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Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission

nytimes.com

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Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission

#151

Post by tkel »

jhanschoo wrote: post #114

When incidents like this happen, it gives credence to North Korean propaganda portraying the US as an imperialist aggressor.

Yeah, it's always been like that, South Korea today is absolutely full of US military personnel. The sight of US tanks on streets is considered normal. War is like the main industry of the US, it's very profitable to have military bases in 55 countries, with a $1 trillion annual pot to draw from. It pays well to force regime change and install friendly client states that allow labor and resource extraction by US companies. Oil in Syria, Oil in Venezuela, minerals in Ukraine are a couple recent examples. The nice thing about Trump is that he just comes out and says these things, he doesn't disguise imperialism like other politicians have. "We'll install Guaido if they agree to give us half of their oil", "We are in Syria for the Oil", "We want something in return in Ukraine, we want the minerals", "We want the lithium in Bolivia", "We want Panama", "We want Greenland", "Make Canada a US state", "turn beachfront Gaza into a Real-Estate investment", etc. But it goes all the way back to the Korean War, with the North having most of the mineral resources that the US is interested in conquering. This is a playbook that the US has used all over the world.

Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission

#152

Post by yzydserd »

kelnos wrote: post #138
Esophagus4 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Assuming you also weren’t in the armed forces, so correct me if I’m wrong.) I don’t think it’s worthwhile for laypeople to armchair quarterback the decisions of possibly the most elite soldiers in the US armed forces. By the time the mission was given to them, the collateral risk had already been accepted by JSOC, national security advisors, and likely Trump. I could feel more comfortable questioning their judgment,…

I think this is really a hard thing. I've also never been in the armed forces, let alone a special forces type branch, so I don't know what it's like. But who is going to question these decisions, then? Can we trust the elected leaders to do so? I don't think so (not being partisan here, this goes for Trump, Biden, Obama, Bush, whomever); they don't want to look bad in the eyes of voters, so they're going to keep the…

> But who is going to question these decisions, then? Can we trust the elected leaders to do so? I don't think so (not being partisan here, this goes for Trump, Biden, Obama, Bush, whomever);

That was exactly the point of the article. Not that the operation was planned or executed, not that it went south and failed, not even that civilians were killed. The point is that there ARE more tiers of “who is going to question” those involved, but it was kept from them.

“The Trump administration did not notify key members of Congress who oversee intelligence operations, before or after the mission.” and “SEALs have an uneven track record that for decades has largely been concealed by secrecy.” And that “ the episode worried some experienced military officials with knowledge of the mission”.

The story is that the some officials (elected and unelected) may keep details from other officials (elected and unelected) who on paper have responsibility in the area, and that experts (military) are concerned enough to whistleblow specifics about one op as an example.

Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission

#153

Post by richardfeynman »

closewith wrote: post #147
richardfeynman wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wrote: "Take the death of bin Laden, "Operation Neptune Spear", a nominal success in that bin Laden may have been killed" Emphasis added. Is the death of Osama bin laden under any serious dispute? It's been 14 years.

Neptune Spear was a culmination of intelligence failures that spanned decades, so while certainly possible, absent other evidence I don't think a press release is sufficient to say that bin Laden was successfully killed in Abbottabad, as opposed to say dying of kidney failure in the years before. Died peacefully in his sleep was not a suitable ending for the mastermind of 9/11, so it would never have been allowed to…

There is a wide consensus that the US succeeded in killing Bin Laden 14 years ago. Here is why:

- On-scene & eyewitness identification by the SEALs (including identification by a wife). [1]

- CIA facial-recognition match to known images. [2]

- Rapid DNA testing matching bin Laden to family members. [3]

- Existence of classified post-mortem photos/videos acknowledged in court. [4]

- Official U.S. account of Islamic-rite preparation and burial at sea. [5]

- Al-Qaeda’s public acknowledgment of bin Laden’s death. [6]

- Large intelligence haul from the Abbottabad compound (letters, books, documents).

- Pakistan’s Abbottabad Commission findings and related interviews/documentation.

Taken together, this evidence is certainly more than "a press release." Do you have stronger evidence that he wasn't killed?

Sources: [1] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB410/docs/UBLDocument...

[2] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB410/docs/UBLDocument...

[3] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB410/docs/UBLDocument...

[4] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/1...

[5] https://www.cpf.navy.mil/Newsroom/News/Article/2755760/bin-l...

[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/al-qaeda-confirms-os...

[7] https://www.dni.gov/index.php/192-dni/resources/1198-bin-lad...

https://ctc.westpoint.edu/letters-from-abbottabad-bin-ladin-...

[8] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2013/7/8/document-pakistans-b...

Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission

#154

Post by impossiblefork »

keepamovin wrote: post #41
xmonkee wrote: post #30

>you woke up before dawn with your companions to go diving in the freezing cold ocean, in hopes of putting some mussels on your family's table. But suddenly, you die. A man you have never met and whose presence you did not know about has shot you with his rifle. His companions stab your lungs so that your body will sink to the bottom of the sea. Your family will likely never know what happened to you. Man, fuck these…

What is the alternative, ask them not to tell? If you had to make the decision in the moment how would you weigh compromising the chance to prevent thousands or millions of deaths for advanced warning of nuclear or other attack using your ability to install that monitoring equipment now or in future, versus the lives of potentially hostile people who show up in your mission area? You have to live with the moral cost,…

The alternative is not murdering anybody and leaving.

You don't have a right to kill civilians and being discovered can never be a justification for doing so.

You can only kill actual combatants.

Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission

#155

Post by Ekaros »

JohnCClarke wrote: post #122

Is there any way all those involved in the killings can be prosecuted for murder?

Will they and their chain of command face the justice? And be trialled in way which the peers of victims get to decide if they are guilty or not? Will also all accomplishes say those who funded politician who decided on this also face potential death penalty?

Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission

#156

Post by impossiblefork »

keepamovin wrote: post #90
chubot wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if you just abort the mission? Probably nothing, and certainly doing nothing is less likely to provoke war and further escalation than murdering civilians, hoping no one notices, and then having a front page NY Times article published about it later If North Korean spies murdered fisherman off the coast of California on a failed mission, you bet there would be blowback If they were simply noticed, the US…

That's one way to assess it. Can you take the cost if your presence is detected? Maybe nothing happens. How likely is nothing? And if your presence finds it ways to the authorities, what's the cost? Likely, NK will patch what might be your best chance at advance warning. As fishing is dangerous and many never return, their plausibly 'accidental' deaths provide cover to keep the secrecy and your future access intact.…

It doesn't matter if you can take the cost.

It's forbidden to kill civilians. You can only kill non-civilians, and there's nothing allowing you to hide the bodies of civilians or interfere with their burial rites.

Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission

#157

Post by lifeformed »

andrewflnr wrote: post #74
doe88 wrote: post #51

I'm always surprised like at this level it still seems some people absolutely want to fire there weapons; whereas I would say the more secret a mission is, the more experience you have, the more training you have and you should have understood that killing people and making noises was not the goal of the mission... It should be more teached it seems, sometimes there is operational value in not killing people.

How are you getting that from this story? They thought they had been discovered, and panicked. Pretty simple. Morality aside, staying quiet doesn't help your stealth if your enemy already has a flashlight pointed at you.

How could they have panicked? Surely this would've been a scenario that would've been planned for. I assume they would've trained for the crazy situation of encountering North Koreans in North Korea.

Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission

#158

Post by impossiblefork »

runsWphotons wrote: post #81

It would have been nicer to kidnap the fishermen.

The laws of war don't allow that either.

It's forbidden to attack civilians. You're not allowed even to wrestle them.

Having been discovered by civilians is not sufficient to justify attacking them.

Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission

#159

Post by lifeformed »

_2d30 wrote: post #46
jjtheblunt wrote: post #37

This post has a title that differs from the article it cites?

Not only that but it’s highly editorialized in a way that makes it effectively misinformation. The killing of the fishermen (which appeared to be potentially NK soldiers) was the cause of the failure and not the covering up of a failure.

It's the same thing. They failed by getting discovered and killed civilians to prevent them from reporting them.

Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission

#160

Post by lifeformed »

keepamovin wrote: post #41
xmonkee wrote: post #30

>you woke up before dawn with your companions to go diving in the freezing cold ocean, in hopes of putting some mussels on your family's table. But suddenly, you die. A man you have never met and whose presence you did not know about has shot you with his rifle. His companions stab your lungs so that your body will sink to the bottom of the sea. Your family will likely never know what happened to you. Man, fuck these…

What is the alternative, ask them not to tell? If you had to make the decision in the moment how would you weigh compromising the chance to prevent thousands or millions of deaths for advanced warning of nuclear or other attack using your ability to install that monitoring equipment now or in future, versus the lives of potentially hostile people who show up in your mission area? You have to live with the moral cost,…

> versus the lives of potentially hostile people who show up in your mission area?

So what? Then you fight the people proven to be hostile or run away. At no point is executing innocents an option that should be on the table in that situation. If things go wrong and escalate to a life threatening situation for you, then that's one the risks YOU consented to. It's not a risk that civilians are responsible for.

Maybe you get killed, or there is political fallout, but both of those situations are a better outcome than killing civilians.

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