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Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
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Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
#92Unfortunately 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.
Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
#93If 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…
Another thing we could do is watch the documentary 300 to learn about how the Spartans fought off Xerxes.
Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
#94It would have been nicer to kidnap the fishermen.
And take them where? Bear in mind the seal team came in on a sub that didn't even have air . They probably don't have restraints of any kind or a way to keep them from shouting... Which is not to say what they did do was right, but "just kidnap some people" is not really a practical reality.
drive the fishing boat back to the submarine. harold holt swam to one it can be done
Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
#95Unfortunately 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.
Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
#96>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,…
> What is the alternative, ask them not to tell?
The moment the seals fired the rifles the mission was over, a complete failure.
So the obvious alternative was to abort without killing everyone. The vaunted seals can't escape from a fishing boat? Nothing was accomplished by this mission other than killing a bunch of fishermen. For shame.
Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
#97[flagged]
Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
#98What evidence exists that the supposed mission occurred?
Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
#99If 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.
Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
#100We are fed a steady diet of media that propagandizes empire. We rewrite history (eg downplaying the USSR's role in WW2). We push a narrative of honorable soldiers, a competent military and elite commandoes.
But the reality is nothing like any of those things. This particularly mission was almost comically bad and would just be funny if a bunch of completely innocent fishermen didn't get deleted in service of this fiction that North Korea is some great evil.
But I take comfort in that. Because as much as hired killers and assassinations might appear in fiction, it basically doesn't exist in the real world. And when people do try, it basically always goes comically wrong (eg the Adelsons in Florida). Hired killers? Just not a thing.
Murder is an interesting crime because the perpetrator and the victim almost always know each other. And the recidivism rate is almost zero. Serial killers are a statistical outlier. Most murder is personal.
But there is "professional" murder, again to a very limited degree. Organized crime, gangs and (of course) state actors, most notably military units. Osama bin Laden was killed this way but even that was comically bad. It took years to find this massive compound that stuck out like a sore thumb in Abbotabad and even then, they managed to crash a Blackhawk.
This gives me a lot of confidence that, for example, Jeffrey Epstein wasn't killed.
The other aspect of this worth examining is the widesprread assumption that of course this was justified. Why? This was technically an act of war between nuclear powers. This was a huge provocation. Haven't we done enough to North Korea? I am, of course, referring to the intentional starving ("economic sanctions") of the citizenry.