TWO MEN CLUNG to what remained of their capsized boat. One moment, they had been cutting through the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea at a rapid clip. The next, their vessel exploded and was engulfed in fire and shrouded in smoke. The men were shipwrecked, helpless or clearly in distress, six witnesses who saw video of the attack say. The survivors pulled themselves onto the overturned hull as an American aircraft filmed them from above. The men waved their arms.
Minutes ticked by. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. As the men bobbed along, drifting with the current, for some 45 minutes, Adm. Frank Bradley — then the head of Joint Special Operations Command — sought guidance from his top legal adviser. At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on September 2, he turned to Col. Cara Hamaguchi, the staff judge advocate at the secretive JSOC, The Intercept has learned.
Could the U.S. military legally attack them again?
How exactly she responded is not known. But Bradley, according to a lawmaker who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified briefing, said that the JSOC staff judge advocate deemed a follow-up strike lawful. In the briefing, Bradley said no one in the room voiced objections before the survivors were killed, according to the lawmaker.
Five people familiar with briefings given by Bradley, including the lawmaker who viewed the video, said that, logically, the survivors must have been waving at the U.S. aircraft flying above them. All interpreted the actions of the men as signaling for help, rescue, or surrender.
“Obviously, we don’t know what they were saying or thinking,” one of the sources said, “but any reasonable person would assume that they saw the aircraft and were signaling either: don’t shoot or help us.”
We need to invent new words to describe this level of evil. Every single person in that chain of command should be in a mental asylum and be treated for their psychopathic disorders.
We have words. We just kept being told “oh, everything you don’t like is a Nazi, isn’t it?”
And we still are. It’s disappointing how many Nazis are out there, crying foul.
As a German, and one that uses the word Nazi too much already, I have to remark that the atrocities committes by the “OG” Nazis were so much worse in sheer numbers at least. The term death camps might as well have been death factories, because that is how the mass murders were organized. That level of evil was most likely only matched by Kissinger, may he forever rot in hell.
There’s also the facetious “whatever happened to the tolerant left” when we deem child-raping Nazis incompatible with civilized society
No, that denies their culpability. They aren’t insane; they’re criminally evil and need to pay.
Yes, it denies their culpability. Yet it still is the way I choose to see the world. I firmly believe that the process in which people become psychopaths like that involves a sort of brain damage that enables you to perform such truly evil acts. A normal person would feel empathy for a victim and could not possibly cause such suffering.
These people are not normal, and the worst punishment they could suffer is to be taught an empathetic understanding of the suffering they have caused. Likely most are too far gone for that, so keeping them locked away for the rest of their existence seems to be the second best option. Not as punishment, but as a means to protect society.
Oh now you think it’s evil. Bitch, please.
This is how USA has always been.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes
I seem to recall that previously, US war crimes had been committed almost entirely within the context of a war. Now they murder random civilians in international waters to distract from a government full of child rapists and murderers.
Oh, please, this level of evil is pretty commonplace in war in general and there have been much worse acts committed throughout history. I’m not defending it, obviously, but we hardly need new words to describe it.
Undoubtedly much worse has been done, but I only have vocabularly to describe the worst of all, the Holocaust. I am honestly missing words for the in- between evil, because calling these acts “monstrous” is unfair to monsters.
Please don’t justify the indefensible.
Please, point out where I’m justifying it.
How is that justifying it?