically the intelligence and defense services do their due diligence.
And they go to the president. And they’re like, we believe, we believe X and Y and Z is true. The president says, I as the commander in chief of the United States, I agree with this finding. I believe these individuals present a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States and I am hereby authorizing executive action against these individuals, and he signs it.
And then somebody like me and others go to Congress to the gang of eight. And I’ve been a gang of eight briefings.
JOURNAL: Explain what the gang of eight is.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: Basically the four leaders of the majority and the minority in the House and the four leaders of the majority and the minority in the Senate get briefings. They get told. They get a chance to ask questions, but they can’t do anything. They can’t tell the president what to do. The president’s still the commander in chief of the United States military.
So we would go in and we would say, okay, here’s what’s going on. And oftentimes they’d be like, wow, really didn’t want to know that today, but thanks. OK. And they can’t say anything. It’s not like they go to the microphone and be like, oh, geez, you won’t believe what I just heard. OK.
You know, so so they get Congress gets informed. Why? Because Congress has a right under the Constitution of oversight of the president’s military activities. Congress gets to declare war. Congress has to be kept informed about the prosecution of armed conflict. Was any of this done? I have no idea.
Based on how members of Congress are acting, I suspect not. But I have no idea, okay? I can’t imagine that we wouldn’t have heard something...I mean, if you remember back in the day with like the special renditions and all the other things, I mean, you know, Pelosi and Reid and others, you know, Boehner and others were like, yeah, we were told.
JOURNAL: Right, right, right.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: We’re not hearing any of that right now, are we? We’re not hearing anybody. You’ve got Roger Wicker [Republican Senator from Mississippi, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee]. I’m shocked, shocked, I say, to find gambling in the casino. Really? Yeah.
Okay. Why? You voted for that clown twice. You voted him out of committee and you voted to confirm him. And now you’re shocked he’s an idiot.
JOURNAL: Roger Wicker strikes me as, or at least has some ethics. I just don’t know where he mislaid them.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: The point I’m trying to make is Congress gets informed. Well, how does Pete Hegseth behave [in terms of transparency]? No one can report on anything in the Pentagon. We’re not telling Congress doodly squat. All the reports we’re making to Congress? Forget that. That’s done. I’m like, wow, I wish we’d have thought of that back in the Bush administration, because I used to spend a third of my time answering Congress’s questions.
And you know, international community can go kiss my butt. That’s their other position. And I’m just like, wow.
How are allies reacting? Well, Britain is like, I’m not telling you anything anymore.
JOURNAL: Yeah, I saw that.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: Others are doing that as well. Why? Because they’re very conscious of how liability under international law flows. That’s why they’re stopping the intelligence gathering. They know there’s a cost to doing that with the president. What would we rather deal with? A lunatic who’s mad at us or we all get hauled into the Hague [the International Criminal Court]? That’s the calculus they’re making at the moment.
Hegseth is thoroughly unqualified to be the Secretary of Defense. It was more than dragged out during his confirmation hearing. Every time he speaks flag officers roll their eyes.
Who is the type of guy who should be the secretary of defense? And when I mean guy, I mean just generally person.
JOURNAL: Mark Kelly?
BRYAN DEL MONTE: Somebody like that. I think Mark Kelly would make an exceptionally good secretary of defense. Okay. And I’m not generally in favor of former military officers. Lloyd Austin [U.S. Secretary of Defense 2021-2025] did an amazing job, in my opinion. I met Lloyd back when he was the commander of 10th Mountain. He was exceptionally good, despite the hiccups he had here and there, because he understood the enterprise. Whereas, for example, Jim Mattis, who I think was probably the most gifted field commander we had had since Pershing. I don’t think he did all that well as SecDef.
Here’s the thing. Again, the SecDef’s job is to run the department, he’s not a warfighter. You want someone who’s like the former CEO of PepsiCo or their former CEO of AT&T or somebody like that, okay? Because those people have demonstrated skills to run complex, diverse, international, multi-jurisdictional enterprises. That is what the Department of Defense is.
JOURNAL: Pete Hegseth couldn’t run his little NGO. I want to ask you about Venezuela because one of our colleagues, Marc Cooper, wrote a very clever and interesting piece about Venezuela. And as I was looking to illustrate it, I found a graphic of the proliferation of Navy ships off the coast of Venezuela. It’s a few little red dots, then more, more, more, more, more, more, more. And it’s like, you know, the law of short stories, you have a gun in the beginning of a story, it has to go off by the end.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: Yeah, Chekhov’s gun is definitely at play.
JOURNAL: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so... It almost seemed like this was waiting to happen. And then given the people involved, although one would have expected something different, perhaps, from the admiral. I mean, he had a great record. So the gun went off.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: But look at Admiral Holsey, [Alvin Holsey] who was the commander of Southcom. He left. Apparently, and I’ve heard from multiple people, apparently it got heated. And he was like, I am not going to be a party to this. [The Wall Street Journal reported Dec. 3 that Holsey, the four-star head of U.S. military operations in the Caribbean and Hegseth clashed from the beginning, but the acrimony deepened when Holsey expressed concerns about the legality of lethal strikes on alleged drug boats.]
Now, I respect that. I would have preferred he’d stayed in his post and resisted unlawful orders. But I also know what the consequences of that are. Okay, which is he would have faced court-martial. He would have faced the loss of his pension. His family would have paid for that. I’m not unsympathetic to that. The guy worked his entire life. Do you have any idea how many few flag officers, how many highly qualified field grade officers become admirals and generals? That’s like miracle number one. Let alone you go from one star to two star to three star to four star. Only a small percentage of those who make flag that ever happens to. And then the number of people who go from three star to being a combatant commander, that’s like the triple lotto win. This guy spent his entire career to get to the top. And he’s there for eight months and he walks away to spend more time with his family.
He resigned and it was clearly over this. So I can respect that. But you know what? These others, apparently that wasn’t on their mind. So my long-term concern is it’s like, okay, well, wait a minute, who the heck’s going to be left? Is it only going to be the phony tough and the crazy brave that are willing to do anything? Because Milley was right. They swear an oath to the Constitution, not to a king. They swear an oath to the rule of law, not to a person.
JOURNAL: So the brakes are failing. As those red dots multiply, do you foresee an invasion of Venezuela?
BRYAN DEL MONTE: Look, as I joked with you when you wanted to do this interview, if Trump nuked the moon between when we first talked and Wednesday, I wouldn’t have been shocked by it. There is no foundational basis at the moment for the United States to attack Venezuela.
Now, maybe there are good reasons to attack Venezuela. If so, we haven’t heard them.
JOURNAL: We talked about that and it was oil for Trump.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: I understand, and I do believe that is the case. I wouldn’t call it foundational. But in terms of, hey, Congress, hey, American people.
Look, countries don’t win wars against the United States. They survive them. So there’s no doubt between the outcome between Maduro and the U.S. military, right?
The Venezuelans are not going to resist the United States military. But the foundation hasn’t been set. We have not made the case before the international community or before the American people why risking one single American soldier is worth it over this.
I don’t know if there have been findings because, you know, here’s the other thing, too, optics wise, which is what this regime seems to really care about. What sounds better? A bunch of dead guys floating in the ocean and the drugs go to the bottom of the ocean?
Or here’s the gym we rented and look at this gigantic pyramid of drugs that we seized from these clowns. And here’s pictures of everybody we arrested. Which one of those two have better optics?
JOURNAL: Yeah. You’re fighting the war on drugs. We’ve seen enough sad-looking brown-skinned guys targeted by the administration, haven’t we? Well, also, I think Trump is politically weak right now. And so selling this in some way would be...
BRYAN DEL MONTE: Oh, it’s impossible at this point. I mean, unless Maduro, like, I don’t know, blows up the Silver Dome or something, you know, there’s no way that a Congress is going to so about face on this that suddenly an AUMF (Authorization to Use Military Force) becomes possible. I mean, Venezuela would have to attack the United States at this point.
JOURNAL: So and in closing, I just want to ask you about the press coverage, because you were you were, I think, justifiably critical of it, although I do think that a lot of the folks have caught up now. What should the press be doing better?
BRYAN DEL MONTE: On this issue, I think this is just a phenomenon happening in Western society. People producing news content prefer speed over accuracy. I understand why they’re doing all that because of the nature of social media and all these independent journalists doing things [without editorial supervision]. The problem is the traditional journalists also suck on this because they’re not doing actual reporting. I mean, you know, I never thought I’d see eye to eye with Lawrence O’Donnell. But the White House press corps is ridiculous. I can’t imagine Helen Thomas or Sam Donaldson behaving this way with Donald Trump.
It’s not just that, though. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up. There’s no armed conflict. OK, we are marching into a war with no justification, no foundation, no legal basis. That’s part of this story here you all missed because what you want to say is Trump’s a dick and he did yet again a thing that sucks. And I get it, right? Because that gets views, that gets likes, that gets restacks, that gets shared, blah, blah, blah. You monetize that attention. I get it. Okay.
But part of the reason why I think the Long Memo became popular is I’m like, well, wait, wait, wait. That’s not how any of this works. The things that people find most interesting are the mechanics of how your government actually functions. I don’t understand why members of the press don’t understand this, because this is the simple functionings of the government that you are covering.
I understand that it’s hard, since the guy commits like 300 felonies a day and tracking them all is a full time job with overtime. Right. OK. But what do I, as a consumer of news, as a citizen, need to know? There’s that rant, right, with Aaron Sorkin in Newsroom about the reason why the American civilization and society was able to do the things it did was because they were rational and informed. Well, yeah, we’re seeing what happens when they’re not.
JOURNAL: With us, of course, you don’t have to worry about us doing things quickly because we never do. We’re like the second day lede, if not the third. But I agree with you although I’d put it a slightly different way. When I was working for daily newspapers and magazines, too, including when I was covering D.C. I was always interested in the larger historical currents, the moral questions, what a story revealed about American society at that time. That’s what we’re talking about here. The editors wanted me to stick the main story, but I’d sneak in a sentence or two, usually at the end, about what I thought it all meant in the larger scheme of things.
That’s even more important now. When Trump 2.0 started, as I told you, I started reading historians more than journalists. I felt that the language of journalism was inadequate. We were in the realm of history. it really emerges for me in your comparison of how Bush dealt with
this issue and how it’s playing out now. We’re talking about how much the structure of our civil society has eroded. It’s disintegrating before our eyes.
I think this massive change keeps people up at night, wondering what what do I do? Personally, I go back and forth between cautious optimism and like, holy s**t.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: Well, you know my nickname. People call me Mr. Happy Fun Guy because all I ever talk about is how things are coming apart, right? I think people do need to recognize that. that there are a series of macro trends that are overlapping, that are augmenting each other, and that you’re not crazy for being disoriented.
Talking a little bit about Borderless Living [Del Monte’s second Substack, containing information for Americans thinking of becoming expatriates.], Trump is not causing people to suddenly decide to leave. Gallup and others did polling before Trump came into office and something like 43 percent of Americans were thinking of living somewhere else. We’re talking about roughly, you know, 40 percent of the country is going to leave. The country will collapse. It’s not realistic but what it reflects is that a discussion is happening more and more and more about is the United States really the right place for me to live?
And that’s actually happening around the world. It’s most acutely happening in the United States for a whole bunch of reasons we don’t have time to discuss, but people are looking at Trump and it’s like an accelerant. Because every institution is under assault. Every norm is under assault.
Trump won and they got a taste of power. And then we have what I call the interregnum with Biden. And now it’s back on. So it’s like, we got cancer. We had chemo. We went into remission, but now it’s back.
JOURNAL: The second time you get it is when it kills you, right?
BRYAN DEL MONTE: That’s why people call me Mr. Happy Fun Guy, right? But I’m a structural thinker. I’m a systems thinker. And so, you know, people who are feeling this way, is it just Trump? No.
Will the Democrats magically pull their head out of their asses and win the midterms? Even if they win, even if they lose, these are structural trends. They’re overlapping.
JOURNAL: And they’re global.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: And they’re global. Is Trump accelerating it? Yeah, I think he is. Because every institution that we rely on is under attack. And so people are like... Whoa, what? Nothing seems safe anymore. And that actually happens even at an individual level.
I used to spend summers in Aunt Edna. And now she’s going on and on about the N-word and Jews and everything else and spouting MAGA nonsense. And basically, that explodes because, you know, Aunt Edna used to be like one of the safe people in your lives. And now she’s a cancerous lunatic.
JOURNAL: The economic insecurity is such a source of worry, at a micro level and a macro level. We don’t know what’s going to happen to the housing market. We don’t know what’s going to happen to the stock market. But beyond that, I think it’s an existential crisis for us. I hope this doesn’t sound too corny, but I certainly was steeped in the values of the Enlightenment and the thinking of the constitution’s framers. Like many of us, I had a sense of safety in the United States. The loss of that is so profound. I think it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between, as the old 70s phrase goes, the personal and the political.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: Well, I think Tip O’Neill got it right. All politics is local.
JOURNAL: Americans are used to having personal crises. Oh, my God, so-and-so doesn’t like me, getting divorced, whatever. But the framework of the society they lived in wasn’t unraveling.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: That’s right.
JOURNAL: Americans don’t think of themselves as creatures of history. But we are.
I think we need to wind it up, but I cannot tell you how important this conversation has been. We should do this again now that you’ve come out from behind your pen name at The Long Memo.
BRYAN DEL MONTE: So now i’ll have uh every lunatic coming after me.
JOURNAL: Sorry. But i’m honored that you did it at our magazine.
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