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

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. :(

>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.

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.

Jobs attract workers for many reasons. For some, it's sheer passion for the work.

The boss loves a passionate employee. The team loves an overachieving colleague. The people love a strong hero. You wouldn't have said anything, because nobody wants to hear it.

I do sometimes wonder where these folks direct their passion after the work dries up.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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."

[dead]

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.

I'm confused. This is a story about war crimes, not local councils? Are you saying your binman or librarian will shoot you?