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

nytimes.com

231–240 of 278 posts

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

#231
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luttrell didn't have anything to do with it. The writer is a British fiction writer. He did a one hour interview with Lutrell, that's the entire involvement Luttrell had with it.

That sucks if true, although I don't expect everyone military special forcers operator to also be a great author on top of their other amazing skills, I expect it to be somewhat ghost written, but one hour? Perhaps the ghostwriter used other interviews and had access to other reports?

Oh I'm sure he read about it somewhere. But the book is simply fiction. Most of the story as Luttrell tells it to this day is false, but the book is even worse.

The link I posted earlier tells the real story.

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

#232
post #230
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't post nationalistic flamebait to HN.

As an American, he's exactly right and it's not flamebait at all. Hell he's probably American too.

What country the commenter belongs to isn't relevant because the issue is how readers will react. Most won't react, but somewhere down the long tail there's a segment of readers who will become provoked and rush to the comments to attack back. Then we end up in flamewar hell. The only solution is not to go down that spiral in the first place, much as the only way to avoid a black hole is to steer clear of it.

Being right isn't relevant either, for two reasons: first, it's a category error to call pejorative language (e.g. "insane $country obsession", "bizarre and absurd") right or wrong, because it's emotional language, not propositional language. Second, again, the issue is the effect on the threads. Even if a pejorative provocation is 100% right in propositional content, not everyone will agree with it—indeed everyone feels it is they who are right—so rightness doesn't change the flamewar dynamic I described in the first paragraph. If anything, it makes it worse.

For avoiding flamewars, the issue isn't whether you're right or not, it's how you express your rightness and whether it's a good moment to make that point. If you're introducing or fueling a classic flamewar topic that's tangential to the topic at hand, it's probably best just not to, no matter how right you are or feel you are.

All of that is what's behind this site guideline: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but this it's clearly forbidden to make civilians object of attack, and it doesn't matter whether you risk discovery or whatever. Surely the RoE should be at least as restrictive as IHL. I think it might be legal to hide the body, but if you do so you must do something to ensure that it can be recovered, either informing the enemy afterwards or some other measure to that effect.

Does a civilian become a combatant or pose a threat if they could derail, though awareness of your presence, your mission to prevent NK making civilians the object of attack on massive scale with nuclear weapons?

No.

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Threads like this -make me- more anti-American. "I certainly condemn the killing of innocent civilians". No you don't. That's BS you're telling yourself so you can feel unconflicted about what should be a simple moral calculus. I am not sure what certifies your moral; God or logic or whatever that tells you that how you live your life is justified. I do know that I have morals, though. "Don't murder people" is pretty…

So if you kill someone in self defense you simply don’t have any morals? What these agents did was obviously wrong, but how does it help to simplify morality like that?

I have a rather limited imagination, so I am having a hard time imagining a world where I kill one of my fellow humans and it doesn't cause me to question the morality of my actions.

Being aware that people are of limited imagination, I often understand that folks want to make morailty more complicated because they can't imagine themselves receiving the violence of those complicated calculations.

So my answer is "yes, if you are killing people and not questioning your actions, you are likely not a moral person."

And your question begs another question: "how does it help to complicate those kinds of moral actions".

From where I stand, a US-led death squad went and murdered some folks. That seems pretty easy to to understand, and complicating that discussion by adding in hypotheticals about "information about this operation that we simply don't have" such as (for instance) other "successful" illegal operations sounds absurd to me.

Like, really, what do we gain in making the murder of fishermen into something complex: this is clearly and simply the murder of some people by professional killers hired by the US government, and it is yet another in several million discrete actions which makes me believe that the US government and the people who support it fundamentally have no morals.

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

#235
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The focus is the drugs and domestic murders, but JSOC's practices are detailed (daily night raids, low threshold for targeting, low accuracy) and give background to how everyone involved became so broken.

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

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. This does seem like an operation gone wrong, and I certanly condemn the killing of innocent civilians, but it's shocking how quick HN commenters are to throw America under the bus based on reporting from a leak. There's so much information about this operation that we simply don't have, including the risk/benefit analysis, the other operations that were successes that we don't know about, etc. I'm not saying Amer…

Maybe try and shake the propaganda you've been ingesting all your life and it be clearer - Easily done by reversing the situation: North Korean special forces get ashore in the US to plant a listening device. They run into issues and are spotted by a boat. So they shoot the civilians, then puncture the lungs of the dead Americans so their bodies don't float, and escaped unharmed. Is throwing North Korea under the bus…

I see your point about reversing the situation (what if North Korea did the same?) and I agree that's a reasonable way to look at things. However, I disagree with your conclusion. If North Korean special forces were to violate US sovereignty by attempting to plant a listening device on the shores of California, and in the process killed some innocent American civilians, I would certainly condemn it. The reason for this is that it's obvious their values (suppress freedom, make the world more repressive, despotic, totalitarian, communist, and dictatorial) do not justify the collateral damage, whereas with the United States, their values, while imperfect, are much better for civilization, and therefore some collateral damage can be tolerated.

To make this illustration even more stark, if Hitler sent some Nazis to the US to perform some sabotage and in the process killed some Americans, I would condemn it; but if Churchill sent some british forces to Germany to perform some sabotage, and in the process killed some innocent WW2-era Germans, I would be more understanding, for the simple reason that Churchill and Hitler were fighting for different things and had different values.

Finally, you began your post with some nonsense about "maybe try and shake the propaganda you've been ingesting all your life." In the same way I don't know what propaganda you've ingested that leads you to equate the US with North Korea--or make assumptions about me--you don't know what, if any, propaganda I've ingested here in the south pacific, where I live. So let's stick to the arguments, assume some good faith, and not accuse each other of forming our opinions based on propaganda.

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

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you kill someone in self defense you simply don’t have any morals? What these agents did was obviously wrong, but how does it help to simplify morality like that?

I have a rather limited imagination, so I am having a hard time imagining a world where I kill one of my fellow humans and it doesn't cause me to question the morality of my actions. Being aware that people are of limited imagination, I often understand that folks want to make morailty more complicated because they can't imagine themselves receiving the violence of those complicated calculations. So my answer is "yes…

I agree on the rather limited imagination part. It's so easy to imagine: a bad guy is for no reason trying to kill your innocent kid. you can save your kid, but to do so you must kill the bad guy. the obvious moral decision is to kill the bad guy and save your kid.

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

#238

It’s possible that Bolton was national security advisor at the time. The timing of this coverage might be to implicate him now.

The article says it was in 'Early 2019' and he was NSA until September, so he was surely at the helm. But it also says Trump greenlit the mission, so I'm not sure how an advisor would be implicated in anything - unless your point is that the current admin thinks he might be the source for this story?

Lately, Trump has denied any knowledge of it. I bet since the FBI raid, Bolton himself isn’t contacting media very often. I bet confirmation of this story wasn’t forthcoming until it benefitted the case(s) against Bolton. And I bet that confirmation was very anonymous and very official.

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

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's a surprisingly fitting analogy, because you don't know if the person you're robbing keeps a gun under their pillow, and you may only have a second to find out.

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

#240
post #99

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…

2007 was the crazy Bush days. In 2008 Bush wanted a missile defense shield in Poland, pointed at Russia, and made a point of declaring Ukraine would join NATO.

I guess the crazy part is he was 100% correct too
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