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 engagement in the event of being detected.
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?
> In Marcus Luttrell's original after-action report, he stated that he and his teammates were attacked by 20–35 insurgents, while his book places the number at over 200....military journalist Ed Darack cites a military intelligence report stating the strength of the Taliban force to be 8–10.
> 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_...
Honestly, I’m not inclined to believe the NYT reporting here either. Those leaking the “facts” necessarily must obscure and change details to avoid being caught as the leaker. But after a few paragraphs, it becomes clear someone leaked this to harm the current administration. Their motive can also mean they left out detail. For example, Obama may have done a similar successful operation but that will not be leaked here. As OP said, usually you need decades to get the truth vs the little reporters can harvest
> it becomes clear someone leaked this to harm the current administration
Did you think that about Watergate too? Unless the entire story was manufactured I don't see how you could possibly reach that conclusion.
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.
I'm not trying to be a jerk here, but source? Genuinely curious.
I don't have a link handy, but I recall seeing on YT a clip of Luttrell basically outright stating that the Navy "handed him the book pre-written" in an interview.
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.
The public should be hearing about these failures when they involve an almost entirely opaque nuclear-armed state having their sovereignty violated.
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.
Lone Survivor is simply a work of fiction.
I think this has fairly recently been outed as being almost all fiction.
Another thing we could do is watch the documentary 300 to learn about how the Spartans fought off Xerxes.
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
Maybe Putin's 2007 Munich speech and 2008 Russian war with Georgia had something to do with that.
Which were also tit-for-tat responses to the US & NATO (US involvement & funding in 2004 Ukraine Orange Revolution, 2006 Georgia bid for NATO, 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit).
Hope you realize that once you subscribe to this naive-mechanistic view of politics all American wars and actions abroad also become justified.
Oh no they donated to a political campaign. Better start shelling villages and displacing a quarter million people. Tit for tat.
And funny thing they aren't shelling the Americans who supposedly wronged them.
How dare you suggest Putin is not doing things because he’s just crazy and wants to take over Europe??
If I was a superpower I would just be really nice and have good policy so that people wanted to join my country
I am not sure why none of the big three have put this into practice yet
Those are the kinds of things you do when you CAN’T get what you want through PR and sheer bullshit (or violence). And assume you don’t already feel like you have the best people.
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).
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.
JSOC units, including Delta Force, carried out raids in Iraq and Afghanistan that killed many civilians, often women and children. We cannot measure the exact ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths, but multiple investigations show civilians bore the brunt, often children.
In these expeditionary wars, the only good guys were groups like MSF, WFP, and the ICRC.
I was reading about special operations in WWII and these kinds of missions always seem to be on a knife's edge. This mission seems more akin to a WWII operation with the team and their immediate support being entirely on their own.
>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 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 House) mission and those tend to be the riskiest.
What is their success rate? What is "pretty high?"
We don't know. It's classified. That's the part of the point. I get why the OC might assume the success rate is pretty high because the successful missions can be talked about so the public hears about them. Very rare to hear about the failures like this one. But we just don't know if its rare because they don't happen much or because they happen a lot and are kept as a state secret.
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 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.
> Without those two traits you are going to get you and your squadmates killed in a hurry.
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 have watched a lot of ex-special forces guys on YT.
What specific channels would you recommend?
> 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.
> I think it needs to be said that people who choose those careers are probably one of the worst kinds of people.
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.
> For those who are interested, here is an interview with a very active former Delta Force operator.
Do you have any other similar podcasts, videos, etc. to recommend that feature interviews with former operators?
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I dunno about “hard” man, it sounds like those Korean fishermen didn’t put up much of a fight.
Hard does not mean good or useful
The entire story is about how you lack a rational basis for holding a belief about the success rate.
> And their success rate should be and is, pretty high.
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.
You wrote: "Take the death of bin Laden, "Operation Neptune Spear", a nominal success in that bin Laden may have been killed"
Emphasis added. Is the death of Osama bin laden under any serious dispute? It's been 14 years.
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 happen, even if the truth had to be bent to achieve it.
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-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...
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.
When French marsouins killed Droukel, one of the first thing they did was take a picture, then sent it to their friends in the navy, operational security be damned (and from what I've heard, that triggered a lot of jokes). The french troops there were more or less aware of the kill way before it was confirmed, which took days. It might be because Seals are tighter at opsec than Marsouins for sure, and that the Cia was ready to confirm the kill while Droukel was less prepared, but the timeline is for sure extremely tight. Still think it happened, I just think the whole story lacks information on insiders.
Yeah, agreed that on the balance of probabilities, it happened more or less as described. But I also think the strongest evidence for that is that Trump didn't use any discrepancy to attack the prior Obama administration in his first term.
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.
> Type A personalities that you want in that job, but that bring with it a willingness for big risk taking and fantastical type missions...
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/our-blessed-homeland-their-ba...
I feel sorry for us as human beings that something like this isn't treated as a war crime. It should never be ok to kill non-combatant civilians in cold-blood. This thought first came into mind when I read that Israel had killed a whole Iranian family ( https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/news/2025/06/26/3342913/entire... ) to assassinate an Iranian scientist. (Or atleast that is what is claimed - some regimes really are too comfortable with the idea of "collective punishment").
It’s possible that Bolton was national security advisor at the time. The timing of this coverage might be to implicate him now.
Or, he might have been raided because he was suspected of leaking the story to NYT.
From the NYT article:
"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."
Just means they declined to put their name on it directly.
If he leaked intel of the operation, he plausibly would decline to comment on the article. That said, Bolton doesn't seem like the type to leak information about a Navy SEALs ops.
I agree, he doesn’t seem the type to leak ops.
He might, if it could be used to disparage his old boss (DJT).
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.
How are you relating NSA with the Navy?
I think it's this usage: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Advisor_(U...
The Navy isn't in the wiretap business.
“The rumors are that the Navy's newest nuclear sub, the USS Jimmy Carter, has been designed for spywork, with a "special capability... to tap undersea cables and eavesdrop on the communications passing through them," according to the AP.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20070203165457/http://www.defens...
I don't know, sometimes we sail the submarine around for a while and then they have us stop in some random place, not sure what's up with that.
ST6 is under the command of SOCOM, they do have the directorate to do clandestine work. To the degree that this article reflects any reality, it's also plausible that a partner in SOCOM (TFO/ISA) or an agency would be along for the ride to do anything specialized.
The Navy has conducted some extremely consequential wiretaps. A fantastic book about the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/...
i see what you mean
For anyone with direct knowledge, what's up with current military culture regarding secrecy? I knew SF guys from the Vietnam era and they didn't talk with outsiders. In fact, I can't think of any prominent "tell all" books from SOF operators from before the 21st century. Now we have ex-SEALs doing book deals.
A lot of these SEAL podcasters exist with explicit blessing from DoD pr department in an effort to improve recruitment
Many of these stories are likely massively exaggerated or are plainly made up/lore. Which is especially easy if you can convince yourself that by bullshitting you help maintain secrecy.
When incidents like this happen, it gives credence to North Korean propaganda portraying the US as an imperialist aggressor.
"An X country's covert operations team landed on country Y's shores, opened fire on a boat in which an innocent fisherman lost lives and left"
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.
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
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.
The Russian/UK situation is a-typical, because they wanted to be found; Russia explicitly left a trail of Novichock as a threat/intimidation.
not sure why you are being downvoted, there are many cases where botched mission happenend even between allied countries and it's bad but never leads to war
The US is pretty clearly an imperialist aggressor? Latin America is littered with the bodies of those who didn't conform to US economic dictates.
And Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Lybia, Vietnam, Laos, any number of examples.
Yeah, it's always been like that, South Korea today is absolutely full of US military personnel. The sight of US tanks on streets is considered normal. War is like the main industry of the US, it's very profitable to have military bases in 55 countries, with a $1 trillion annual pot to draw from. It pays well to force regime change and install friendly client states that allow labor and resource extraction by US companies. Oil in Syria, Oil in Venezuela, minerals in Ukraine are a couple recent examples. The nice thing about Trump is that he just comes out and says these things, he doesn't disguise imperialism like other politicians have. "We'll install Guaido if they agree to give us half of their oil", "We are in Syria for the Oil", "We want something in return in Ukraine, we want the minerals", "We want the lithium in Bolivia", "We want Panama", "We want Greenland", "Make Canada a US state", "turn beachfront Gaza into a Real-Estate investment", etc. But it goes all the way back to the Korean War, with the North having most of the mineral resources that the US is interested in conquering. This is a playbook that the US has used all over the world.
"Yeah, it's always been like that, South Korea today is absolutely full of US military personnel. "
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.
yeah, it's not like north korea doesn't do batshit crazy stuff like kidnap japanese/south korean civilians from japanese/south korean soil, or murder people abroad with massage artists given vx laden massage oil
How does the masseur survive that massage?
Idk. I misremembered, it might not have been massage oil specifically. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-na...
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.
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.
It's funny how people are so surprised? This story was already fictionalized in 2004's "Team America - World Police". SEALs, North Korea, it's all there.
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.
I think "inept" is a bit uncharitable. We have no idea what their success and failure rates are. By their very nature, they take on the trickiest assignments, the ones that are most likely to fail in weird, unexpected ways.
> 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.
Sorry to be pedantic but SEALS are not Special Forces by US military definition. That's the US Army.
They are by common use of the term, however. Just not in US military jargon.
If anyone is interested, but didn't read it because it looked long-form... it's only ~3,500 words, and is a very accessible writeup about this serious matter.
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.)
I'm always surprised like at this level it still seems some people absolutely want to fire there weapons; whereas I would say the more secret a mission is, the more experience you have, the more training you have and you should have understood that killing people and making noises was not the goal of the mission... It should be more teached it seems, sometimes there is operational value in not killing people.
What surprises me is that they had the mini subs door open and bright lights on inside. This seems like surprisingly poor light discipline.
yeah this part is insane. you make a stealth sub but its all ligths out in the middle of the sea you're trying to infiltrate lol
> It should be more teached it seems, sometimes there is operational value in not killing people.
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.
they fired because one possibility was that the boat was NK police / military and the underwater dudes didn't have means to defend themselves.
i'm pretty sure this was the plan in case they got caught : kill everybody and flee
How are you getting that from this story? They thought they had been discovered, and panicked. Pretty simple. Morality aside, staying quiet doesn't help your stealth if your enemy already has a flashlight pointed at you.
How could they have panicked? Surely this would've been a scenario that would've been planned for. I assume they would've trained for the crazy situation of encountering North Koreans in North Korea.
What do you think the plan was for "the North Korean military has already found us and is trying to capture or kill us?"
Retreat? This isn't a war, you can't just drop into another country and start killing people. At no point was it morally or legally justified to have engaged in combat in this situation. At the very least they need to verify it was a military target, and even then it's not justified.
I'm not disagreeing with any of that. But any plan they had clearly did disagree. Context, please.
>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 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.
> 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.
A lot of people bash the Marvel content for essentially having the depth of an arcade beat-em-up, but the character arcs of Cap and Iron Man alone through the movies is something to behold IMHO
That's not much an arc, at least as described. He starts with one set of principles, and he stays with those same set of principles, but just changes his methods. A more interesting (IMO) arc would be to realize that principles should be guidelines, not strict rules, and that those guidelines can sometimes be bent in order to accomplish goals. "I can't trust organizations anymore" is not character growth; the character is not learning anything about how his decisions affect the world.
yeah, it's great writing -- it's a total coincidence that the Iron Man origin was conveniently re-written to implicate the middle east with arms trade, energy smuggling, and human trafficking for the movie. It's also great writing that it gets to show off the F-35 , a project that was hugely failed at the time economically, to the public as something with on-par agility to a super hero.
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.
Hooo boy. I barely have time for this but...
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.)
>So yes, the US military was literally created to fight the Islamic terrorism of its day. That is not propaganda, that is historical fact.
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.
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, and human conflict means these choices have to be made.
What happens if you just abort the mission? Probably nothing, and certainly doing nothing is less likely to provoke war and further escalation than murdering civilians, hoping no one notices, and then having a front page NY Times article published about it later
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
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.
Now the story leaks out from inside - what are the consequences? I don't know.
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.
The article states that it was NOT forbidden to kill civilians. Or at least, the US considered it justified.
The US has signed treaties according to which it is forbidden and these treaties are additionally so special that they're treated as applying to even non-signatories, the so-called customary international law.
the US considered it justified
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
Specialist missions normally have custom RoE not always mirroring those in conventional theatre, but nevertheless appropriate for the mission specifics.
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.
I don't think it's so much about the Rules of Engagement but more about "Don't indiscriminately murder people"
Indiscriminate would be nuclear weapons on cities. This mission’s ultimate goal was to prevent NK doing that.
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?
No? I don't think this is the trap you think it is.
> 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.
The alternative is not murdering anybody and leaving.
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.
False dichotomy. There were many other options available.
Such as?
Not becoming a murderer for hire in the first place, for one.
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.
> versus the lives of potentially hostile people who show up in your mission area?
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.
Amazon is showing Homelander do exactly this though haha.
The Winter Soldier was literally a film about how Captain America had to stop America from doing something like this because murdering innocents was a line that those in charge were perfectly willing to cross.
No mention of this in the article, but less than two years after this happened, the Pentagon announced a change in policy with regard to supporting CIA missions.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/10/politics/pentagon-cia-counter...
This post has a title that differs from the article it cites?
Looks like the title was reverted around the time of your comment.
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.
Not only that but it’s highly editorialized in a way that makes it effectively misinformation.
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.
It's the same thing. They failed by getting discovered and killed civilians to prevent them from reporting them.
Afaik links to offered articles cannot be opened more than once
I don't think that's true? Here's what the NYT has to say about it:
Subscribers can gift 10 gift News articles per month:
- On the 1st of every month, Subscribers’ gift articles reset to 10.
- When an article is gifted, recipients can read it with or without a subscription.
- Recipients have 30 days to read the article before access is revoked.
https://help.nytimes.com/360060848652-Gift-Articles-for-New-...
The gift link I shared above opens for me in a private browser window w/o any prompting.
This botched operation shows how representative government has been subverted in America. Power should flow bottom-up, rather than top-down. Would putting this operation to a democratic vote ever result in approval? Highly doubtful. This suggests our current form of democracy is deeply broken and urgently needs fixing. IMO the issue is how we think about power itself. The assumption underneath it all is that once we vote, power becomes fully vested in our elected officials rather than remaining with the people who conditionally granted it to them. The "representative" part of our democratic republic has become the hack that allows crappy politicians to take over and use power for their own benefit. We grant power through voting, but that power should stay accountable to us - not disappear into secret operations that would never survive public scrutiny.
"Would putting this operation to a democratic vote ever result in approval?"
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.
Not sure what you mean. This is exactly what you get with representative government. In theory accountable, but nearly all decisions are made by proxies, and not by the people as a whole.
Putting special ops up to democratic vote is absurd.
you make it very clear that you have zero understanding of what republican democracy is in the United States.
Do tell more
Some other countries have a "no confidence" process to remove elected officials, right?
What evidence exists that the supposed mission occurred?
> The 2019 operation has never been publicly acknowledged, or even hinted at, by the United States or North Korea. The details remain classified and are being reported here for the first time. The Trump administration did not notify key members of Congress who oversee intelligence operations, before or after the mission. The lack of notification may have violated the law.
> 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.
Your post seems to have some parts out-of-order or missing perhaps?
But, in summary, we should take the New York Times' word for it?
Bwahahahahaaaah!
Is there any way all those involved in the killings can be prosecuted for murder?
Not a chance in this administration. Trump pardoned a Navy SEAL war criminal in 2019[0].
> 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...
US soldiers have murdered literally tens of thousand of innocent, unarmed civilians in the recent wars. Include the postwar period and it's hundreds of thousands to millions.
The US has threatened the ICC with violence to prevent criminal charges against US military members.
So in short, no.
Will they and their chain of command face the justice? And be trialled in way which the peers of victims get to decide if they are guilty or not? Will also all accomplishes say those who funded politician who decided on this also face potential death penalty?
Anyone willing to speculate what the target and electronic device could’ve been?
The story doesn't really make sense as written. At least it's hard to imagine something remote enough to be accessed undetected from shore and be important enough to be worth tapping. Then somehow you get the data back out without being detected?
Feels like the mission happened with a different goal and this is the cover story.
Fiber cable tap?
If later the murdered fishermen are identified and their stories known, is it possible for their families to seek compensation from USG?
If they weren't in NK they could probably try. But given the poverty there, how restrictive the government is about anything getting out, and that they're in a hostile nation to the US, the answer is effectively "No."
If they got anything at all it'd be a PR stunt, since they have no way of enforcing any compensation.
The Japanese bombed civilian boats that happened to be out on the water near pearl harbour before their surprise attack.
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.
If you're interested in "crimes committed by the US war machine which mirror similar crimes by the Japanese", there is a lot written about the US use of biological weapons on the peninsula in late 1951.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_biological_warf...
There was quite alot including actual massacres of civilians in Vietnam. The US where not the good guys in that war.
In what wars were either side free of innocent blood? Where there were actually good guys rather than maybe just morally better than the other side?
Link does not work, just "Server error"
It would have been nicer to kidnap the fishermen.
The laws of war don't allow that either.
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.
I didn't say it would've been legal, just nicer.
Ah, I see.
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
Sounds like a Jack Reacher novel!
Terrible murder aside, what kind of signals was that device going to intercept and why did it need to be on shore?
The US and its usual spreading of freedom to innocent civilians overseas I see.
> The plan called for the Navy to sneak a nuclear-powered submarine, nearly two football fields long, into the waters... then deploy a small team of SEALs in two mini-subs, each about the size of a killer whales..
What? What is with these measurements?
You mean this is your first time getting to know the insane American obsession with using any random measurement unit you can conceive of, no matter how bizarre and absurd, as long as it means avoiding metric units?
Edit: To be fair, with the above units I do actually get a pretty good idea of how big each machine was, right away. Most of us can easily imagine a killer whale, or a couple football fields end to end. For being precise and easy to segment though, luaghable.
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 react strongly, 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.
Therefore, for avoiding flamewars, the issue isn't whether you're right or not, it's how you express the rightness you're bringing—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
Not as bad as Bay of Pigs, but despicable nonetheless. Kudos to the journalists who surfaced this.
The Bay of Pigs was arguably an act of war, this was a war crime.
"A North Korean boat appeared out of the dark. Flashlights from the bow swept over the water. Fearing that they had been spotted, the SEALs opened fire. Within seconds, everyone on the North Korean boat was dead."
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.
(Assuming you also weren’t in the armed forces, so correct me if I’m wrong.)
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.
I think this is really a hard thing. I've also never been in the armed forces, let alone a special forces type branch, so I don't know what it's like.
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.
> 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);
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.
+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 America is all good, but this thread is surprisingly anti-American.
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 for this shocking ? I'm not saying North Korea is all good......
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
>They found no guns or uniforms. Evidence suggested that the crew, which people briefed on the mission said numbered two or three people, had been civilians diving for shellfish. All were dead, including the man in the water. Officials familiar with the mission said the SEALs pulled the bodies into the water to hide them from the North Korean authorities. One added that the SEALs punctured the boat crew’s lungs with knives to make sure their bodies would sink.
Nothing to see here but a bunch of psychopaths killing innocent people as they screw up their own mission
and then... "Many of the people involved in the mission were later promoted."
That has basically been the entire point of the US military since the end of the Cold War (and before that too, but you could argue there was a better reason back then)
The lung puncturing was especially brutal. Literal hitmen actions
Sounds like SEALs all right.
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_abductions_of_Jap... where NK would send raiding parties to Japan, supposedly finally ended in the eighties.
We 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.
Yesterday's HN post on the story, with some discussion, but was flagged:
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 commentsIt's a dupe. Earlier, source, unflagged.
Why was this flagged? Absolute worst feature of HN, I don’t know why it continues.
I don't mind it. Looking at the comments, it seems like a number of people got facts wrong (based on the articles that have been written) and emotions were high. It's just hard to have these conversations and HN isn't necessarily the place to have them.
Point taken, but sometimes 'heated' conversations happen on topics of great importance, and are sometimes the conversations from which we learn the most. (certainly not always, but sometimes).
A 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.
You can't judge this by individual datapoints that you disagree with.
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.
Something can be flagged (or downvoted) because people think the topic or discussion is off-charter or incorrect, or to suppress information/discussion for ulterior reasons.
In some forums, tactics like flaming, disinformation, off-topic noise like jokes, upvoting diversions, etc. can also suppress information/discussion.
Upstream reporting: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/navy-seal-north-korea-...
Thanks, we've changed the URL to that from https://reason.com/2025/09/05/navy-seals-reportedly-killed-n... now.
This is much better. Some of the other sources made it seem like the seals were killing witnesses, rather than confusing civilians for patrols and panicking.
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> The plan called for the Navy to sneak a nuclear-powered submarine, nearly two football fields long, into the waters off North Korea and then deploy a small team of SEALs in two mini-subs, each about the size of a killer whale
The lengths some people willing to go just not to use the metric system
People died under troubling circumstances. Hopefully the strange quirks of the news org's writing style don't derail discussion.
A football field is close to 100m, independently of whether people manage the balls with their feet or with their hands.
And killer whales are about the size of mini subs whether people steer them with their feet or hands too!
100 yds :)
1 yard is ~0.9 m
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[dupe] Earlier, source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45137040
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Could you have said it with your main account instead of an alt?
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[deleting this -- now that the source for the article has been changed, my comment is not as relevant]
Not sure why the source for the article was changed (never seen - or at least never noticed - that on HN before).
For anyone interested, the original source was: https://reason.com/2025/09/05/navy-seals-reportedly-killed-n...
Oh, it happens all the time. Usually we post a comment saying so (here are 2,000 of those: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), but sometimes we don't have time or are on mobile, etc.
I've added such a comment to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45155452 now, which is where it would usually go.
Nice. Idea: it would be cool if HN kept the original submission just as signpost or tombstone, that would be incredibly transparent (otherwise tracing URL modifications depends entirely on the submitter mentioning it and being honest about it). Although I admit this is a very minor feature. I know stack overflow does a vaguely similar thing with duplicate posts, where they'll usually be downvoted and closed quickly, but they often remain as 'signposts' linking to the preferred post on that topic.
Btw, thanks for all the work you do.
It happens sometimes on HN. Times I’ve seen it happen is when another article covers the events better, or are just the original article instead.
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Please don't attack another user like this, no matter how wrong they are or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf”
— Originally attributed to George Orwell in one form or another