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.”
They killed them to eliminate witnesses in a future war-crimes prosecution. The article just reports a lazy-ass pretext.
Were they cops? Y’know, shooting unarmed people already laying down in surrender?
War crimes
They shot them 45 fucking minutes later?
Jesus fucking Christ. Everyone involved needs to face a court martial and should hang.
and memos circulated detailing why the ones who gave the orders are hanging and why the ones who pulled the trigger are hanging
that’s not why they killed them, its a justification made for doing it after the fact.
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
We need to invent new words to describe this level of evil.
Oh now you think it’s evil. Bitch, please.
This is how USA has always been.
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.
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, 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.
…this level of evil is pretty commonplace in war in general and there have been much worse acts committed throughout history.
How is that justifying it?
What’s the proper way? Seems being shipwrecked is a perfectly valid surrender by itself.
Clearly a proper surrender is to give Trump $10M each.
This is the only way to get anything done in US government. Money is speech.
I guess they could have been making some interpretations of their hand gestures, deliberately ignoring that Venezuelan
fishermendrug smugglers are unlikely to know the hand signals of American military?When American photographer Carl McCunn was stranded in Alaska, he was discovered by a state trooper plane. He cheerfully raised his fist in celebration. The plane left and never came back. Between this incident and perishing there he read up on hand signals, and learned that he had inadvertently signaled “all is well”.
“but any reasonable person would assume that they saw the aircraft and were signaling either: don’t shoot or help us.”
Well clearly anyone in command of the US armed forces cannot be reasonable and must have reached that position being that way.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
Stoopid latin monkey. Don’t you know how to do anything right.
/s
I so want everyone including the pilot to spend the rest of their days busting large rocks in to small rocks. The only real justice is to send a message to soldiers that if a order violate the uniform code they should never carry it out.
Lol OK
