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. :(
They did not stay silent . They bragged about warcrimes openly on a podcast.
Persecute the murderous fuckers hard and fast, but not publicly. This affair cooking up smells to much like another russian anti colonial sentiment cooking op.
Can you share a link about the podcast? I’d be interested to learn more.
From the Wikipedia page, it does indeed appear that the “whistleblower“ is no hero. He was whistleblowing over-scrutiny-of-military-personnel. He wasn’t whistleblowing the _murders_, but almost the opposite! Horrible.
Thats how they recruit- stir up anti-western sentiments by getting western self flaggelation conversations going . You allow the resulting volunteers/ dhijhadis / freedom fighters in as part of some chechyan warlords entourage and throw them into a colonial war in ukraine, where the Afghanistan war is just another tuesday in the Russian army .
Same playbook since forever. Those anti-gaza protest are going to give birth to radicalized cells too. Its free fighters, the wests open discussions just another self radicalisation recruitment platform.
Im all for dragging the whole shebang through all the mud. The politicians who parked the war aimlessly , against a non existing country. The officers and media who went along, the soldiers that filtered through and the psychopaths that situation called for. But im against providing the anti western coalition (quatar/teheran/moscow/bejing) ressources.
In a nod to an actual reality that's stranger than you imagine ...
> the person that felt bad enough to reveal the crime
is considerably arse backwards.
To scratch the surface of that:
McBride had previously raised concerns within the Australian Defence Force about the dangers of increasingly restrictive rules of engagement and the nature of investigations into members of the special forces.
The ABC found evidence of war crimes and published the information in their 2017 publication The Afghan Files.
McBride was allegedly unhappy with ABC's reporting of his documents.
ie. The "whistleblower" disclosed examples of behaviour of the SASR and other(?) special force groups not with the motivation of disclosing "war crimes" but to provide examples of "stuff the lads do to get the job done", behaviours that were being threatened by kid glove thinking and internal policing that might have a bias, etc.
During the case, McBride's lawyers stated he acted out of concern about the nature of the Defence Force's “excessive investigation of soldiers” in Afghanistan.
McBride believed the investigations were a "PR exercise" to compensate for earlier public allegations of war crimes.
Justice David Mossop stated "the way you've explained it is that the higher-ups might have been acting illegally by investigating these people too much, and that that was the source of the illegality that was being exposed."
However his story changed and wandered over the course of time his initial motivation on record wasn't at all that he felt bad about the rules of engagement being disregarded, he felt that such things were being chased down too hard.
Wow that is insane, thanks for linking the Wikipedia page. To summarize, the thing he was whistleblowing was over-scrutiny of military personnel actions! He wasn’t whistleblowing the murders! That’s crazy and horrible.
Devils advocate and not necessarily McBride's argument but... does the "blooding" happen if "throwdowns" weren't already commonplace due to the over-oversight? Normalization of deviance creating a path for worse things? Once you are over there and everyone knows they have to do some amount of illegal shit its kind of difficult because the line is already crossed, where is the new line? Noone knows. I've seen this on much less high stakes scales and its a potent source of crazy-making.
Speaking of normalisation it's worth raising that as a former British Army major of a certain age McBride very much more than likely grew up with lashings of the Lance Corporal Jones approach to dealing with others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhWlAKdlQp4
>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.
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.
> 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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I don't buy that, nobody with a shred of humanity shoots handcuffed kids in the back of their heads. Something is wrong with these people as well as with the ones who are protecting them.
Human beings have unfathomed depths. You don't know how you'd react under the same pressures. Like, unless you've been there, you simply don't know. Our behavior under extreme stress is unpredictable, even to ourselves. That's the hard part about prison or homelessness or war: it shows you parts of yourself that you wish didn't exist. You're writing this guy off as un-human. I think that's a mistake. If we accept the full complexity of normal human potential, including our own destructive capacity, then we can put systems in place to guard against it. That's why the original commenter said it's the command's fault. They should have constructed a system where something like this is impossible. Military systems must be built to absorb the reality that soldiers will act in contradiction to both their training and their self-concept. Only by accepting moral volatility as an expected input can a military system anticipate the full range of its own possible breakdowns.
Are you asking specifically about the US Army Special Forces, or special operations in general? In either case they typically don't have much training in law enforcement. Special Forces do have extensive training on building relationships with locals, which can be helpful with investigations and intelligence gathering.
There are also Military Police trained in law enforcement. They tend to deal more with force protection and internal investigations. Some US MPs were responsible for the notorious Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal but there have been some reforms since then.
I think I meant UK special forces. I would expect them to have better trigger discipline and discipline in general. And it would be somewhat surprising if they didn't practice "search and not destroy" quite alot for WoT.
Then again the whole ordeal lacked in ... many things.
Is there anything you could blow the whistle on right now? If yes, and you are not blowing the whistle, then then answer is no you could not do the right thing. It also means you did not come forward to do the right thing then either.
If you can’t think of anything that you could blow the whistle on, then chances are you were the one who did wrong and were found out about it.
If neither is the case, then you are either oblivious or you are a snitch who didn’t let anything slide.
Come up with a list of reasons why you did not come forward. Don’t belittle your crimes either.
To add to the list, this article [1] alleges that a number of Afghan special forces were refused a UK visa upon withdrawal, so they couldn't testify in the UK against the UK special forces. Then when the Taliban took over, the predictable happened. Pretty shocking.
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?
War crimes have always happened. What matters is whether they are celebrated, ignored, or properly investigated and punished.
Wars are horrible enough as-is; we have laws of armed conflict to try the best we can to keep a lid on the utter barbarity of it all, and to help our warfighters be able to live with themselves after.
This is not a new concept; one of the first people to expound on the proper laws of war in the West was Saint Augustine, and his work is still the philosophical foundation of the subject.
That's too easy. The US, British and Israelis routinely whitewash their war crimes. The Russians don't even pretend to follow the rules of war.
In comparison, the French put a general in the dock when his soldiers in the Ivory Coast, at his implicit orders, extrajudicially killed Firmin Mahé, a bandit himself responsible for many murders, and I believe other European countries have done similar prosecutions of senior officers.
My Lai? Prosecuted. Abu Ghraib? Prosecuted and a one-star relieved. Eddie Gallagher? Prosecuted, at least until Trump got in the way.
I'll buy that all of the above were disgraces to the US, and I'll buy that the IDF is a little too cavalier with the rules of engagement. But come on. It's easy to pontificate from an armchair about who's "whitewashing" things when it isn't your friends getting shot. In wars, these things will happen and the best a government can do is put measures in place to stop it and then punish it severely when it occurs.
My Lai was only addressed after dogged investigators like Sy Hersh made it impossible to keep covering up.
Compare this with the US during the Philippines War in the 19th century, an exceedingly dirty colonial conflict with no meaningful press involvement to blow the whistle, yet a major was court-martialled for waterboarding a prisoner:
Ultimately these practices are either a sign of rotten leadership, or poor discipline. Once you let the rot fester, it's only a matter of time before the entire army is gangrened.
Yes, and the main issue is that the men in the army who could have been properly taught how to handle violence are not, and when they're back the violence will infuse in the broader society.
Apparently you missed the part in the article where SAS troopers testified against the accused.
So let's take that bigoted "veterans are broken people" narrative and stuff it where the sun don't shine alongside "women are hysterical" and so forth.
Wow, wow, i wasn't clear, i'm not accusing any western army of doing that (israel, US might be close however), i was responding to a specific comment about rotten leadership and lack of discipline. A well disciplined army do not bring the violence back, because they're taught how to handle the violence, and often are debriefed after each mission, then after each deployment. The issue is when demilitarization never happen, or when it start to treat enemies as non-humans.
I know far to much army men (mostly airforce, some Marsouins) to say "veterans are broken people", i know it isn't the case.
I think it's deeper than that. There's an incentive on not going against your own military because doing so would attract the wrong kind of mentality and makes things worse when you need them. So unless there are real consequences against brushing it off (like burning down public buildings) that's usually what happens. But publicly people cannot be too explicit saying it because it plays on the image of the pristine rule of law that our politicians like so much to use on speeches to make sure we're above China and other developing countries on the moral grounds.
When we say that extremists hate our freedom, bear in mind this is the one of the kinds of freedom they hate. To win against these people, we have to be better than them and stop providing them with recruitment material for the next generation.
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?
I don't know about the movie, but in his own book it's quite clear he's a moron that sees anyone in the enemy lines as less than human and feels nothing after killing.
And, in many instances back home, he also see many fellow americans as worthless.
Allegations from the Vietnam war affected Bob Kerrey's political ambitions many years later, as I recall. The US does bring people to trial, now and then, but may come away with misdemeanor convictions.
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.
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.
> 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."
It depends on the question you are asking, and what you want to learn. If you want to know if you should lock up an individual child cannibal, it doesn't.
If you want to know if the government is doing a good job at catching and preventing child cannibalism, then the trends and comparators matter.
Are there more child cannibals than 10 years ago? Are there more or less than in other countries like France?
> "They handcuffed a young boy and shot him," recalled one veteran who served with the SAS in Afghanistan. "He was clearly a child, not even close to fighting age."
No Western government (or whatever you meant by government system) treats anyone like that, and such behaviour should absolutely surprise everyone.
> "No Western government (or whatever you meant by government system) treats anyone like that, and such behaviour should absolutely surprise everyone."
Also, such behavior recruits the whole extended clan into a insurgency to avenge the dishonor of getting murdered. 10 psychopaths "working" can prolong a war in a clan-structured society indefinitely.
GP's claim is that rule-breaking is done by state institutions routinely and is part of the organisational culture. And that we turn a blind eye to it until there are deaths.
The SAS is being sloppy with the rules because the entire candidate pool for that organization exists in a reality where it's considered tacitly ok to be sloppy with the rules when it's the "bad guys" and that's just how every big organization, every government entity acts. And so they're tasked with running an organization and they unsurprisingly wind up with the same problem.
This is a cultural problem with British culture. Just nobody notices until it's the SAS doing it and the bodies stack up
I think I can draw a pretty straight line between a prevailing culture that's unable to root out bad behavior by its individual cogs in mundane issues, and one that's similarly unable in serious issues. The SAS with it's inability to reign in its own cogs suffers from all the same problems as any other organization.
Where am I making excuses?
The point is you can't criticize others when you do the same exact thing you are criticizing. Beyond that it's also legitimate to doubt the info one gets from people who are obviously hypocritical. That's all.
Drawing a legitimate parallel and questioning the legitimacy of what we know and what we are being told is hardly 'whataboutism'. Especially when it might be geo-strategic.
I find your accusation severe.
The news colported these past few years should already have opened some eyes normally. Alas...
Said otherwise, if you're a thief accusing someone else of stealing, I can legitimately wonder if you're making accusations in good faith... That simple.
Isn't there a saying for this even? The pot that calls the kettle black?
The journalists covering these stories are not members of the armed forces responsible for the actions you're talking about; they're not even government employees. It would be one thing if the SBS members accused of crimes were the ones criticizing Wagner, but that's not what's going on here.
I have not seen any British Army officers criticizing Wagner's war crimes while protecting the SBS from similar accusations, though I'd agree that would be hypocritical. That being said, the OP is not about those people, it's about a whistle-blower, and completely unrelated to Wagner.
The evidence presented by the BBC in 2020: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-53597137
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
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. :(
They did not stay silent . They bragged about warcrimes openly on a podcast.
Persecute the murderous fuckers hard and fast, but not publicly. This affair cooking up smells to much like another russian anti colonial sentiment cooking op.
Can you share a link about the podcast? I’d be interested to learn more.
From the Wikipedia page, it does indeed appear that the “whistleblower“ is no hero. He was whistleblowing over-scrutiny-of-military-personnel. He wasn’t whistleblowing the _murders_, but almost the opposite! Horrible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_McBride_(whistleblower)
russian？
Australia. The land down under mate. Nice beaches. Vegemite. The good guys.
> This included a practice of "blooding" where junior soldiers were told to get their first kill by shooting a prisoner.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_war_crimes
Thats how they recruit- stir up anti-western sentiments by getting western self flaggelation conversations going . You allow the resulting volunteers/ dhijhadis / freedom fighters in as part of some chechyan warlords entourage and throw them into a colonial war in ukraine, where the Afghanistan war is just another tuesday in the Russian army .
Same playbook since forever. Those anti-gaza protest are going to give birth to radicalized cells too. Its free fighters, the wests open discussions just another self radicalisation recruitment platform.
Beats paying gig workers: https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/russias-new-weapon-child-s...
Im all for dragging the whole shebang through all the mud. The politicians who parked the war aimlessly , against a non existing country. The officers and media who went along, the soldiers that filtered through and the psychopaths that situation called for. But im against providing the anti western coalition (quatar/teheran/moscow/bejing) ressources.
In a nod to an actual reality that's stranger than you imagine ...
> the person that felt bad enough to reveal the crime
is considerably arse backwards.
To scratch the surface of that:
ie. The "whistleblower" disclosed examples of behaviour of the SASR and other(?) special force groups not with the motivation of disclosing "war crimes" but to provide examples of "stuff the lads do to get the job done", behaviours that were being threatened by kid glove thinking and internal policing that might have a bias, etc. ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_McBride_(whistleblower)However his story changed and wandered over the course of time his initial motivation on record wasn't at all that he felt bad about the rules of engagement being disregarded, he felt that such things were being chased down too hard.
Wow that is insane, thanks for linking the Wikipedia page. To summarize, the thing he was whistleblowing was over-scrutiny of military personnel actions! He wasn’t whistleblowing the murders! That’s crazy and horrible.
Devils advocate and not necessarily McBride's argument but... does the "blooding" happen if "throwdowns" weren't already commonplace due to the over-oversight? Normalization of deviance creating a path for worse things? Once you are over there and everyone knows they have to do some amount of illegal shit its kind of difficult because the line is already crossed, where is the new line? Noone knows. I've seen this on much less high stakes scales and its a potent source of crazy-making.
Speaking of normalisation it's worth raising that as a former British Army major of a certain age McBride very much more than likely grew up with lashings of the Lance Corporal Jones approach to dealing with others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhWlAKdlQp4
>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.
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.
> 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".
> 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?
>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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I don't buy that, nobody with a shred of humanity shoots handcuffed kids in the back of their heads. Something is wrong with these people as well as with the ones who are protecting them.
People used to murder their own children undesired a children as a form of population control.
It was normal and expected.
Murdering defeated enemies, and their children was equally normal and expected.
We live in such a wonderful age that we can easily forget many “unthinkable” things are the default of humanity.
That doesn't excuse current behavior. We want to live in a world where that does not happen. Do you not?
Also in this case it wasn't expected of these special forces to behave this way, they take the liberty to commit atrocities out of pure pleasure.
Human beings have unfathomed depths. You don't know how you'd react under the same pressures. Like, unless you've been there, you simply don't know. Our behavior under extreme stress is unpredictable, even to ourselves. That's the hard part about prison or homelessness or war: it shows you parts of yourself that you wish didn't exist. You're writing this guy off as un-human. I think that's a mistake. If we accept the full complexity of normal human potential, including our own destructive capacity, then we can put systems in place to guard against it. That's why the original commenter said it's the command's fault. They should have constructed a system where something like this is impossible. Military systems must be built to absorb the reality that soldiers will act in contradiction to both their training and their self-concept. Only by accepting moral volatility as an expected input can a military system anticipate the full range of its own possible breakdowns.
UK military has way more training on de-escalation than US police…
> They're not trained for that.
Not even special forces?
Are you asking specifically about the US Army Special Forces, or special operations in general? In either case they typically don't have much training in law enforcement. Special Forces do have extensive training on building relationships with locals, which can be helpful with investigations and intelligence gathering.
There are also Military Police trained in law enforcement. They tend to deal more with force protection and internal investigations. Some US MPs were responsible for the notorious Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal but there have been some reforms since then.
I think I meant UK special forces. I would expect them to have better trigger discipline and discipline in general. And it would be somewhat surprising if they didn't practice "search and not destroy" quite alot for WoT.
Then again the whole ordeal lacked in ... many things.
This has to be one of the worst mental gymnastics i have seen in a long time
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.
the easiest way of doing the right thing is not enlisting in evil organizations.
> 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.
Is there anything you could blow the whistle on right now? If yes, and you are not blowing the whistle, then then answer is no you could not do the right thing. It also means you did not come forward to do the right thing then either.
If you can’t think of anything that you could blow the whistle on, then chances are you were the one who did wrong and were found out about it.
If neither is the case, then you are either oblivious or you are a snitch who didn’t let anything slide.
Come up with a list of reasons why you did not come forward. Don’t belittle your crimes either.
To add to the list, this article [1] alleges that a number of Afghan special forces were refused a UK visa upon withdrawal, so they couldn't testify in the UK against the UK special forces. Then when the Taliban took over, the predictable happened. Pretty shocking.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3q5xl9wqwo
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?
War crimes have always happened. What matters is whether they are celebrated, ignored, or properly investigated and punished.
Wars are horrible enough as-is; we have laws of armed conflict to try the best we can to keep a lid on the utter barbarity of it all, and to help our warfighters be able to live with themselves after.
This is not a new concept; one of the first people to expound on the proper laws of war in the West was Saint Augustine, and his work is still the philosophical foundation of the subject.
That's too easy. The US, British and Israelis routinely whitewash their war crimes. The Russians don't even pretend to follow the rules of war.
In comparison, the French put a general in the dock when his soldiers in the Ivory Coast, at his implicit orders, extrajudicially killed Firmin Mahé, a bandit himself responsible for many murders, and I believe other European countries have done similar prosecutions of senior officers.
Impunity is a choice.
How is your statement a contradiction? They said what matters is how governments respond to war crimes and you concluded much the same.
My Lai? Prosecuted. Abu Ghraib? Prosecuted and a one-star relieved. Eddie Gallagher? Prosecuted, at least until Trump got in the way.
I'll buy that all of the above were disgraces to the US, and I'll buy that the IDF is a little too cavalier with the rules of engagement. But come on. It's easy to pontificate from an armchair about who's "whitewashing" things when it isn't your friends getting shot. In wars, these things will happen and the best a government can do is put measures in place to stop it and then punish it severely when it occurs.
My Lai was only addressed after dogged investigators like Sy Hersh made it impossible to keep covering up.
Compare this with the US during the Philippines War in the 19th century, an exceedingly dirty colonial conflict with no meaningful press involvement to blow the whistle, yet a major was court-martialled for waterboarding a prisoner:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding#During_the_Phili...
Ultimately these practices are either a sign of rotten leadership, or poor discipline. Once you let the rot fester, it's only a matter of time before the entire army is gangrened.
Yes, and the main issue is that the men in the army who could have been properly taught how to handle violence are not, and when they're back the violence will infuse in the broader society.
Apparently you missed the part in the article where SAS troopers testified against the accused.
So let's take that bigoted "veterans are broken people" narrative and stuff it where the sun don't shine alongside "women are hysterical" and so forth.
Wow, wow, i wasn't clear, i'm not accusing any western army of doing that (israel, US might be close however), i was responding to a specific comment about rotten leadership and lack of discipline. A well disciplined army do not bring the violence back, because they're taught how to handle the violence, and often are debriefed after each mission, then after each deployment. The issue is when demilitarization never happen, or when it start to treat enemies as non-humans.
I know far to much army men (mostly airforce, some Marsouins) to say "veterans are broken people", i know it isn't the case.
I think it's deeper than that. There's an incentive on not going against your own military because doing so would attract the wrong kind of mentality and makes things worse when you need them. So unless there are real consequences against brushing it off (like burning down public buildings) that's usually what happens. But publicly people cannot be too explicit saying it because it plays on the image of the pristine rule of law that our politicians like so much to use on speeches to make sure we're above China and other developing countries on the moral grounds.
There's a fantastic documentary on Apple TV called The Line about war crimes and the fog of war: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/the-line/umc.cmc.4u53f7zokr7g40...
When we say that extremists hate our freedom, bear in mind this is the one of the kinds of freedom they hate. To win against these people, we have to be better than them and stop providing them with recruitment material for the next generation.
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?
So Australian and now UK special forces have been implicated in similar war crimes.
How is it that US special forces haven’t been implicated in similar war crimes?
Does the US have a genuinely better culture, or are they just less accountable?
People like Chris Kyle are treated as heroes, but it seems unlikely that he got so many kills by following the rules of engagement properly.
> How is it that US special forces haven’t been implicated in similar war crimes?
They absolutely have been.
https://theintercept.com/2017/01/10/the-crimes-of-seal-team-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Gallagher_(Navy_SEAL)
I don't know about the movie, but in his own book it's quite clear he's a moron that sees anyone in the enemy lines as less than human and feels nothing after killing.
And, in many instances back home, he also see many fellow americans as worthless.
Haven't they?
Allegations from the Vietnam war affected Bob Kerrey's political ambitions many years later, as I recall. The US does bring people to trial, now and then, but may come away with misdemeanor convictions.
I guess I'm thinking more about GWOT special forces specifically.
Decades of war crimes and they still lost, that's gotta bite. Master race hard at work?
Cobra effect.
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.
Seems like Kurt Tucholsky was right
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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.
> 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."
>What does this mean, and why is it relevant?
It depends on the question you are asking, and what you want to learn. If you want to know if you should lock up an individual child cannibal, it doesn't.
If you want to know if the government is doing a good job at catching and preventing child cannibalism, then the trends and comparators matter.
Are there more child cannibals than 10 years ago? Are there more or less than in other countries like France?
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.
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I don't think you read the article.
> "They handcuffed a young boy and shot him," recalled one veteran who served with the SAS in Afghanistan. "He was clearly a child, not even close to fighting age."
No Western government (or whatever you meant by government system) treats anyone like that, and such behaviour should absolutely surprise everyone.
> "No Western government (or whatever you meant by government system) treats anyone like that, and such behaviour should absolutely surprise everyone."
Clearly not
You're right. I commented too hastily.
Also, such behavior recruits the whole extended clan into a insurgency to avenge the dishonor of getting murdered. 10 psychopaths "working" can prolong a war in a clan-structured society indefinitely.
I'm confused. This is a story about war crimes, not local councils? Are you saying your binman or librarian will shoot you?
GP's claim is that rule-breaking is done by state institutions routinely and is part of the organisational culture. And that we turn a blind eye to it until there are deaths.
The SAS is being sloppy with the rules because the entire candidate pool for that organization exists in a reality where it's considered tacitly ok to be sloppy with the rules when it's the "bad guys" and that's just how every big organization, every government entity acts. And so they're tasked with running an organization and they unsurprisingly wind up with the same problem.
This is a cultural problem with British culture. Just nobody notices until it's the SAS doing it and the bodies stack up
I don’t think you can draw a straight line between your local councillor’s bad attitude and the special forces executing foreigners without warrant.
They’re just not comparable in any way, literal or metaphorical.
I think I can draw a pretty straight line between a prevailing culture that's unable to root out bad behavior by its individual cogs in mundane issues, and one that's similarly unable in serious issues. The SAS with it's inability to reign in its own cogs suffers from all the same problems as any other organization.
then yhey criticize the wagner militia but they are not any better apparently. Maybe it's even hearsay.
making excuses for the Wagner Militia really is not the takeaway you want from this one
Where am I making excuses? The point is you can't criticize others when you do the same exact thing you are criticizing. Beyond that it's also legitimate to doubt the info one gets from people who are obviously hypocritical. That's all.
You’re engaging in ‘whataboutism’; if you’d like to discuss the Wagner Group, you should post something about them instead.
Drawing a legitimate parallel and questioning the legitimacy of what we know and what we are being told is hardly 'whataboutism'. Especially when it might be geo-strategic. I find your accusation severe.
The news colported these past few years should already have opened some eyes normally. Alas...
Said otherwise, if you're a thief accusing someone else of stealing, I can legitimately wonder if you're making accusations in good faith... That simple.
Isn't there a saying for this even? The pot that calls the kettle black?
The journalists covering these stories are not members of the armed forces responsible for the actions you're talking about; they're not even government employees. It would be one thing if the SBS members accused of crimes were the ones criticizing Wagner, but that's not what's going on here.
There must have been a misunderstanding. I wasn't speaking about the journalists. They are doing their reporting as they should.
Then (specifically) who do you think is being hypocritical?
Some army officers and potentially those who rely on the information they provide.
I have not seen any British Army officers criticizing Wagner's war crimes while protecting the SBS from similar accusations, though I'd agree that would be hypocritical. That being said, the OP is not about those people, it's about a whistle-blower, and completely unrelated to Wagner.
I wasn't targeting the SAS specifically. This seems to be pervasive across armies. Just read the Human Rights Watch reports.