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Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
- clueless 1y ago>They found no guns or uniforms. Evidence suggested that the crew, which people briefed on the mission said numbered two or three people, had been civilians diving for shellfish. All were dead, including the man in the water. Officials familiar with the mission said the SEALs pulled the bodies into the water to hide them from the North Korean authorities. One added that the SEALs punctured the boat crew’s lungs with knives to make sure their bodies would sink. Nothing to see here but a bunch of psychopaths killing innocent people as they screw up their own mission
- mac-attack 1y agoThe lung puncturing was especially brutal. Literal hitmen actions
- clueless 1y agoand then... "Many of the people involved in the mission were later promoted."
- aaomidi 1y agoThat has basically been the entire point of the US military since the end of the Cold War (and before that too, but you could argue there was a better reason back then)
- iamdelirium 1y agoSounds like SEALs all right.
- rasz 1y agoReminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_abductions_of_Japanese_citizens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_abductions_of_Jap... where NK would send raiding parties to Japan, supposedly finally ended in the eighties.
- qaz_plm 1y agohttps://archive.ph/70z3s https://archive.ph/70z3s
- matrix12 1y agoLink does not work, just "Server error"
- saltcured 1y agoIf you can stomach the bravado and unclear factual accuracy, the 2007 book Lone Survivor gives an account of a similar failure, in Afghanistan, where a SEAL team was discovered early in their mission. But, it devolved into a running battle and a disaster for the US special forces where most of the team and many rescuers also died. As a result of those prior events, I can imagine they have different rules of engagement in the event of being detected. But, what's most crazy to me is that these details are being published in such a short time. My impression is that these clandestine forces used to have much more strict control, and details would not emerge for many decades or even during the lives of the participants?
- ruthie_cohen 1y agoThe public should be hearing about these failures when they involve an almost entirely opaque nuclear-armed state having their sovereignty violated. It appears that people involved in the operation feel the same. The stakes in a failure like this are far higher than most SOC missions.
- crikeykangaroo 1y agoThe Lone Survivor story is pure propaganda and mostly inaccurate. You can easily look this up. That entire operation was a F up from the beginning, and had nothing to do with being discovered early. It created proper propaganda fuel though, so mission partially accomplished I suppose.
- jack_newmann 1y ago> The plan called for the Navy to sneak a nuclear-powered submarine, nearly two football fields long, into the waters... then deploy a small team of SEALs in two mini-subs, each about the size of a killer whales.. What? What is with these measurements?
- southernplaces7 1y ago[flagged]
- dang 1y agoPlease don't post nationalistic flamebait to HN.
- jki275 1y agoAs an American, he's exactly right and it's not flamebait at all. Hell he's probably American too.
- dang 1y agoWhat country the commenter belongs to isn't relevant because the issue is how readers will react. Most won't react, but somewhere down the long tail there's a segment of readers who will become provoked and rush to the comments to attack back. Then we end up in flamewar hell. The only solution is not to go down that spiral in the first place, much as the only way to avoid a black hole is to steer clear of it. Being right isn't relevant either, for two reasons: first, it's a category error to call pejorative language (e.g. "insane $country obsession", "bizarre and absurd") right or wrong, because it's emotional language, not propositional language. Second, again, the issue is the effect on the threads. Even if a pejorative provocation is 100% right in propositional content, not everyone will agree with it—indeed everyone feels it is they who are right—so rightness doesn't change the flamewar dynamic I described in the first paragraph. If anything, it makes it worse. For avoiding flamewars, the issue isn't whether you're right or not, it's how you express your rightness and whether it's a good moment to make that point. If you're introducing or fueling a classic flamewar topic that's tangential to the topic at hand, it's probably best just not to, no matter how right you are or feel you are. All of that is what's behind this site guideline: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- southernplaces7 1y ago"A North Korean boat appeared out of the dark. Flashlights from the bow swept over the water. Fearing that they had been spotted, the SEALs opened fire. Within seconds, everyone on the North Korean boat was dead." Seeing as how this was right where this entire mission turned into a lethal clusterfuck, you'd think rigorously trained, carefully coordinated and disciplined SEALs would just try the incredibly sophisticated tactic of.... just, you know, holding their fire a few minutes to first see if the boat knew about them or had anything to do with their mission. They must have known that random people can appear for reasons of their own, without necessarily being a sign of discovery, and then just wait and see if they can resume ops soon after the intruder leaves. Even your average career burglar knows better than to panic at the first sight of an unforeseen individual arriving at some scene they're working for a theft.
- Esophagus4 1y ago(Assuming you also weren’t in the armed forces, so correct me if I’m wrong.) I don’t think it’s worthwhile for laypeople to armchair quarterback the decisions of possibly the most elite soldiers in the US armed forces. By the time the mission was given to them, the collateral risk had already been accepted by JSOC, national security advisors, and likely Trump. I could feel more comfortable questioning their judgment, I think, but I would need some more context still.
- kelnos 1y agoI think this is really a hard thing. I've also never been in the armed forces, let alone a special forces type branch, so I don't know what it's like. But who is going to question these decisions, then? Can we trust the elected leaders to do so? I don't think so (not being partisan here, this goes for Trump, Biden, Obama, Bush, whomever); they don't want to look bad in the eyes of voters, so they're going to keep these sorts of outcomes classified if they can. Can we trust non-political military leadership? To some extent, I think so, but they (especially those involved in planning and approval for these missions) will still have incentives to downplay any failures. This is a classic problem, of course: you can never fully trust the people involved to police themselves. But I also agree that most civilians won't have the experience, context, and training to evaluate what happened and come to a reasonable and fair conclusion. So... I'm not sure what the solution is. The bottom line is that collateral civilian deaths are a tragedy. The fact that it happened is awful, and that operation should be gone over with a fine-toothed comb to determine if the soldiers involved could and should have done something differently in order to avoid those deaths. Whether or not that will happen, in an objective, unbiased manner, by people who are qualified to do so, is unknown. I'd like to think there were better options here, and that those people didn't need to die, but I really have no idea.
- wrp 1y agoFor anyone with direct knowledge, what's up with current military culture regarding secrecy? I knew SF guys from the Vietnam era and they didn't talk with outsiders. In fact, I can't think of any prominent "tell all" books from SOF operators from before the 21st century. Now we have ex-SEALs doing book deals.
- dilyevsky 1y agoA lot of these SEAL podcasters exist with explicit blessing from DoD pr department in an effort to improve recruitment
- varjag 1y agoMany of these stories are likely massively exaggerated or are plainly made up/lore. Which is especially easy if you can convince yourself that by bullshitting you help maintain secrecy.
- afroboy 1y agoThere is no proof of these stories. They exist only to glorify the US army, this is why they allow them to spread these imaginary heroic stories.
- s5300 1y ago[dead]
- some_guy_nobel 1y agoNot as bad as Bay of Pigs, but despicable nonetheless. Kudos to the journalists who surfaced this.
- vkou 1y agoThe Bay of Pigs was arguably an act of war, this was a war crime.
- some_guy_nobel 1y agoI think you can credibly make either claim for both.
- vkou 1y agoAn act of war follows the rules of war. You are allowed to shoot in an area where civilians are, if you are aiming for a military asset. You can't just massacre a village because some villagers saw you. The animals who did this were not following the rules of war. The animals who covered it up, and did not prosecute them deserve to hang with them, too.
- 3np 1y agoUpstream reporting: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/navy-seal-north-korea-trump-2019.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/navy-seal-north-korea-...
- Seattle3503 1y agoThis is much better. Some of the other sources made it seem like the seals were killing witnesses, rather than confusing civilians for patrols and panicking.
- dang 1y agoThanks, we've changed the URL to that from https://reason.com/2025/09/05/navy-seals-reportedly-killed-north-korean-fishermen-and-mutilated-their-bodies-to-hide-a-failed-mission/ https://reason.com/2025/09/05/navy-seals-reportedly-killed-n... now.
- xeonmc 1y agohttps://archive.is/bcv64 https://archive.is/bcv64
- arduanika 1y ago[deleting this -- now that the source for the article has been changed, my comment is not as relevant]
- malnourish 1y ago[flagged]
- dang 1y agoPlease don't attack another user like this, no matter how wrong they are or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- malnourish 1y agoThank you for the correction, you're right and I apologize.
- nomilk 1y agoNot sure why the source for the article was changed (never seen - or at least never noticed - that on HN before). For anyone interested, the original source was: https://reason.com/2025/09/05/navy-seals-reportedly-killed-north-korean-fishermen-and-mutilated-their-bodies-to-hide-a-failed-mission/ https://reason.com/2025/09/05/navy-seals-reportedly-killed-n...
- hetspookjee 1y agoIt happens sometimes on HN. Times I’ve seen it happen is when another article covers the events better, or are just the original article instead.
- dang 1y agoOh, it happens all the time. Usually we post a comment saying so (here are 2,000 of those: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20url%20from%20change&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), but sometimes we don't have time or are on mobile, etc. I've added such a comment to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45155452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45155452 now, which is where it would usually go.
- sigwinch 1y agoIt’s possible that Bolton was national security advisor at the time. The timing of this coverage might be to implicate him now.
- mikeyouse 1y agoThe article says it was in 'Early 2019' and he was NSA until September, so he was surely at the helm. But it also says Trump greenlit the mission, so I'm not sure how an advisor would be implicated in anything - unless your point is that the current admin thinks he might be the source for this story?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jjtheblunt 1y agoHow are you relating NSA with the Navy?
- jandrese 1y agoThe Navy isn't in the wiretap business.
- jjtheblunt 1y agoi see what you mean
- snypher 1y agoI don't know, sometimes we sail the submarine around for a while and then they have us stop in some random place, not sure what's up with that.
- OWaz 1y ago“The rumors are that the Navy's newest nuclear sub, the USS Jimmy Carter, has been designed for spywork, with a "special capability... to tap undersea cables and eavesdrop on the communications passing through them," according to the AP.” https://web.archive.org/web/20070203165457/http://www.defensetech.org/archives/001397.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070203165457/http://www.defens...
- neilv 1y agoYesterday's HN post on the story, with some discussion, but was flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45143759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45143759 [flagged] US special forces killed North Korean civilians in botched 2019 mission (reuters.com) 68 points by hnlurker22 1 day ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 28 comments
- Mistletoe 1y agoWhy was this flagged? Absolute worst feature of HN, I don’t know why it continues.
- Seattle3503 1y agoI don't mind it. Looking at the comments, it seems like a number of people got facts wrong (based on the articles that have been written) and emotions were high. It's just hard to have these conversations and HN isn't necessarily the place to have them.
- nomilk 1y agoPoint taken, but sometimes 'heated' conversations happen on topics of great importance, and are sometimes the conversations from which we learn the most. (certainly not always, but sometimes). A non-HN example: often when two people I have huge respect for as intellectuals go at it in debate over something, I can often infer that the topic is of some importance (I might not have ever heard of the topic before), and when smart people differ greatly in their views, at the very least, it's an 'interesting' topic, perhaps warranting further inquisition.
- neilv 1y agoSomething can be flagged (or downvoted) because people think the topic or discussion is off-charter or incorrect, or to suppress information/discussion for ulterior reasons. In some forums, tactics like flaming, disinformation, off-topic noise like jokes, upvoting diversions, etc. can also suppress information/discussion.
- deleted 1y ago
- xmonkee 1y ago>you woke up before dawn with your companions to go diving in the freezing cold ocean, in hopes of putting some mussels on your family's table. But suddenly, you die. A man you have never met and whose presence you did not know about has shot you with his rifle. His companions stab your lungs so that your body will sink to the bottom of the sea. Your family will likely never know what happened to you. Man, fuck these people. Meanwhile hollywood will churn out another hundred films about how Captain America would never let something like this happen because murdering innocents is not a line America would ever cross.
- saurik 1y ago> Meanwhile hollywood will churn out another hundred films about how Captain America would never let something like this happen because murdering innocents is not a line America would ever cross. FWIW, Captain America's character arc throughout the MCU, at least (which is what I'd assume we mean by "Hollywood"), has largely been to realize that he can't actually trust the government and that not only is the government now corrupt (becoming so during his time skip), but it has always been just as bad: the "good government" he believed in from WWII was propaganda, it turned out SHIELD was a so deeply infiltrated with enemy spies that it was effectively an arm of HYDRA... even the UN's attempts at diplomacy inherently result in moral compromises that he refuses to accept, and, by the end, he ended up as a fugitive. I think you'd be hard pressed to watch these movies and think that Captain America's existence demonstrates that America would never cross such lines.
- pmarreck 1y agoA lot of people bash the Marvel content for essentially having the depth of an arcade beat-em-up, but the character arcs of Cap and Iron Man alone through the movies is something to behold IMHO
- serf 1y agoyeah, it's great writing -- it's a total coincidence that the Iron Man origin was conveniently re-written to implicate the middle east with arms trade, energy smuggling, and human trafficking for the movie. It's also great writing that it gets to show off the F-35 , a project that was hugely failed at the time economically, to the public as something with on-par agility to a super hero. it's also a total coincidence that the original origin had Stark demonstrating his weapons in Vietnam, and being captured by communist war-lord Wong Chu. It's so strange that all this great writing seems somehow connected to the current affairs of the United States at the time. The fakey Lockheed Martin logo and typescript for Stark Industries is also a nice fuck-you, but the fans think it's endearing. Any kind of semblance of "Oh the superhero now mistrusts authority" is there simply to make the actual propgadandized bullshit more palatable and believable, and you'll be damn sure that after the traitors are ousted in the movie it'll be good old Uncle Sam and the US whatever-corp waiting for the real super heroes when it's all through. The DoD sure puts out some great fiction writing.
- ChrisArchitect 1y ago[dupe] Earlier, source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45137040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45137040
- jjtheblunt 1y agoThis post has a title that differs from the article it cites?
- _2d30 1y agoNot only that but it’s highly editorialized in a way that makes it effectively misinformation. The killing of the fishermen (which appeared to be potentially NK soldiers) was the cause of the failure and not the covering up of a failure.
- lifeformed 1y agoIt's the same thing. They failed by getting discovered and killed civilians to prevent them from reporting them.
- nomilk 1y agoLooks like the title was reverted around the time of your comment. To alleviate doubt, I originally submitted with modified title to include the word 'wiretap' (the aspect I found interesting, figured would be be similar for HN audience). But the topic is clearly interesting for other reasons too.
- nython 1y ago> The plan called for the Navy to sneak a nuclear-powered submarine, nearly two football fields long, into the waters off North Korea and then deploy a small team of SEALs in two mini-subs, each about the size of a killer whale The lengths some people willing to go just not to use the metric system
- marcosdumay 1y agoA football field is close to 100m, independently of whether people manage the balls with their feet or with their hands.
- ProAm 1y ago100 yds :)
- marcosdumay 1y ago1 yard is ~0.9 m
- ProAm 1y ago1 foot is 0.3048 m
- fnordpiglet 1y agoAnd killer whales are about the size of mini subs whether people steer them with their feet or hands too!
- neilv 1y agoPeople died under troubling circumstances. Hopefully the strange quirks of the news org's writing style don't derail discussion.
- doe88 1y agoI'm always surprised like at this level it still seems some people absolutely want to fire there weapons; whereas I would say the more secret a mission is, the more experience you have, the more training you have and you should have understood that killing people and making noises was not the goal of the mission... It should be more teached it seems, sometimes there is operational value in not killing people.
- andrewflnr 1y agoHow are you getting that from this story? They thought they had been discovered, and panicked. Pretty simple. Morality aside, staying quiet doesn't help your stealth if your enemy already has a flashlight pointed at you.
- lifeformed 1y agoHow could they have panicked? Surely this would've been a scenario that would've been planned for. I assume they would've trained for the crazy situation of encountering North Koreans in North Korea.
- andrewflnr 1y agoWhat do you think the plan was for "the North Korean military has already found us and is trying to capture or kill us?"
- lifeformed 1y agoRetreat? This isn't a war, you can't just drop into another country and start killing people. At no point was it morally or legally justified to have engaged in combat in this situation. At the very least they need to verify it was a military target, and even then it's not justified.
- andrewflnr 1y agoI'm not disagreeing with any of that. But any plan they had clearly did disagree. Context, please.
- flyinglizard 1y ago“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf” — Originally attributed to George Orwell in one form or another
- adhamsalama 1y agoThe US and its usual spreading of freedom to innocent civilians overseas I see.
- runsWphotons 1y agoIt would have been nicer to kidnap the fishermen.
- ocdtrekkie 1y agoAnd take them where? Bear in mind the seal team came in on a sub that didn't even have air. They probably don't have restraints of any kind or a way to keep them from shouting... Which is not to say what they did do was right, but "just kidnap some people" is not really a practical reality.
- runsWphotons 1y agodrive the fishing boat back to the submarine. harold holt swam to one it can be done
- harambae 1y agoI like conspiracy theories as much as the next guy (especially when it would only technically require a few people here), but it seems more likely Holt just got eaten by a shark or drowned. People die in open-water situations all the time.
- impossiblefork 1y agoThe laws of war don't allow that either. It's forbidden to attack civilians. You're not allowed even to wrestle them. Having been discovered by civilians is not sufficient to justify attacking them.
- runsWphotons 1y agoI didn't say it would've been legal, just nicer.
- impossiblefork 1y agoAh, I see.
- neilv 1y agoIf anyone is interested, but didn't read it because it looked long-form... it's only ~3,500 words, and is a very accessible writeup about this serious matter. The bulk of the piece is also a more sympathetic reporting of the story (e.g., the alleged importance of the mission, and allegedly why things happened) than previous reporting I saw. (The end of the piece switches to criticism beyond this story, though.)
- Eextra953 1y agoThis botched operation shows how representative government has been subverted in America. Power should flow bottom-up, rather than top-down. Would putting this operation to a democratic vote ever result in approval? Highly doubtful. This suggests our current form of democracy is deeply broken and urgently needs fixing. IMO the issue is how we think about power itself. The assumption underneath it all is that once we vote, power becomes fully vested in our elected officials rather than remaining with the people who conditionally granted it to them. The "representative" part of our democratic republic has become the hack that allows crappy politicians to take over and use power for their own benefit. We grant power through voting, but that power should stay accountable to us - not disappear into secret operations that would never survive public scrutiny.
- cellis 1y ago"Would putting this operation to a democratic vote ever result in approval?" As a civilian, I understand the intention. But, unless all are warriors of equal rank, I don't want the public voting on how the military will be run minute-by-minute, nor do I think it's helpful for the public ( i.e. our adversaries in a very real sense ) to have access to information of classified operations. That sounds like a recipe for an authoritarian / tyrannical government to absolutely steamroll us...which would negate the advantages of a democracy in the first place.
- nappy 1y agoyou make it very clear that you have zero understanding of what republican democracy is in the United States.
- brcmthrowaway 1y agoDo tell more
- kelnos 1y agoNot sure what you mean. This is exactly what you get with representative government. In theory accountable, but nearly all decisions are made by proxies, and not by the people as a whole. Putting special ops up to democratic vote is absurd.
- nibman 1y ago[dead]
- pjmlp 1y agoUnfortunately many innocent people do fall victims of covert operations, the whole good versus bad, morals and stuff is cinema content. The actual ops on the field is very wide gray spectrum, and one of the reasons so many are traumatised upon return to civil life.
- ryanwhitney 1y agoThe Fort Bragg Cartel by Seth Harp covers this well. JSOC basically runs an around-the-clock global assassination squad where innocents, family members, and children are killed with intent. Then they come home and try to fit in with a less murder-acclimated population.
- mdhb 1y agoThat is both not true and not what is in the book.
- ryanwhitney 1y agoThe focus is the drugs and domestic murders, but JSOC's practices are detailed (daily night raids, low threshold for targeting, low accuracy) and give background to how everyone involved became so broken.
- mdhb 1y agoWhich is not even in the same ballpark as what you originally wrote.
- JohnCClarke 1y agoIs there any way all those involved in the killings can be prosecuted for murder?
- closewith 1y agoUS soldiers have murdered literally tens of thousand of innocent, unarmed civilians in the recent wars. Include the postwar period and it's hundreds of thousands to millions. The US has threatened the ICC with violence to prevent criminal charges against US military members. So in short, no.
- Ekaros 1y agoWill they and their chain of command face the justice? And be trialled in way which the peers of victims get to decide if they are guilty or not? Will also all accomplishes say those who funded politician who decided on this also face potential death penalty?
- hypeatei 1y agoNot a chance in this administration. Trump pardoned a Navy SEAL war criminal in 2019[0]. > Gallagher was convicted in July of posing with the dead body of a teenage Islamic State captive he had just killed with a hunting knife. He was granted clemency by the president in November in a decision that angered military chiefs. > fellow platoon members told of a ruthless leader who stabbed the captive to death for no reason then forced his troops to pose for a photograph with the corpse. 0: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/27/eddie-gallagher-trump-navy-seal-iraq https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/27/eddie-gallag...
- indigodiddy 1y ago[flagged]
- bigyabai 1y agoCould you have said it with your main account instead of an alt?
- giardini 1y agoWhat evidence exists that the supposed mission occurred?
- jhanschoo 1y ago> The 2019 operation has never been publicly acknowledged, or even hinted at, by the United States or North Korea. The details remain classified and are being reported here for the first time. The Trump administration did not notify key members of Congress who oversee intelligence operations, before or after the mission. The lack of notification may have violated the law. > The White House declined to comment. > This account is based on interviews with two dozen people, including civilian government officials, members of the first Trump administration and current and former military personnel with knowledge of the mission. All of them spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the mission’s classified status. The NYT story has this to say regarding provenance.
- giardini 1y agoYour post seems to have some parts out-of-order or missing perhaps? But, in summary, we should take the New York Times' word for it? Bwahahahahaaaah!
- jmyeet 1y agoWe are fed a steady diet of media that propagandizes empire. We rewrite history (eg downplaying the USSR's role in WW2). We push a narrative of honorable soldiers, a competent military and elite commandoes. But the reality is nothing like any of those things. This particularly mission was almost comically bad and would just be funny if a bunch of completely innocent fishermen didn't get deleted in service of this fiction that North Korea is some great evil. But I take comfort in that. Because as much as hired killers and assassinations might appear in fiction, it basically doesn't exist in the real world. And when people do try, it basically always goes comically wrong (eg the Adelsons in Florida). Hired killers? Just not a thing. Murder is an interesting crime because the perpetrator and the victim almost always know each other. And the recidivism rate is almost zero. Serial killers are a statistical outlier. Most murder is personal. But there is "professional" murder, again to a very limited degree. Organized crime, gangs and (of course) state actors, most notably military units. Osama bin Laden was killed this way but even that was comically bad. It took years to find this massive compound that stuck out like a sore thumb in Abbotabad and even then, they managed to crash a Blackhawk. This gives me a lot of confidence that, for example, Jeffrey Epstein wasn't killed. The other aspect of this worth examining is the widesprread assumption that of course this was justified. Why? This was technically an act of war between nuclear powers. This was a huge provocation. Haven't we done enough to North Korea? I am, of course, referring to the intentional starving ("economic sanctions") of the citizenry.
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- black_13 1y ago[dead]
- rollulus 1y agoAnyone willing to speculate what the target and electronic device could’ve been?
- thenthenthen 1y agoFiber cable tap?
- treis 1y agoThe story doesn't really make sense as written. At least it's hard to imagine something remote enough to be accessed undetected from shore and be important enough to be worth tapping. Then somehow you get the data back out without being detected? Feels like the mission happened with a different goal and this is the cover story.
- addandsubtract 1y agoI'm really curious about the tech as well. You could use a satellite connection to transmit data, but how do you power the device for days/weeks? A solar panel can't really be hidden and batteries don't last very long when you're recording audio 24/7.
- js2 1y agoGift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/navy-seal-north-korea-trump-2019.html?unlocked_article_code=1.kE8.MXkn.2zCFx6L4CMzu&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/navy-seal-north-korea-...
- mrtnmrtn 1y agoAfaik links to offered articles cannot be opened more than once
- js2 1y agoI don't think that's true? Here's what the NYT has to say about it: Subscribers can gift 10 gift News articles per month: - On the 1st of every month, Subscribers’ gift articles reset to 10. - When an article is gifted, recipients can read it with or without a subscription. - Recipients have 30 days to read the article before access is revoked. https://help.nytimes.com/360060848652-Gift-Articles-for-New-York-Times-Subscribers https://help.nytimes.com/360060848652-Gift-Articles-for-New-... The gift link I shared above opens for me in a private browser window w/o any prompting.
- aussieguy1234 1y agoThe Japanese bombed civilian boats that happened to be out on the water near pearl harbour before their surprise attack. Their reasoning was that these boats could have alerted the Americans about the impending attack. It's interesting to see the US more or less committing the same crime, even if it was just a bug planting mission.
- scarecrowbob 1y agoIf you're interested in "crimes committed by the US war machine which mirror similar crimes by the Japanese", there is a lot written about the US use of biological weapons on the peninsula in late 1951. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_biological_warfare_in_the_Korean_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_biological_warf...
- aussieguy1234 1y agoThere was quite alot including actual massacres of civilians in Vietnam. The US where not the good guys in that war.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoIn what wars were either side free of innocent blood? Where there were actually good guys rather than maybe just morally better than the other side?
- scarecrowbob 1y agoOh, yeah, I was just picking one thing at random- there are literally millions of murders done by the US war machine. The US generally aren't the good guys in any war. Heck, I think that the US treatment of the Nazis after the second world war should make it pretty clear what "side" of that conflict they were actually on.
- jhanschoo 1y agoWhen incidents like this happen, it gives credence to North Korean propaganda portraying the US as an imperialist aggressor.
- throwawaymaths 1y agoyeah, it's not like north korea doesn't do batshit crazy stuff like kidnap japanese/south korean civilians from japanese/south korean soil, or murder people abroad with massage artists given vx laden massage oil
- solardev 1y agoHow does the masseur survive that massage?
- throwawaymaths 1y agoIdk. I misremembered, it might not have been massage oil specifically. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-nam https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-na...
- kyletns 1y agoThe US is pretty clearly an imperialist aggressor? Latin America is littered with the bodies of those who didn't conform to US economic dictates.
- closewith 1y agoAnd Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Lybia, Vietnam, Laos, any number of examples.
- devsda 1y ago"An X country's covert operations team landed on country Y's shores, opened fire on a boat in which an innocent fisherman lost lives and left" If X is Iran/Russia/North Korea/<current choice> and Y is US/UK/Canada etc, the whole *mainstream* media would be calling for war. But in this case, its just called a failed operation. Even if it was an allied country and the SEAL was caught, US would threaten the country with war to get the person back. US has always been an agressor to small countries, big countries, allies i.e rest of the world. Americans can accept the fact or stay in denial but it doesn't change other countries' experience or how they feel about it.
- 317070 1y agoIt's funny how people are so surprised? This story was already fictionalized in 2004's "Team America - World Police". SEALs, North Korea, it's all there. Special Forces are secretive, and almost as a law of nature that leads to them being inept. There is a long list of these special operations in the book "Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs" by Noam Chomsky.
- kelnos 1y agoI think "inept" is a bit uncharitable. We have no idea what their success and failure rates are. By their very nature, they take on the trickiest assignments, the ones that are most likely to fail in weird, unexpected ways. > There is a long list of these special operations in the book... And I'm sure there's a list orders of magnitude longer that we'll never hear about, and there's no way to judge if the ops in his book are representative of the whole.
- okdood64 1y agoSorry to be pedantic but SEALS are not Special Forces by US military definition. That's the US Army.
- yepitwas 1y agoThey are by common use of the term, however. Just not in US military jargon.
- anonymousiam 1y agoNo mention of this in the article, but less than two years after this happened, the Pentagon announced a change in policy with regard to supporting CIA missions. https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/10/politics/pentagon-cia-counterterrorism https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/10/politics/pentagon-cia-counter...
- iknowitsakek 1y ago[dead]
- Qem 1y agoIf later the murdered fishermen are identified and their stories known, is it possible for their families to seek compensation from USG?
- techjamie 1y agoIf they weren't in NK they could probably try. But given the poverty there, how restrictive the government is about anything getting out, and that they're in a hostile nation to the US, the answer is effectively "No." If they got anything at all it'd be a PR stunt, since they have no way of enforcing any compensation.
- bjourne 1y ago[flagged]
- tomasphan 1y agoTerrible murder aside, what kind of signals was that device going to intercept and why did it need to be on shore?
- harambae 1y agoLaser-microphone pickup? Just a wild-ass guess.
- supersparrow 1y agoSounds like a Jack Reacher novel!
- thisislife2 1y agoI feel sorry for us as human beings that something like this isn't treated as a war crime. It should never be ok to kill non-combatant civilians in cold-blood. This thought first came into mind when I read that Israel had killed a whole Iranian family ( https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/news/2025/06/26/3342913/entire-family-of-iranian-scientist-martyred-in-targeted-israeli-assassination https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/news/2025/06/26/3342913/entire... ) to assassinate an Iranian scientist. (Or atleast that is what is claimed - some regimes really are too comfortable with the idea of "collective punishment").
- loki49152 1y ago.... as opposed to what? What do you think they should have done, sat around waiting to be captured so the could be featured in a NoKo TikTok video?
- duxup 1y agoI was reading about special operations in WWII and these kinds of missions always seem to be on a knife's edge. This mission seems more akin to a WWII operation with the team and their immediate support being entirely on their own. >But the episode worried some experienced military officials with knowledge of the mission, because the SEALs have an uneven track record that for decades has largely been concealed by secrecy. This seems to be a trait many special operations groups have. Type A personalities that you want in that job, but that bring with it a willingness for big risk taking and fantastical type missions. That's not to say their success rate should be super high, these are difficult missions, but some like the failures in Panama were a case of ambition over common sense. Granted this mission they made the right call to leave when they were discovered.
- ignoramous 1y ago> Type A personalities that you want in that job, but that bring with it a willingness for big risk taking and fantastical type missions... https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/our-blessed-homeland-their-barbarous-wastes https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/our-blessed-homeland-their-ba...
- chvid 1y agoNothing heroic “type a” about killing random unarmed civilians. These people are disgusting psychopathic thugs and so are the people behind them. And it is tragic that we are so deeply buried in arrogance and propaganda that we cannot see this.
- runjake 1y ago