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Comment by harddrivereque | Hacker News Reader

It should be obvious to everyone, not just about UK, but all sorts of war invoke this. I mean, we all know about torture in Guantanamo and even on European soil, and it wasn't even that long ago. What makes anyone think anything has changed? Why would it change? Is there an incentive? Sure, there are courts and theoretical conventions, but the system is not perfect, there is no enforcement and also no incentive to enforce it. For all I know there is lack of enforcement for all kinds of crime - just extrapolate the mess with simple street crime to warzones and it doesn't seem as surprising anymore, does it?

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War crimes have always happened. What matters is whether they are celebrated, ignored, or properly investigated and punished.

Wars are horrible enough as-is; we have laws of armed conflict to try the best we can to keep a lid on the utter barbarity of it all, and to help our warfighters be able to live with themselves after.

This is not a new concept; one of the first people to expound on the proper laws of war in the West was Saint Augustine, and his work is still the philosophical foundation of the subject.

That's too easy. The US, British and Israelis routinely whitewash their war crimes. The Russians don't even pretend to follow the rules of war.

In comparison, the French put a general in the dock when his soldiers in the Ivory Coast, at his implicit orders, extrajudicially killed Firmin Mahé, a bandit himself responsible for many murders, and I believe other European countries have done similar prosecutions of senior officers.

Impunity is a choice.

How is your statement a contradiction? They said what matters is how governments respond to war crimes and you concluded much the same.

My Lai? Prosecuted. Abu Ghraib? Prosecuted and a one-star relieved. Eddie Gallagher? Prosecuted, at least until Trump got in the way.

I'll buy that all of the above were disgraces to the US, and I'll buy that the IDF is a little too cavalier with the rules of engagement. But come on. It's easy to pontificate from an armchair about who's "whitewashing" things when it isn't your friends getting shot. In wars, these things will happen and the best a government can do is put measures in place to stop it and then punish it severely when it occurs.

My Lai was only addressed after dogged investigators like Sy Hersh made it impossible to keep covering up.

Compare this with the US during the Philippines War in the 19th century, an exceedingly dirty colonial conflict with no meaningful press involvement to blow the whistle, yet a major was court-martialled for waterboarding a prisoner:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding#During_the_Phili...

Ultimately these practices are either a sign of rotten leadership, or poor discipline. Once you let the rot fester, it's only a matter of time before the entire army is gangrened.

Yes, and the main issue is that the men in the army who could have been properly taught how to handle violence are not, and when they're back the violence will infuse in the broader society.

Apparently you missed the part in the article where SAS troopers testified against the accused.

So let's take that bigoted "veterans are broken people" narrative and stuff it where the sun don't shine alongside "women are hysterical" and so forth.

Wow, wow, i wasn't clear, i'm not accusing any western army of doing that (israel, US might be close however), i was responding to a specific comment about rotten leadership and lack of discipline. A well disciplined army do not bring the violence back, because they're taught how to handle the violence, and often are debriefed after each mission, then after each deployment. The issue is when demilitarization never happen, or when it start to treat enemies as non-humans.

I know far to much army men (mostly airforce, some Marsouins) to say "veterans are broken people", i know it isn't the case.

I think it's deeper than that. There's an incentive on not going against your own military because doing so would attract the wrong kind of mentality and makes things worse when you need them. So unless there are real consequences against brushing it off (like burning down public buildings) that's usually what happens. But publicly people cannot be too explicit saying it because it plays on the image of the pristine rule of law that our politicians like so much to use on speeches to make sure we're above China and other developing countries on the moral grounds.

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