Wow, that’s crazy, the _whistleblower_ and one other person were tried and convicted. Essentially just punishing the person that felt bad enough to reveal the crime, not the many that committed it and stayed silent. :(
FirmwareBurner · 2h ago
>But only the whistleblower and one other were tried and convicted:
Of course, what did you expect? Murder is legal if it's for the government, and, exposing your government's secret dirty laundry is a crime against the law. Business as usual everywhere.
I'm not aware of any government that rewards you when you exposed it as fool/criminal in front of their voters and the world. Hence why whistleblowers get the book thrown at them, as there's one set of rules for the plebs and another for the super wealthy and powerful.
And do you know what's most ironic? We're rewarding our own soldiers for the same crimes we hanged the Nazi soldiers for. Another proof that the legality of right VS wrong, good VS evil, has less to do with morals and more to do with whether you're on the victorious side of history.
lwo32k · 2h ago
Making a dent is possible, but to take on power you need other powerful people/networks backing you. Most whistleblowers don't do enough homework. They just want to dump things out there and hope for the best. That's never good enough.
FirmwareBurner · 1h ago
> but to take on power you need other powerful people/networks backing you. Most whistleblowers don't do enough homework.
Doing your homework and having powerful people behind you are orthogonal. You can do all the homework you want but powerful people got in power and staid in power for playing for those in power, they're not gonna throw away all that to die on your hill with you.
You might think you can get away by playing one political side against the other for your protection and rally support, but when it comes to national security, military industrial complex, the ultra wealthy elites, etc, those tend to be part of and fund both sides so it won't work out in your favor as you might expect.
>They just want to dump things out there and hope for the best.
What's the alternative? Once you start "doing your homework" those in power will already find out you're rocking the boat and will lock you up under the usual $ESPIONAGE, $TERRORISM, $PATRIOT laws before you manage to send a text, so your safest bet is to release all info quickly to the public/press while you're still able to.
Time works against you here. The longer you're in possession of dirt that can get those at the top in trouble, the more you risk finding yourself "Epsteined".
JumpCrisscross · 23m ago
> Doing your homework and having powerful people behind you are orthogonal
In the way sifting flour and beating eggs are orthogonal steps in cake making. You need to do both, and not necessarily in any order.
> You might think you can get away by playing one political side against the other for your protection and rally support
“Sides” are an abstraction. The first rule of power is its quantum are people. You need people on your side to have power. Not abstractions.
> Once you start "doing your homework" those in power will already find out you're rocking the boat and will lock you up
No they won’t. Even these whistleblowers were publicly tried to scandalous effect for the impacted agencies.
The step most whistleblowers fail to take is the simplest one when confronting a powerful entity: consulting a lawyer.
> longer you're in possession of dirt that can get those at the top in trouble, the more you risk finding yourself "Epsteined"
This is nonsense and worse, a self-defeating argument. You think the people Epstein had dirt on didn’t know it until he was jailed?
FirmwareBurner · 18m ago
>You need to do both
How do you do that?
>You need people on your side to have power.
How do you get them?
>The step most whistleblowers fail to take is the simplest one when confronting a powerful entity: consulting a lawyer.
If only Snowden would have talked to a lawyer, I'm sure he'd be safe in the US right now.
JumpCrisscross · 15m ago
> How?
This is highly situation dependent.
If you’re blowing the whistle on the British special forces, you’d want to have copious contemporaneous notes referencing where official documents may corroborate your claims.
You’d also want to introduce your claims into the Parliamentary record; first step would be finding an MP who wants to reform (not unmake) the special forces. In this way you can play into ambitious underlings’ promotion dreams while dangling transformation resources for the agency you’re criticising.
> How do you get them?
If you can’t manage the basics of politics, don’t launch a political endeavour. (This is true for whistleblowing and entrepreneurship, commercial and political.)
> If only Snowden would have talked to a lawyer, I'm sure he'd be safe in the US right now
Chelsea Manning is out of jail. And Manning went about her business in about the stupidest way possible.
SAI_Peregrinus · 2h ago
> Another proof that the legality of right VS wrong, good VS evil, has less to do with morals and more to do with whether you're on the victorious side of history.
I'd say more that "legality" and "morals" are not necessarily related. Morality cannot be imposed by laws, and laws aren't usually driven by morality. This applies to both secular and religious laws.
huhkerrf · 2h ago
When I read about terrible things done in a group like this, my first thought is: would I have done the right thing?
I like to think I'm a good person, but these people probably do, too. It sounds like there's something rotten in the culture of the special forces that encouraged or at least overlooked these actions. What would I have done if I had been there? Would I have stood up against people I saw as my brothers in arms?
Before anyone gets this twisted, this is not an excuse of their behavior or saying that it should be discounted.
nashashmi · 4m ago
[delayed]
beloch · 1h ago
Soldiers are not trained to do police work, yet that's what many are asked to do. An informant provides a tip that someone is manufacturing IED's, so soldiers are sent to investigate. They're not trained for that. Worse yet, they're the targets of the crime they're investigating. Police are not typically asked to investigate an attempt on their own lives for good reason.
Even with appropriate training and when investigating crimes that do not target themselves, police are often guilty of abuses. In an occupation, the sheer numbers involved would guarantee abuses even if it were police operating under ideal conditions.
It is usually not feasible to conduct military operations with a huge force of trained police officers. However, even with people of the wrong background investigating without detachment, there should be an expectation for a culture of conscientiousness. That's the truly shocking thing about this article. Soldiers were put into a situation where things were expected to go wrong, but the attitude from command was to let it go wrong gleefully and to help cover it up afterwards. There was a complete surrender to inhumanity, on the part of command, before the conflict even started. That's what is truly reprehensible. Perhaps we must forgive people for doing bad things in the moment and under duress, but there should be no forgiveness for those who do it happily, daily, and without complaint.
This was a failure of command even more than it was a failure of the soldiers who committed crimes.
psunavy03 · 32m ago
Keep in mind that a good part of the reason why this came to light is SAS troopers doing the right thing and testifying against the accused.
exe34 · 1h ago
> something rotten in the culture of the special forces that encouraged or at least overlooked these actions
I suspect it's the price of having the best killers on Earth. They necessarily have to compromise on something else.
harddrivereque · 2h ago
It should be obvious to everyone, not just about UK, but all sorts of war invoke this. I mean, we all know about torture in Guantanamo and even on European soil, and it wasn't even that long ago. What makes anyone think anything has changed? Why would it change? Is there an incentive? Sure, there are courts and theoretical conventions, but the system is not perfect, there is no enforcement and also no incentive to enforce it. For all I know there is lack of enforcement for all kinds of crime - just extrapolate the mess with simple street crime to warzones and it doesn't seem as surprising anymore, does it?
psunavy03 · 2h ago
War crimes have always happened. What matters is whether they are celebrated, ignored, or properly investigated and punished.
Wars are horrible enough as-is; we have laws of armed conflict to try the best we can to keep a lid on the utter barbarity of it all, and to help our warfighters be able to live with themselves after.
This is not a new concept; one of the first people to expound on the proper laws of war in the West was Saint Augustine, and his work is still the philosophical foundation of the subject.
fmajid · 1h ago
That's too easy. The US, British and Israelis routinely whitewash their war crimes. The Russians don't even pretend to follow the rules of war.
In comparison, the French put a general in the dock when his soldiers in the Ivory Coast, at his implicit orders, extrajudicially killed Firmin Mahé, a bandit himself responsible for many murders, and I believe other European countries have done similar prosecutions of senior officers.
Impunity is a choice.
mtrovo · 2h ago
I think it's deeper than that. There's an incentive on not going against your own military because doing so would attract the wrong kind of mentality and makes things worse when you need them. So unless there are real consequences against brushing it off (like burning down public buildings) that's usually what happens. But publicly people cannot be too explicit saying it because it plays on the image of the pristine rule of law that our politicians like so much to use on speeches to make sure we're above China and other developing countries on the moral grounds.
Australian SASR already had a major scandal. There's been open reporting in the past about some bad actors over the years in USSOCOM. It'd be interesting for someone to do some serious psych research on how many of these people were psychopaths who slipped through the cracks as opposed to people who broke bad after several combat deployments.
The general public never payed much attention to GWOT as it was, but one of the consequences of it was that the special operations forces as a community were "rode hard and put away wet" as they say for 20+ years. Take someone, put them through a grueling selection process to become "the best of the best," which can cultivate a corresponding ego. Then pound the hell out of them over a full career with combat deployment after combat deployment, raid after raid.
It doesn't excuse what happened by any means, but is there legitimately a limit that needs to be known about how much violence someone can take before they give in to the beast within? Military aviators have crew rest limitations because it was discovered that beyond a certain level of fatigue, you are literally killing people. The experience of Vietnam POWs forced changes to military training for being taken captive, because they found out that if you torture anyone enough, they will eventually break.
So is the solution here that the SOF communities are attracting too many psychopaths and screening needs to be changed, or is it that people were being broken by war, which is a totally different problem?
Yeul · 10m ago
Western countries should never send their citizens into the heart of darkness.
I will never forget the footage of Serbians chaining Dutch officers to lampposts to act as living shields against NATO airstrikes. The poor bastards were time machined into the dark ages.
PicassoCTs · 3h ago
Well, should be easy to account, given that the same prop-weapons were used over and over again. Find a unique scratch or dent and start counting.
tiahura · 2h ago
It's hard to know what to make of an article like this because of the lack of context. Killing the kids of your enemy is bad, but was happening long before humans showed up. So, the question is, given comparable conditions, how did SAS perform vs others? Are they 1/2 as cruel as the French and 1/4 as cruel than they used to be? If so, we should be happy they're improving. We don't know.
This seems like a systemic problem with war fighting and requires system improvements. The Heinlein in me is uneasy with a prosecutorial focus. Improve the culture, make it easier to take a couple of weeks off, whistleblow, whatever--but telling someone who volunteered to fight for their country to go get shot at and dodge bombs for a few hours, watch their friends get their faces blown off, and then flip a switch, seems unreasonable.
pessimizer · 2h ago
> Killing the kids of your enemy is bad, but was happening long before humans showed up.
What does this mean, and why is it relevant? Some animals eat their weaker young. Would you include this in an argument defending a child cannibal? Did he eat fewer or more children than others?
I think this is how you reason when you have no values. "I know it's probably bad or whatever, but it's 5% fewer than the French!"
"Who are the French?"
"An excuse to kill 4% more kids. If we need to kill even more kids, I'll find another country that at some point in the past could justify a few more basis points."
"You know, some invaders in the past killed all the kids as a matter of policy. Who are we to say they weren't great or moral? It's culturally insensitive."
"Lets consult Heinlein. I know he has a lot about sleeping with your children, but he's got to have something about killing them."
croes · 2h ago
Seems like Kurt Tucholsky was right
No comments yet
aatd86 · 2h ago
then yhey criticize the wagner militia but they are not any better apparently. Maybe it's even hearsay.
nemo · 2h ago
making excuses for the Wagner Militia really is not the takeaway you want from this one
And apparently Australia had already released their report and investigation of their own behavior: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-55088230
But only the whistleblower and one other were tried and convicted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brereton_Report
Of course, what did you expect? Murder is legal if it's for the government, and, exposing your government's secret dirty laundry is a crime against the law. Business as usual everywhere.
I'm not aware of any government that rewards you when you exposed it as fool/criminal in front of their voters and the world. Hence why whistleblowers get the book thrown at them, as there's one set of rules for the plebs and another for the super wealthy and powerful.
And do you know what's most ironic? We're rewarding our own soldiers for the same crimes we hanged the Nazi soldiers for. Another proof that the legality of right VS wrong, good VS evil, has less to do with morals and more to do with whether you're on the victorious side of history.
Doing your homework and having powerful people behind you are orthogonal. You can do all the homework you want but powerful people got in power and staid in power for playing for those in power, they're not gonna throw away all that to die on your hill with you.
You might think you can get away by playing one political side against the other for your protection and rally support, but when it comes to national security, military industrial complex, the ultra wealthy elites, etc, those tend to be part of and fund both sides so it won't work out in your favor as you might expect.
>They just want to dump things out there and hope for the best.
What's the alternative? Once you start "doing your homework" those in power will already find out you're rocking the boat and will lock you up under the usual $ESPIONAGE, $TERRORISM, $PATRIOT laws before you manage to send a text, so your safest bet is to release all info quickly to the public/press while you're still able to.
Time works against you here. The longer you're in possession of dirt that can get those at the top in trouble, the more you risk finding yourself "Epsteined".
In the way sifting flour and beating eggs are orthogonal steps in cake making. You need to do both, and not necessarily in any order.
> You might think you can get away by playing one political side against the other for your protection and rally support
“Sides” are an abstraction. The first rule of power is its quantum are people. You need people on your side to have power. Not abstractions.
> Once you start "doing your homework" those in power will already find out you're rocking the boat and will lock you up
No they won’t. Even these whistleblowers were publicly tried to scandalous effect for the impacted agencies.
The step most whistleblowers fail to take is the simplest one when confronting a powerful entity: consulting a lawyer.
> longer you're in possession of dirt that can get those at the top in trouble, the more you risk finding yourself "Epsteined"
This is nonsense and worse, a self-defeating argument. You think the people Epstein had dirt on didn’t know it until he was jailed?
How do you do that?
>You need people on your side to have power.
How do you get them?
>The step most whistleblowers fail to take is the simplest one when confronting a powerful entity: consulting a lawyer.
If only Snowden would have talked to a lawyer, I'm sure he'd be safe in the US right now.
This is highly situation dependent.
If you’re blowing the whistle on the British special forces, you’d want to have copious contemporaneous notes referencing where official documents may corroborate your claims.
You’d also want to introduce your claims into the Parliamentary record; first step would be finding an MP who wants to reform (not unmake) the special forces. In this way you can play into ambitious underlings’ promotion dreams while dangling transformation resources for the agency you’re criticising.
> How do you get them?
If you can’t manage the basics of politics, don’t launch a political endeavour. (This is true for whistleblowing and entrepreneurship, commercial and political.)
> If only Snowden would have talked to a lawyer, I'm sure he'd be safe in the US right now
Chelsea Manning is out of jail. And Manning went about her business in about the stupidest way possible.
I'd say more that "legality" and "morals" are not necessarily related. Morality cannot be imposed by laws, and laws aren't usually driven by morality. This applies to both secular and religious laws.
I like to think I'm a good person, but these people probably do, too. It sounds like there's something rotten in the culture of the special forces that encouraged or at least overlooked these actions. What would I have done if I had been there? Would I have stood up against people I saw as my brothers in arms?
Before anyone gets this twisted, this is not an excuse of their behavior or saying that it should be discounted.
Even with appropriate training and when investigating crimes that do not target themselves, police are often guilty of abuses. In an occupation, the sheer numbers involved would guarantee abuses even if it were police operating under ideal conditions.
It is usually not feasible to conduct military operations with a huge force of trained police officers. However, even with people of the wrong background investigating without detachment, there should be an expectation for a culture of conscientiousness. That's the truly shocking thing about this article. Soldiers were put into a situation where things were expected to go wrong, but the attitude from command was to let it go wrong gleefully and to help cover it up afterwards. There was a complete surrender to inhumanity, on the part of command, before the conflict even started. That's what is truly reprehensible. Perhaps we must forgive people for doing bad things in the moment and under duress, but there should be no forgiveness for those who do it happily, daily, and without complaint.
This was a failure of command even more than it was a failure of the soldiers who committed crimes.
I suspect it's the price of having the best killers on Earth. They necessarily have to compromise on something else.
Wars are horrible enough as-is; we have laws of armed conflict to try the best we can to keep a lid on the utter barbarity of it all, and to help our warfighters be able to live with themselves after.
This is not a new concept; one of the first people to expound on the proper laws of war in the West was Saint Augustine, and his work is still the philosophical foundation of the subject.
In comparison, the French put a general in the dock when his soldiers in the Ivory Coast, at his implicit orders, extrajudicially killed Firmin Mahé, a bandit himself responsible for many murders, and I believe other European countries have done similar prosecutions of senior officers.
Impunity is a choice.
The general public never payed much attention to GWOT as it was, but one of the consequences of it was that the special operations forces as a community were "rode hard and put away wet" as they say for 20+ years. Take someone, put them through a grueling selection process to become "the best of the best," which can cultivate a corresponding ego. Then pound the hell out of them over a full career with combat deployment after combat deployment, raid after raid.
It doesn't excuse what happened by any means, but is there legitimately a limit that needs to be known about how much violence someone can take before they give in to the beast within? Military aviators have crew rest limitations because it was discovered that beyond a certain level of fatigue, you are literally killing people. The experience of Vietnam POWs forced changes to military training for being taken captive, because they found out that if you torture anyone enough, they will eventually break.
So is the solution here that the SOF communities are attracting too many psychopaths and screening needs to be changed, or is it that people were being broken by war, which is a totally different problem?
I will never forget the footage of Serbians chaining Dutch officers to lampposts to act as living shields against NATO airstrikes. The poor bastards were time machined into the dark ages.
This seems like a systemic problem with war fighting and requires system improvements. The Heinlein in me is uneasy with a prosecutorial focus. Improve the culture, make it easier to take a couple of weeks off, whistleblow, whatever--but telling someone who volunteered to fight for their country to go get shot at and dodge bombs for a few hours, watch their friends get their faces blown off, and then flip a switch, seems unreasonable.
What does this mean, and why is it relevant? Some animals eat their weaker young. Would you include this in an argument defending a child cannibal? Did he eat fewer or more children than others?
I think this is how you reason when you have no values. "I know it's probably bad or whatever, but it's 5% fewer than the French!"
"Who are the French?"
"An excuse to kill 4% more kids. If we need to kill even more kids, I'll find another country that at some point in the past could justify a few more basis points."
"You know, some invaders in the past killed all the kids as a matter of policy. Who are we to say they weren't great or moral? It's culturally insensitive."
"Lets consult Heinlein. I know he has a lot about sleeping with your children, but he's got to have something about killing them."
No comments yet