698
Entire Chain of Command Could Be Held Liable for Killing Boat Strike Survivors, Sources Say
(theintercept.com)
Could.
But won't.
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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He is a murderer... all of them are.
Won't matter if they're held liable by US law.
We need justice that is not beholden to any king or emperor (or would-be whatever). International courts should rule on this. Because local ones won't do anything.
Aliens?
Interplanetary courts.
Hi! Your local friendly Ferengi here, would you be interested in purchasing a ruling from my Mobile Interplanetary Court?
Could is not news. Ever.
They could be, but they won't.
good. prison for all of them. genocidal nazis all of them. from the leader to the guy who pushed the button.
ILLEGAL ORDERS MUST BE IGNORED.
The laws will be changed to make them legal. Either that, or de facto standards will "move faster" than laws.
Sure, sure, right after we convict Bush, Rice et al., for their war crimes in Iraq.
… As they should.
… But they won’t.
They are doing the Democrats job. Democrats want the military to refuse illegal orders and the GOP(Goofy Old Phuckers) are helping by punishing the military for obeying them.
Hahaha! Oh, you were serious? That won't happen.
I'm hearing conflicting reports of the timeline.
One version has Hegseth ordering the strike, and after the first hit, there were two guys alive in the water, and Hegseth said "Kill them all," and the second strike was fired.
Another version has Hegseth saying "Kill them all" up front, and the pilot, noticing the two survivors in the water, decided to fire the second shot on his own, in accordance with Hegseth's original order, but Hegseth did not give the specific order to fire a second shot.
In the first version, Hegseth is definitely on the hook for the order to fire the second shot, which was murder, plain and simple. In the second version, the pilot unilaterally made the decision to murder the survivors, giving Hegseth weak deniability. He did order them to "Kill them all," but he could say it was an excited but rhetorical statement at the outset of the operation, but that he didn't mean for the pilot to commit actual murder. He'll act all outraged, and throw the pilot under the bus.
If nothing else (and they are plenty else), MAGA is cowardly.
"Respect the chain of command." - Babylon 5 TV show
Same thing Democrats said recently. Same thing Milley said last time Trump put soldiers on streets years ago. Back then Trump also said Milley should be hanged for saying it.
I love B5 and while the show might look a bit dated now the message sure as fuck is not.
Maybe give them what they gave the boats.
That's what should happen, but I won't be holding my breath.
Ok, do it.
Yes, that’s pretty much how war crimes work.
I guess I don't understand why the second strike is worse than the first one?
The UCMJ uses “firing on shipwrecked persons” as a specific example of an illegal order.
Firing on an operating crewed ship is, in a very, very broad sense, potentially justifiable. Firing on a disabled ship whose crew is not firing back is not.
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(3 replies)
It's not that it's worse in any way, a person killed is dead either way, it's that there's no possible defense and it clearly demonstrates the intentional and likely premeditated illegality, making it possible to actually make a substantive case against it. It's not realistic to apply a full legal process to every individual military misdeed or act of war, no matter how much many people might wish it were. We don't live in a perfect world. The list of actual war crimes is intended to include things which are clearly demonstrable with enough evidence that a conviction could be realistic.
It's the difference between running someone over once, which could be a simple accident and we can't and probably shouldn't prosecute every single pedestrian death as first degree murder, it might serve justice to try to do that in some ways, but it's not realistic and also has the potential to be unjust.
Compare that to someone then stopping, backing up and running the same person over again. It removes any possibility of doubt whether the action was an intentional targeted crime and makes it a lot more worthwhile to prosecute. Neither one makes the person any more dead than the other. But one is almost certainly a lot easier to prove to be murder.
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(1 replies)
This is what happens when you think you're the king.