Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
But, what's most crazy to me is that these details are being published in such a short time. My impression is that these clandestine forces used to have much more strict control, and details would not emerge for many decades or even during the lives of the participants?
It appears that people involved in the operation feel the same. The stakes in a failure like this are far higher than most SOC missions.
And the other Valhalla VFT one, and the Team House podcast, and just all over the place…
The link I posted earlier tells the real story.
> Luttrell's book and the film both suggest that the SEALs decision to release the goat herders led to their subsequent ambush - yet according to Gulab, people throughout the area heard the SEALs being dropped off by helicopter, and the Taliban proceeded to track the SEALs' footprints.
Yeah, I'm going to go with the reason these details are "emerging" (aka published in coordination with the DoD) is the aforementioned "unclear factual accuracy".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Survivor#Historical_accur...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Luttrell#Operation_Red_...
Did you think that about Watergate too? Unless the entire story was manufactured I don't see how you could possibly reach that conclusion.
I am not sure why none of the big three have put this into practice yet
That tends to not align very well with being a ‘superpower’. That kind of self doubt and reasonableness is what makes you stop being a superpower.
It’s similar with Empires. You don’t get to be (or sustain) being an empire by giving a shit what anyone else thinks. You get to be (or sustain) being an empire by doing whatever the fuck you want, regardless of what anyone else thinks. And if anyone tries to stop you, figuring out a way to get them out of your way/conquer them.
It’s a variant of ‘reasonable people conform to reality, unreasonable people make reality conform to them. therefore, all progress depends on unreasonable people.’
Of course, if you fuck it up, you potentially die. So none of this is for the faint of heart, or weak of arm (as it were).
The SEALs talk in open media constantly. There's a reason you have no idea what the Green Berets do.
In these expeditionary wars, the only good guys were groups like MSF, WFP, and the ICRC.
>But the episode worried some experienced military officials with knowledge of the mission, because the SEALs have an uneven track record that for decades has largely been concealed by secrecy.
This seems to be a trait many special operations groups have. Type A personalities that you want in that job, but that bring with it a willingness for big risk taking and fantastical type missions.
That's not to say their success rate should be super high, these are difficult missions, but some like the failures in Panama were a case of ambition over common sense. Granted this mission they made the right call to leave when they were discovered.
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 House) mission and those tend to be the riskiest.
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 and years. So I have a decent level of confidence in that aspect of their tales.
Anyway, the common threads are that while they do want highly confident and confident types who are also outliers in terms of physical ability, the selection process is HIGHLY geared towards selecting intelligent team-oriented individuals. Without those two traits you are going to get you and your squadmates killed in a hurry. These missions are highly planned but due to the inherent ambiguity and difficulty the SF guys have to make a LOT of autonomous decision making on the fly when things (inevitably) deviate from the script.
You hear very similar stories from other "elite" types in the military, like combat pilots. While you have to be sort of a highly talented "alpha" type you also need to be professional and team oriented. No loose cannons allowed, either on the individual or squad level.
In terms of military history this is not strictly true. In past conflicts where personnel was limited and compromises had to made these types of soldiers were often given solo or special assignments and very often excelled in that environment, with more than a few of our highly decorated soldiers from WWII having served in this way.
Peace time militaries tend to get bogged down with this strict squadron type of thinking and in that context you are not at all wrong, but it is interesting that when push comes to shove, the military rediscovers that there's more than one way to win the battle.
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.
I’m guessing you’ve never met any special operations people, much less folks from the SMUs. I have met many. 100% A+ people. I’m sure there are bad apples, but I’ve never met one.
> They choose to use their unique, advantageous talents to murder people on command.
Rules of engagement are a thing — a very real thing.
For those who are interested, here is an interview with a very active former Delta Force operator. There are interesting stories about selection, rules of engagement, the stresses of doing the type of work he did, and life after the military.
Do you have any other similar podcasts, videos, etc. to recommend that feature interviews with former operators?
They should be studied anthropologically not listened too.
I think it needs to be said that people who
choose those careers are probably one of the
worst kinds of people
And then you select out of those the ones
that think being interviewed on YouTube about that
is a good idea.
What specific channels would you recommend?
The majority of them also have views that I find pretty problematic.
Is it?
We obviously don't get most reporting, but of the publicly known missions, the success rate is abysmal, and even the "successes" are disasters.
Take the death of bin Laden, "Operation Neptune Spear", a nominal success in that bin Laden may have been killed, it was operationally questionable _and_ it was 9 years after another spectacularly failed mission involving SEALs ("Operation Anaconda") allowed bin Laden's escape, which in turn was following the disastrous Battle of Tora Bora which was the first major failure in a war respite with them.
None of these operations were daring acts of brave men. They were all - like the one in the article - full of cowardly acts and human rights abuses, from deliberately killing civilians to using fake healthcare workers to collect DNA samples (which has caused and continues to cause thousands of deaths due to the ongoing suspicion of childhood vaccines in Pakistan) to the torture of enemy soldiers and civilians alike in secret prisons to shooting an eight-year-old girl in the neck (Nawar al-Awlaki).
> they’re highly-trained for high-risk missions and taking calculated risks with massive amounts of intelligence work and contingency planning beforehand
That's certainly the Hollywood version, but the reality doesn't match up.
Emphasis added. Is the death of Osama bin laden under any serious dispute? It's been 14 years.
Died peacefully in his sleep was not a suitable ending for the mastermind of 9/11, so it would never have been allowed to happen, even if the truth had to be bent to achieve it.
- 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...
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.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/our-blessed-homeland-their-ba...
And it is tragic that we are so deeply buried in arrogance and propaganda that we cannot see this.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070203165457/http://www.defens...
"Two of his top national security officials at that time — his national security adviser, John Bolton, and the acting defense secretary, Patrick M. Shanahan — declined to comment for this article."
If X is Iran/Russia/North Korea/<current choice> and Y is US/UK/Canada etc, the whole *mainstream* media would be calling for war. But in this case, its just called a failed operation. Even if it was an allied country and the SEAL was caught, US would threaten the country with war to get the person back.
US has always been an agressor to small countries, big countries, allies i.e rest of the world. Americans can accept the fact or stay in denial but it doesn't change other countries' experience or how they feel about it.
Russia had killed UK nationals on the British soil in covert ops and exactly the opposite had happened. The establishment and the media categorically did not want this to go anywhere let alone to a war.
In 1952 there were 326,863 US troops in South Korea. Last count there is 28,500 US troops. I struggle to fathom any definition of full of US military personnel that could possibly be true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Forces_Korea#Num...
"The sight of US tanks on streets is considered normal."
I've been in Seoul over three months, I've never seen a military tank on the street. In fact, I've never witnessed a tank on a street in my entire life in any country anywhere.
"War is like the main industry of the US, ..." Nope, not even close. https://axiomalpha.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot...
"... it's very profitable to have military bases in 55 countries, with a $1 trillion annual pot to draw from. " US Spends over 150 billion annually on overseas base. https://www.mintpressnews.com/214492-2/214492/
Can you provide any source that verifies any of your post? I can't seem to find anything I can point to and say, yes this is true.
The bulk of the piece is also a more sympathetic reporting of the story (e.g., the alleged importance of the mission, and allegedly why things happened) than previous reporting I saw. (The end of the piece switches to criticism beyond this story, though.)
Their reasoning was that these boats could have alerted the Americans about the impending attack.
It's interesting to see the US more or less committing the same crime, even if it was just a bug planting mission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_biological_warf...
Heck, I think that the US treatment of the Nazis after the second world war should make it pretty clear what "side" of that conflict they were actually on.
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.
Special Forces are secretive, and almost as a law of nature that leads to them being inept.
There is a long list of these special operations in the book "Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs" by Noam Chomsky.
> There is a long list of these special operations in the book...
And I'm sure there's a list orders of magnitude longer that we'll never hear about, and there's no way to judge if the ops in his book are representative of the whole.
Man, fuck these people. Meanwhile hollywood will churn out another hundred films about how Captain America would never let something like this happen because murdering innocents is not a line America would ever cross.
FWIW, Captain America's character arc throughout the MCU, at least (which is what I'd assume we mean by "Hollywood"), has largely been to realize that he can't actually trust the government and that not only is the government now corrupt (becoming so during his time skip), but it has always been just as bad: the "good government" he believed in from WWII was propaganda, it turned out SHIELD was a so deeply infiltrated with enemy spies that it was effectively an arm of HYDRA... even the UN's attempts at diplomacy inherently result in moral compromises that he refuses to accept, and, by the end, he ended up as a fugitive. I think you'd be hard pressed to watch these movies and think that Captain America's existence demonstrates that America would never cross such lines.
it's also a total coincidence that the original origin had Stark demonstrating his weapons in Vietnam, and being captured by communist war-lord Wong Chu.
It's so strange that all this great writing seems somehow connected to the current affairs of the United States at the time.
The fakey Lockheed Martin logo and typescript for Stark Industries is also a nice fuck-you, but the fans think it's endearing.
Any kind of semblance of "Oh the superhero now mistrusts authority" is there simply to make the actual propgadandized bullshit more palatable and believable, and you'll be damn sure that after the traitors are ousted in the movie it'll be good old Uncle Sam and the US whatever-corp waiting for the real super heroes when it's all through.
The DoD sure puts out some great fiction writing.
1) First of all, you're talking about an imaginary universe with a character literally named "Captain America". Just to put this in the right perspective.
2) A single Google would show you that the Middle East often engages (AND has historically engaged) in all of that, and lots of other bad-actordom (please do not tu-quoque me here about the sins of the United States, I know about its meddling consequences). Do you know why? It's because the Quran endorses it. Do you want the quotes they use to justify it to this day? It's the same quotes that the Barbary Pirates quoted at Thomas Jefferson and John Adams when they traveled to Morocco to ask why their peaceful trade ships kept getting attacked... which shocked them... and which ended up in them forming the US Navy. So yes, the US military was literally created to fight the Islamic terrorism of its day. That is not propaganda, that is historical fact. (Source- This is wild, btw, if you weren't aware of it: https://www.masshist.org/publications/adams-papers/index.php... Find the paragraph that begins with "We took the Liberty...") Just to give you an idea how deep the rabbit hole goes here, and that it's not all just "durr hurr brown people bad" (I mean... that might be some of it, but it's absolutely not ALL of it). In short, the "Middle East trope" was largely earned, not applied... and the US was founded on good principles by good people (who, uh, owned slaves sometimes. Yes, it's complicated. I know.). (Related side note - the Crusades were largely a response to Islamic jihadic conquests. But I digress.)
3) F-35 criticism- No contest. I didn't realize that, actually. And I'm a 4 year USAF vet, so... I should have.
4) Regarding "choice of enemy"... funny story I read about this lately related to that is that the lead designer of the Call of Duty games is having trouble traveling overseas without a security attache because of the enemies he picked in his past games, lol. If you're curious, I can find the link. But the unfortunate truth is that the dramas set up in these media have to have SOME plausible semblance to reality. (I will return to this in a moment.)
5) "Any kind of semblance of "Oh the superhero now mistrusts authority" is there simply to make the actual propgadandized bullshit more palatable and believable" This is not a falsifiable claim, and I'll demonstrate why: A) If the movie depicts the US as flawless, you will see it as propaganda. B) If the movie depicts the US as flawed, you... Also see it as propaganda? See the problem yet? If there are no conditions under which a Marvel movie is not "United States propaganda" to you, then it is not falsifiable, end of story. It also completely misses any satirical elements, which were surely present.
Now, to my last point...
Ich sprech fliessend Deutsch. My mom is from Heidelberg and my dad is from Bremen and they emigrated to the US and I am a firstborn American with some particular German sensitivities that we likely share (couldn't help noticing your gmx.com email address). And so we get to the problem of Every Single US-Produced Historical Videogame using Nazis As The Enemy. Contributes to negative German stereotypes. I feel that. As a US citizen who is also German (100% German ancestry, actually), I want to apologize for that. There's gotta be some part of you that this pains, because it does me. Germans should be known for waaaaay better things they've contributed to the world, than that (Ordnung über alles! lol). So, I'm sorry. Perhaps that fed into some of your rage here. If so, I'd understand... possibly more than most. (I've also been called a Nazi more than once.)
I mean, you're bending the truth a little. The US Navy was created to fight thieves and murderers on ships, who happened to be Muslim. There was no ideological component to the conflict. That someone can cite a passage from a book to justify robbing you doesn't mean that his robbing you is inspired by the book.
>funny story I read about this lately related to that is that the lead designer of the Call of Duty games is having trouble traveling overseas without a security attache because of the enemies he picked in his past games, lol.
Sounds extremely dubious. For one, there's not a designer. It's always been at least two different companies working on alternating titles; right now it's three or four. Second, who would even recognize him, by either face or name?
>B) If the movie depicts the US as flawed, you... Also see it as propaganda? See the problem yet? If there are no conditions under which a Marvel movie is not "United States propaganda" to you, then it is not falsifiable, end of story.
For example, if the US government wasn't a player at all (it's not aware of the conflict, it's totally powerless to do anything about it [for or against], etc.), it would not be propaganda. Or it could depict a realistic US government, as not a monolithic entity, but a massive swath of people with different motivations, principles, and knowledge. Hell, imagine this: two different branches of the government want to help with the problem but they refuse to cooperate out of mistrust and their solutions work against each other, cancelling each other out, and a third, smaller branch makes a small but key contribution to the heroes' effort.
I'm sorry, what? I literally don't follow. If someone robs my home because of what it says to do in an unquestionable book that they've been raised on, how is that not literally inspired by the book? This is nonsense. People do things all the time (good and bad) because of what they believe is true in books. Would you not fault those books if they state something wrong that causes people to commit harm? I mean... Trepanation? Bloodletting? Countless other things that were believed to be true, were acted on because of that, but were actually wrong?
Have you actually read the relevant passages?
(I more or less agree with your other statements.)
Yes, if I beg the question, I also can reach any conclusion I like. But someone doesn't rob because of what any book says. They rob you because they want what you have and they think they can get away with it. I assure you, if you put a sign on the front of the house saying "beware of the leopard" and the robber hears growling noises coming from inside, he will not rob you, no matter how righteous his unquestionable book says robbing you is.
(If he does, then I'll grant you in such a case there's an ideological component to it.)
>People do things all the time (good and bad) because of what they believe is true in books.
That's not how human nature works. It's not like before Muhammad came around pillaging didn't exist. What do you think vikings were, or the sea peoples? I haven't read the passage, and I don't need to. It doesn't matter what it says. The Old Testament says that Hebrews could take slaves from their neighboring nations. Leviticus didn't invent slavery. All the book did was condone a practice that already existed. At the most what the passage did was let people feel better about what they were doing (and we know they knew slavery was awful, because they had different practices for the in-group than for the out-group), if nothing else because their own countrymen would not punish them for it.
Take everything I said about the Hebrews and apply it to the Muslim pirates.
>I mean... Trepanation? Bloodletting? Countless other things that were believed to be true, were acted on because of that, but were actually wrong?
Now you're just conflating things. Trepanation and bloodletting were performed because it was mistakenly believed they would help the patient. Someone who enslaves you, robs you, or murders you because his holy book tells him is the righteous thing to do is under no mistaken impression that he's doing you a favor.
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, and human conflict means these choices have to be made.
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 govt might be able to and be incentivized to downplay it. Similar to downplaying whatever drones were flying over NJ
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.
Now the story leaks out from inside - what are the consequences? I don't know.
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.
If you could stop NK doing that, would you pull the trigger? Would you make a targeted kill of a person who compromised that mission by discovering it?
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.
If IHL were deeply ingrained in international political behaviour and absolutely established I could see deviations from it where such deviations could be justified on moral grounds as acceptable, but since the law is hardly even established it is more important that it be followed than that it minimizes suffering in the now.
Furthermore, I don't think that it mattered. Everyone places his tactical concerns very highly in the moment, but over time they are often irrelevant. Do you really think it matters now, whether that information was available or not?
I don't really believe there's anything useful that can be achieved when it comes to the North Korea's nuclear weapons. They have them, they'll probably try to build more of them. That sucks, but there's nothing that can be done.
I don't think we should be having wars and killing each other. I don't think we should need to. Hopefully one day we won't and we will stand together as 1 species united in purpose and prowess and exploring together.
For NK, projecting strength is so important. But belligerence is all they have, they don't really want to be fighting, they want to be rich and having fun. Past humiliation and present partnerships coerce them towards war. Surrender is improbable, and for them joining the world can only be done on terms where everyone respects their strength. Tho maybe it will change, and they will hunger for what we have, more than they are afraid to stand as equals lest they be seen as weak.
I think what can be done is to bring everyone together so no country needs nuclear weapons pointed at another country. But until then you need advantage in case of hostility and conflict.
s/ the US / "some bureaucratic process within the military"
which is almost certainly politically influenced, as many decisions at this level are
In this case, I don't think the bureaucracy reflects the will of the people
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.
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.
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.
Propaganda wouldn't be a movie in which the villain is the government of the country that the main hero also belongs to, and remains with at the conclusion of the movie.
OTOH, the trope of the hero's government being the villain is very much a trope in the conspiracy thriller genre, which has been around for more than 50 years.
You're probably not a native speaker: the proper past tense of teach is "taught".
And you're of course right! I'm also an outsider to the US. It seems to me that "kill first think later" is the modus operandi of all kinds of US armed forces, from the police to the army and the navy.
i'm pretty sure this was the plan in case they got caught : kill everybody and flee
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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.
To alleviate doubt, I originally submitted with modified title to include the word 'wiretap' (the aspect I found interesting, figured would be be similar for HN audience).
But the topic is clearly interesting for other reasons too.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/10/politics/pentagon-cia-counter...
As a civilian, I understand the intention. But, unless all are warriors of equal rank, I don't want the public voting on how the military will be run minute-by-minute, nor do I think it's helpful for the public ( i.e. our adversaries in a very real sense ) to have access to information of classified operations. That sounds like a recipe for an authoritarian / tyrannical government to absolutely steamroll us...which would negate the advantages of a democracy in the first place.
Putting special ops up to democratic vote is absurd.
> The White House declined to comment.
> This account is based on interviews with two dozen people, including civilian government officials, members of the first Trump administration and current and former military personnel with knowledge of the mission. All of them spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the mission’s classified status.
The NYT story has this to say regarding provenance.
But, in summary, we should take the New York Times' word for it?
Bwahahahahaaaah!
The US has threatened the ICC with violence to prevent criminal charges against US military members.
So in short, no.
> Gallagher was convicted in July of posing with the dead body of a teenage Islamic State captive he had just killed with a hunting knife. He was granted clemency by the president in November in a decision that angered military chiefs.
> fellow platoon members told of a ruthless leader who stabbed the captive to death for no reason then forced his troops to pose for a photograph with the corpse.
0: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/27/eddie-gallag...
Feels like the mission happened with a different goal and this is the cover story.
Seeing as how this was right where this entire mission turned into a lethal clusterfuck, you'd think rigorously trained, carefully coordinated and disciplined SEALs would just try the incredibly sophisticated tactic of.... just, you know, holding their fire a few minutes to first see if the boat knew about them or had anything to do with their mission. They must have known that random people can appear for reasons of their own, without necessarily being a sign of discovery, and then just wait and see if they can resume ops soon after the intruder leaves.
Even your average career burglar knows better than to panic at the first sight of an unforeseen individual arriving at some scene they're working for a theft.
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, but I would need some more context still.
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 these sorts of outcomes classified if they can. Can we trust non-political military leadership? To some extent, I think so, but they (especially those involved in planning and approval for these missions) will still have incentives to downplay any failures.
This is a classic problem, of course: you can never fully trust the people involved to police themselves. But I also agree that most civilians won't have the experience, context, and training to evaluate what happened and come to a reasonable and fair conclusion.
So... I'm not sure what the solution is. The bottom line is that collateral civilian deaths are a tragedy. The fact that it happened is awful, and that operation should be gone over with a fine-toothed comb to determine if the soldiers involved could and should have done something differently in order to avoid those deaths. Whether or not that will happen, in an objective, unbiased manner, by people who are qualified to do so, is unknown. I'd like to think there were better options here, and that those people didn't need to die, but I really have no idea.
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.
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 for this shocking ? I'm not saying North Korea is all good......
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.
"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 easy for me to justify categorically.
If you have to put a big [*] next to that which says "if my boss tells me to kill someone, it's okay", then you really don't have any morals.
That math is easy for most folks to do.
The thing that probably keeps you from being able to do that math is some relative certainty that you personally will never have to be on the "risk/benefit analysis" board for these kinds of murderers.
But that's an error.
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.
If they got anything at all it'd be a PR stunt, since they have no way of enforcing any compensation.
Which is not to say what they did do was right, but "just kidnap some people" is not really a practical reality.
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.
What? What is with these measurements?
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.
You can't just massacre a village because some villagers saw you.
The animals who did this were not following the rules of war. The animals who covered it up, and did not prosecute them deserve to hang with them, too.
Nothing to see here but a bunch of psychopaths killing innocent people as they screw up their own mission
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45143759
[flagged] US special forces killed North Korean civilians in botched 2019 mission (reuters.com)
68 points by hnlurker22 1 day ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 28 commentsA non-HN example: often when two people I have huge respect for as intellectuals go at it in debate over something, I can often infer that the topic is of some importance (I might not have ever heard of the topic before), and when smart people differ greatly in their views, at the very least, it's an 'interesting' topic, perhaps warranting further inquisition.
In some forums, tactics like flaming, disinformation, off-topic noise like jokes, upvoting diversions, etc. can also suppress information/discussion.
To answer your question, imagine HN's frontpage saturated by stories that you would consider entirely offtopic and sensational. To a first approximation, that's what HN would be for everyone if it weren't for user flags.
Of course the system is imperfect and overcorrects. But the presence of the current post on the frontpage already shows that sometimes—often, in fact—the overcorrection gets adjusted.
The lengths some people willing to go just not to use the metric system
For anyone interested, the original source was: https://reason.com/2025/09/05/navy-seals-reportedly-killed-n...
I've added such a comment to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45155452 now, which is where it would usually go.
Btw, thanks for all the work you do.
— Originally attributed to George Orwell in one form or another