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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

#161

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,…

If I break into your home to steal something, and accidentally wake you up, is the only reasonable option for me to shoot you?

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

#162

Post by keepamovin »

impossiblefork wrote: post #156
keepamovin wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Specialist missions normally have custom RoE not always mirroring those in conventional theatre, but nevertheless appropriate for the mission specifics.

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

#163

Post by mdhb »

ryanwhitney wrote: post #95
pjmlp wrote: post #92

Unfortunately many innocent people do fall victims of covert operations, the whole good versus bad, morals and stuff is cinema content. The actual ops on the field is very wide gray spectrum, and one of the reasons so many are traumatised upon return to civil life.

The Fort Bragg Cartel by Seth Harp covers this well. JSOC basically runs an around-the-clock global assassination squad where innocents, family members, and children are killed with intent. Then they come home and try to fit in with a less murder-acclimated population.

That is both not true and not what is in the book.

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

#165

Post by lawgimenez »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #145
saltcured wrote: post #9

If you can stomach the bravado and unclear factual accuracy, the 2007 book Lone Survivor gives an account of a similar failure, in Afghanistan, where a SEAL team was discovered early in their mission. But, it devolved into a running battle and a disaster for the US special forces where most of the team and many rescuers also died. As a result of those prior events, I can imagine they have different rules of engagemen…

SEALs are macho glory hounds. Army special forces are so much better at mission and role focus. The SEALs talk in open media constantly. There's a reason you have no idea what the Green Berets do.

Green Berets are not tier 1 though compared to Seal Team Six mentioned in the article. I think, you meant Delta Force.

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

#166

Post by closewith »

richardfeynman wrote: post #153
closewith wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-ri…

Most of the cited sources come from the U.S. military, government, or intelligence community. These institutions have a long record of politically expedient deception - from WMD in Iraq, to the Gulf of Tonkin, to the bombing of the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza - so their claims should not be taken at face value.

The Letters from Abbottabad also fall into this category. Their timing and content are unusually convenient for the U.S. narrative, and there is no independent verification of their authenticity beyond U.S. release.

The Abbottabad Commission’s findings were limited. It was unable to independently verify bin Laden’s residence in Abbottabad except via U.S. assertions. What it did conclude was that Pakistani authorities had no prior knowledge of his presence or of the American raid.

It’s also worth noting that the claim bin Laden was “martyred” by U.S. forces was desirable for Al-Qaeda’s own propaganda purposes. It provided them with a rallying narrative regardless of the underlying facts.

So when you ask whether there is “stronger evidence he wasn’t killed,” the point is that there is no independent evidence either way. What we have are uncorroborated U.S. claims and propaganda statements from Al-Qaeda for whom his death at the hands of the US was a propaganda boon. Neither of which can be treated as reliable proof.

In fact, the level of evidence is comparable to other cases where U.S. authorities presented certainty that later collapsed - such as the claim that the Al-Shifa plant in Sudan produced VX nerve agent, or that Pat Tillman was killed by enemy fire. Both were asserted as fact by the U.S. military and government until contradictory evidence made the truth undeniable. It would be naïve to assume we are working with reliable sources here.

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

#167

Post by scotty79 »

JohnBooty wrote: post #86
runjake wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s important to clarify that yes, they’re more comfortable with risk taking but they’re highly-trained for high-risk missions and taking calculated risks with massive amounts of intelligence work and contingency planning beforehand. It’s not just “lol, let’s try it. If we die, we die!” And their success rate should be and is, pretty high. That said, this was a National Command Authority (came down from the White Ho…

This is my best understanding as well. I have watched a lot of ex-special forces guys on YT. Needless to say, I take it all with massive grains of salt, including the claim that they were even SF in the first place. However, they all describe the selection processes similarly. And, my educated assumption is that this part is probably too dull for them to lie about, much less lie about in unison across many accounts a…

> I have watched a lot of ex-special forces guys on YT. > Needless to say, I take it all with massive grains of salt

I think it needs to be said that people who choose those careers are probably one of the worst kinds of people. They choose to use their unique, advantageous talents to murder people on command. And then you select out of those the ones that think being interviewed on YouTube about that is a good idea. They should be studied anthropologically not listened too.

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

#168

Post by PUSH_AX »

saltcured wrote: post #9

If you can stomach the bravado and unclear factual accuracy, the 2007 book Lone Survivor gives an account of a similar failure, in Afghanistan, where a SEAL team was discovered early in their mission. But, it devolved into a running battle and a disaster for the US special forces where most of the team and many rescuers also died. As a result of those prior events, I can imagine they have different rules of engagemen…

I think this has fairly recently been outed as being almost all fiction.

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

#169

Post by PUSH_AX »

verisimi wrote: post #142
crikeykangaroo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Lone Survivor story is pure propaganda and mostly inaccurate. You can easily look this up. That entire operation was a F up from the beginning, and had nothing to do with being discovered early. It created proper propaganda fuel though, so mission partially accomplished I suppose.

Unless you were there, there is no reason to think any of the stories (good or bad) are anything other than propaganda.

The US navy literally wrote the book, and gave it to Luttrell. This has recently come to light. Now if that’s not propaganda then I don’t know what is.

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

#170

Post by scotty79 »

113 wrote: post #149
chvid wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing heroic “type a” about killing random unarmed civilians. These people are disgusting psychopathic thugs and so are the people behind them. And it is tragic that we are so deeply buried in arrogance and propaganda that we cannot see this.

I feel like everything being said in this thread is at odds with what's in the article.

I think the title makes the article too repulsive to read for many.
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