I’m not questioning you, because I think you had an excellent point, I’m questioning the existence of this thread.
I think maybe because this was a particularly egregious act of violence that appears to have been directly orderedl from high up in the ranks, possibly by Hegseth himself because it’s exactly the kind of murderous violence that he loves to crow about. And it represents a distinct escalation in the scale of the conflict, not a focused campaign on military infrastructure and regime leadership, but full-scale war on the high seas.
Whereas other events like the school bombing might possibly have been due to recklessness rather than outright malevolence, which is not an excuse but if true represents a slightly lesser grade of evil in terms of intent. as tragic as it was.
See I still have trouble grasping this framing. The school bombing was absolutely, undoubtedly a war crime whether it was intentional or not. “It was on accident” is not a defense. If it were then people would be doing atrocities right and left saying “oops, didn’t know”.
And I believe that nobody even bothered to check if the school was still being used as a military asset or not (reportedly, years ago it was, but most recently it was said to be an actual school with actual students). A crime of negligence at a minimum, and I’m not convinced it was just negligence.
Neither am I, but it’s a possibility – perhaps a missile gone astray, or incompetence or bad intel about the nature of the school building. But the sinking of the IRIS Dena and all the consequent deaths was unquestionably directly ordered from somewhere in the upper ranks of Trump’s cabal of murderous thugs.
And Hegseth was, naturally, described as “exultant” over the sinking:
“War Secretary” Pete Hegseth was exultant, underlining its historic significance:
“[Y]esterday in the Indian Ocean, and we’ll play it on the screen there,” he said, “an American submarine sunk an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters. Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo, quiet death. The first sinking of an enemy ship by a torpedo since World War II.”
Also, leaving the Iranian sailors to drown is itself a war crime that contravenes Article 18 of the Second Geneva Convention, adopted in 1949 and ratified by the US Senate in 1955.
You must have trouble with civilian criminal law, too, then, where an accidental death caused by recklessness is treated differently from an intentional one done on the spur of the moment which is treated differently again from a premeditated murder.
The sinking of the Dena was premeditated murder. The school bombing? We don’t really know, and Trump’s goons will likely make sure we never do.
I am a little surprised that the nature of submarine warfare and the norms and laws around it are not pretty well known after a hundred years or more of it.
By whom?
Jus in bello isn’t the same as jus ad bellum. Warship commanders are expected to open fire upon the enemy. Absolutely no international law and no precedent of which I am aware has ever seen naval officers charged with murder for firing on enemy warships, even if their nation was not justified in its decision to go to war. Even German U-boat commanders weren’t treated as murderers. Had Dena spotted the American sub on the surface I’ve no doubt she would have opened fire, even though submarines are effectively helpless when surfaced.
By a cascade of shared responsibility, beginning with whoever gave the direct order (I suspect Pete Hegsgeth, a violence-loving thug if ever there was one). As for the lower ranking servicemen, how well did “just following orders” work in the post-WW2 war crimes trials?
Remember that a state of war has not been declared, which is supposed to be the purview of Congress. Remember as well that leaving injured sailors to drown with no attempt whatsoever to render any kind of aid before rescue ships arrived (too late, for most of them) could be construed as a war crime in itself in direct contravention of Article 18 of the Second Geneva Convention.
Fascinating claim by Iran International, an opposition/diaspora Iranian community newspaper, which claims to have interviewed the father of one of the sailors who was killed, who told his father shortly before the ship blew up that the US told the crew to abandon vessel twice, the sailors wanted to surrender, but the officers refused:
For attacking enemy warships, it worked just fine. Di you read my entire post? Are you aware that submarine commanders have been doing this in war for longer than you’ve been alive and have never been prosecuted for it?
I’m sure you know the story of USS Indianapolis, the American cruiser that carried the atomic bomb that was torpedoed on its way back. Did the Japanese submarine offer help? Nope. Was the captain prosecuted by the Americans afer the war? No, he was treated as a fellow naval professional. The Japanese leaders who STARTED the war were hanged. The ship commanders fighting naval warfare the way it’s normally fought were not.
What war? The Orange Buffoon says there’s no war.
There were no rules of engagement at the time regarding providing compassionate medical aid and assistance to innocent victims of an attack at sea. The Second Geneva Convention wasn’t adopted until four years later, and not ratified by the US Senate until 1955. But now it’s been in force for 70 years.
There are some very powerful scenes in the German movie Das Boot, one of which involves the sinking of a British oil tanker by a U-boat. Unaware that there are still sailors aboard, the U-boat fires a second torpedo. When desperate sailors leap into the water, some of them burned and all of them drowning and pleading for help, the captain orders the U-boat to silently back away. The scene was meant to be horrifying and to symbolize the stark evil of the Nazi regime.
Yay! The Trumpies are just about as good as Nazis! Even when it violates their own ratified code of conduct! Hegseth recently referred to humanitarian codes of conduct like that as “stupid”.
How do you square that, with this:
That’s an incredibly callous and dismissive attitude to take to victims (1) of an illegal war of aggression (2) many of whom were only present under pain of death or torture as conscripts serving an authoritarian regime. And yet the tone and tenor of your posts is “Meh. They’re all just a bunch of terrorists. Let ‘em burn” (or rather drown, I suppose).
It’s patent bullshit if you ask me.
Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree.
It seems pretty clear to other countries that all that has to happen is that your president has a “feeling” that we’re going to attack, and that means that he alone gets to decide to start bombing our country and sinking our ships at will, no matter where in the world they are located.
That is indeed where we’re at now.
Not that actual facts and legal precedent have any meaning here, but Karl Doenitz was charged with a war crime at Nuremburg for issuing the Laconia Order which stipulated that submarines were not to rescue survivors. His defense was that the security of the submarine superseded the obligation for rescue and that the development of long range aircraft made rescue impossible. He was eventually acquitted of that charge after Adm Chester Nimitz responded that unrestricted submarine warfare was carried out by the US from the beginning of the war, and that he had given a similar order for the same reasons.
It has been a well accepted practice since then that this principal precludes submarines from the obligation to rescue survivors both because surfacing to effect the rescue would compromise the safety of the submarine and because submarines are not equipped with sufficient berthing and medical facilities to care for the wounded. Article 18 notwithstanding, it hasn’t come up too often, so we don’t have a legal precedent since its ratification.
That’s irrelevant. There IS a war.
The rules of war at sea existed before then and the behavior of ships since hasn’t changed. Did HMS Conqueror rescue the crew of General Belgrano in 1982? Of course not.
And you don’t understand that scene in Das Boot. Sorry, but you need to learn more about this subject.
Hmmm … this is what I wrote:
This is the relevant portion of Wikipedia’s plot summary:
The [U-]boat sustains heavy damage but manages to surface when night falls. A British tanker they torpedoed is still afloat and on fire, so they torpedo it again, only to learn that sailors are still aboard. The crew watches as the sailors leap overboard and swim towards them. Neither able nor willing to accommodate prisoners, the captain orders the boat to back away.
Give it time; it will happen, and it will be euphemistically called “friendly fire.”
No, because as I said, that is not legal. What you have described is not legal. Actually prosecuting it is thorny, but it’s a rogue president doing illegal things. He may never be held to account, I don’t know. But it’s not legal.
On the contrary, it appears I’m almost the only person in this thread who understands that there’s a difference between civil law and military law. Frankly, it’s mind-boggling that people keep making these stupid comparisons between police making an arrest and a sub executing a military mission. To wit:
You are extremely stupid. That is the only conclusion that can be drawn here.
If the main critique now is about my “tone” and we’re agreed on the substance that this is not a war crime, then OK. That’s the scope of what I’m arguing, and the substance doesn’t change no matter how many bodies you want to throw in my face. I realize now that most correspondents here are shocked and dismayed that military law doesn’t bend to their emotional sensibilities, but I can’t really help you with that.
Total bullshit. First, the comparison I was drawing to civilian law has an exact parallel in the UCMJ where murder, manslaughter, and negligent homicide are different offenses in decreasing order of seriousness and potential penalties, contrary to your earlier claim that “The school bombing was absolutely, undoubtedly a war crime whether it was intentional or not. ‘It was on accident’ is not a defense.”
Second, even if this wasn’t true, there is value in making an appeal to a higher morality, as the judges did at the Nuremberg trials, stating (bolding mine) that “the crime of plotting and waging aggressive war [is] ‘the supreme international crime’ because ‘it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole’.” Self-ascribed immunity due to “military” acts of war did nothing to protect the Nuremberg defendants.
Your constant defense of Trump’s and Hegseth’s barbaric atrocities is utterly reprehensible. Hegseth recently implied that every last Iranian should be dead.
Listen dipshit, I have no love for Trump or Hegseth, I am simply addressing the endless bleating of “the sinking of Dena was a war crime”. It’s a straightforward legal question.
You’re not the first moron in this thread with the mistaken belief that understanding the law equals a celebration of Trump and Hegseth, and you probably won’t be the last, but please invest the minimal effort to understand that there is a difference, and it does matter.
Many actual experts disagree with you. Without a declaration of war by Congress, this is no different than Trump’s other adventure blowing up boats off the coast of Venezuela, just because he could. There’s also the secondary question of failing to do anything to help survivors of the sinking, at least for the very short time until rescue vessels arrived, contrary to the Geneva Convention.