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Ex-UK Special Forces break silence on 'war crimes' by colleagues

140 points by tartoran 1y ago

potato3732842 1y ago
[flagged]
- ta1243 1y ago
  I'm confused. This is a story about war crimes, not local councils? Are you saying your binman or librarian will shoot you?
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    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
    - OtherShrezzing 1y ago
      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.
      - potato3732842 1y ago
        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.
  - joshuaissac 1y ago
    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.
- dmos62 1y ago
  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.
  - PicassoCTs 1y ago
    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.
  - oaththrowaway 1y ago
    > "No Western government (or whatever you meant by government system) treats anyone like that, and such behaviour should absolutely surprise everyone." Clearly not
    - dmos62 1y ago
      You're right. I commented too hastily.
sys32768 1y ago
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.4u53f7zokr7g40tjj4gs61xbu https://tv.apple.com/us/show/the-line/umc.cmc.4u53f7zokr7g40...
axus 1y ago
The evidence presented by the BBC in 2020: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-53597137 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 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brereton_Report
- pinkmuffinere 1y ago
  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. :(
  - defrost 1y ago
    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." ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_McBride_(whistleblower) 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.
PicassoCTs 1y 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.
harddrivereque 1y 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?
- mtrovo 1y 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.
- psunavy03 1y 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 1y 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.
aatd86 1y ago
then yhey criticize the wagner militia but they are not any better apparently. Maybe it's even hearsay.
- nemo 1y ago
  making excuses for the Wagner Militia really is not the takeaway you want from this one
  - aatd86 1y ago
    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.
    - nickff 1y ago
      You’re engaging in ‘whataboutism’; if you’d like to discuss the Wagner Group, you should post something about them instead.
      - aatd86 1y ago
        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?
        nickff 1y ago
        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.
croes 1y ago
Seems like Kurt Tucholsky was right
- stefantalpalaru 1y ago
  [dead]
tiahura 1y 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 1y 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."
  - s1artibartfast 1y ago
    >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?
huhkerrf 1y 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.
- exe34 1y 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.
- beloch 1y 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.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
psunavy03 1y ago
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 1y 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.
throwaway48476 1y ago
Cobra effect.
WatchDog 1y ago
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.
- cafard 1y ago
  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.
  - WatchDog 1y ago
    I guess I'm thinking more about GWOT special forces specifically.
- avidiax 1y ago
  > 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-6/ https://theintercept.com/2017/01/10/the-crimes-of-seal-team-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Gallagher_(Navy_SEAL) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Gallagher_(Navy_SEAL)
- _zamorano_ 1y ago
  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.
mschoch 1y ago
[dead]
rich_sasha 1y ago
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 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3q5xl9wqwo
blotfaba 1y ago
Decades of war crimes and they still lost, that's gotta bite. Master race hard at work?
moomin 1y ago
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.

140 points by tartoran 1y ago

potato3732842 1y ago

[flagged]

ta1243 1y ago
I'm confused. This is a story about war crimes, not local councils? Are you saying your binman or librarian will shoot you?
- potato3732842 1y ago
  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
  - OtherShrezzing 1y ago
    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.
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      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.
- joshuaissac 1y ago
  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.
dmos62 1y ago
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.
- PicassoCTs 1y ago
  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.
- oaththrowaway 1y ago
  > "No Western government (or whatever you meant by government system) treats anyone like that, and such behaviour should absolutely surprise everyone." Clearly not
  - dmos62 1y ago
    You're right. I commented too hastily.

sys32768 1y ago

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.4u53f7zokr7g40tjj4gs61xbu https://tv.apple.com/us/show/the-line/umc.cmc.4u53f7zokr7g40...

axus 1y ago

The evidence presented by the BBC in 2020: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-53597137 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 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brereton_Report

pinkmuffinere 1y ago
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. :(
- defrost 1y ago
  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." ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_McBride_(whistleblower) 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.

PicassoCTs 1y 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.

harddrivereque 1y 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?

mtrovo 1y 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.
psunavy03 1y 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 1y 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.

aatd86 1y ago

then yhey criticize the wagner militia but they are not any better apparently. Maybe it's even hearsay.

nemo 1y ago
making excuses for the Wagner Militia really is not the takeaway you want from this one
- aatd86 1y ago
  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.
  - nickff 1y ago
    You’re engaging in ‘whataboutism’; if you’d like to discuss the Wagner Group, you should post something about them instead.
    - aatd86 1y ago
      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?
      - nickff 1y ago
        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.

croes 1y ago

Seems like Kurt Tucholsky was right

stefantalpalaru 1y ago
[dead]

tiahura 1y 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 1y 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."
- s1artibartfast 1y ago
  >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?

huhkerrf 1y 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.

exe34 1y 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.
beloch 1y 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.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

psunavy03 1y ago

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 1y 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.

throwaway48476 1y ago

Cobra effect.

WatchDog 1y ago

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.

cafard 1y ago
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.
- WatchDog 1y ago
  I guess I'm thinking more about GWOT special forces specifically.
avidiax 1y ago
> 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-6/ https://theintercept.com/2017/01/10/the-crimes-of-seal-team-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Gallagher_(Navy_SEAL) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Gallagher_(Navy_SEAL)
_zamorano_ 1y ago
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.

mschoch 1y ago

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rich_sasha 1y ago

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 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3q5xl9wqwo

blotfaba 1y ago

Decades of war crimes and they still lost, that's gotta bite. Master race hard at work?

moomin 1y ago

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.