From ramming U-boats to strafing survivors, drone wars, and bin Laden’s killing, America’s critics selectively forget that yesterday’s “war crimes” were applauded when ordered by Democrats.
didn’t know that the Titanic had a sister ship that had also made its mark in maritime history.
The S.S. Olympic was an ocean liner launched in 1911, a year before its tragic sibling. During World War I it was pressed into service as a troopship by the government.
While transporting American soldiers to France in May of 1918, the Olympic was attacked in the English Channel by a German submarine, the U-103. Upon sighting the liner, the U-boat had tried to launch two torpedoes from its stern tubes. Unable to submerge in time, the sub came under fire from the Olympic with deck guns it had been outfitted with on entering naval service. Worse yet for the sub, the Olympic managed to turn at a right angle and ram the U-103, hitting it just aft of the conning tower, killing nine of its crew. The Germans scuttled the badly damaged vessel, taking to life rafts. After dispatching the submarine, the Olympic proceeded on, not stopping to rescue survivors. (Fortunately for the German crew—it was the early morning hours—they were able to send up a flare at daylight and the thirty-five crew members were picked up by an American destroyer, the U.S.S. Davis, and taken to Ireland.)
During WWII, twenty-five years later, in 1943, the American and Australian high commands in the Pacific Theater got word of a Japanese convoy headed towards a port on one of the southern islands in New Guinea, Lae. Carrying almost 7,000 troops, the Allies were fearful that these reinforcements might tip the battle for New Guinea in Japan’s favor. Only a year before, there had been concern that this port might be a jumping-off point for the invasion of Australia itself. The Allies determined this convoy had to be stopped at all costs.
Thanks to naval code breakers, the Allies were able to marshal over a hundred bombers ahead of time. In addition, the Americans had just developed a new, low-level bombing technique (“skip bombing”) for use against surface ships.
After the Japanese convoy set out from Rabaul, on one of the northern islands of New Guinea, they sailed through a part of the South Pacific known as the Bismarck Sea. On March 2nd and 3rd, 1943, the Japanese troop ships were struck by American and Australian aircraft and PT boats. Dropping their payloads on the convoy at mast height, the Allied planes sank all eight transports and four of the eight escorting destroyers.
The next day, March 4, 1943, the American and Australian pilots were ordered back to the area and commanded to machine gun any survivors on rafts or lifeboats or floating in the ocean. By one account, 2,000 Japanese sailors and soldiers who had survived the initial sinking of the ships they were on died from being strafed in the water by Allied planes. All told, of the 6,900 troops that had been sent to Lae, only 1,200 reached their destination. (The rest were killed or eventually rescued and taken back to Rabaul.)
In recent years, there have been discussions of the legality of U.S. actions resulting in the death of Osama Bin Laden. They have focused specifically on whether the Navy Seals were ordered to kill Bin Laden. If you regarded him as an enemy combatant, he couldn’t be killed if he was not a threat and/or if he was in the process of surrendering.
The usual suspects (Leon Panetta and John Brennan) claim there was no such order and that Bin Laden would have been spared if he’d attempted to surrender.
The SEALs that carried out the raid tell a very different story. Even though they give varying accounts of how the operation went down, they all agree that their mission was to kill the terrorist leader.
This is borne out by the actual circumstances of his death. Bin Laden was taken by surprise at 1:00 a.m. in his bedroom. He was wearing pajamas and was unarmed. He presented no threat at the moment he was initially shot. (In fairness, the SEALs had no way of knowing this.) The SEALs then finished him off with three shots to his torso before taking his body with them for purposes of identification. The best take on this question was an article in Political Science Quarterly, which concluded:
“(t)he capture option was mainly there for appearance’s sake and to fulfill requirements of international law, and that everyone involved considered it for all practical purposes a mission to kill.” P.S.Q., Fall 2016, “Decision Making in Using Assassinations in International Relations,” Warren R. and Jonathan L. Schilling.
Another example from history was the five hundred-plus drone strikes ordered by Barack Obama on targets in non-battlefield settings in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. According to a study by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Obama administration’s own figures, 3,797 people were killed, including 324 civilians. The CFR article quotes him as telling senior aides, “Turns out I was really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.” Obama’s Final Drone Strike Data, Micah Zenko, Council on Foreign Relations, January 20, 2017.
It’s interesting to consider each of these historical precedents in view of the current-day criticism of the Trump administration. The Democratic Party has charged it with crimes against humanity for destroying drug smugglers’ boats and killing their crews. All of these arguments apply with equal force to the four incidents from the past I’ve cited: the S.S. Olympic, the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and the drone strikes by the Obama administration.
Targeting non-combatants? Killing survivors of shipwrecks in express violation of Article 24 of the Geneva Convention? Ordering the assassination of a person after you’ve treated him as subject to our criminal justice system by indicting him in a U.S. court and thus entitled to due process, including a lawful arrest after a finding of probable cause, a trial by jury, and a right of appeal?
Not only did none of the historical examples I gave ever have their legality challenged, but the most recent one occurred less than ten years ago, so it was, in many cases, the very same individuals on the Left who are now so scathing towards Trump who gave Obama a free pass.
Think about it. The abandonment of German sailors to die of exposure after their ship sank; the slaughter of defenseless Japanese soldiers and sailors in the Bismarck Sea; the extrajudicial killing of Osama Bin Laden after we first treated him as subject to our criminal justice system with all its safeguards of the rights of the accused; and the remote-control murder of four thousand people by a U.S. president who flippantly remarked on the slaughter he ordered, including more than two dozen “double tap” strikes, with a huge toll in innocent civilians and medical personnel responding to survivors at the scene of the first strike.
You have to conclude that none of this makes any sense. But, of course, it makes perfect sense, i.e., the prior acts by the U.S. and its allies cannot be criticized because they all occurred under Democratic presidents. (Boy, do I feel all kinds of foolish!) We need to keep before us these “controlling legal precedents”—to use a phrase favored by law school dropout Al Gore—when we hear the Greek chorus attacking the Trump policy of destroying “coke” boats. (In the interest of full disclosure, I have known two young people who died from opioid addiction.) So these sophistries carry little weight with me.
