“Trial by combat: Deciding a man’s guilt or innocence in the eyes of the gods by having two other men hack each other to pieces. It tells you something about the gods.”
That’s Tyrion Lannister on Sunday night’s Game of Thrones.
.. Trials by combat happened less frequently than trial by ordeal, but persisted in history for longer ..
Related: Tywin said – “Explain to me why it is more noble to kill 10,000 men in battle than a dozen at dinner.” How would you explain it to him?
SEAL Team 6: A Secret History of Quiet Killings and Blurred Lines
“JSOC investigates JSOC, and that’s part of the problem,” said one former senior military officer experienced in special operations, who like many others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because Team 6’s activities are classified.
Even the military’s civilian overseers do not regularly examine the unit’s operations. “This is an area where Congress notoriously doesn’t want to know too much,”
.. Delta Force members, who have a reputation for going by the book, often start out as regular infantry, then move up through the Army’s Ranger units and Special Forces teams before joining Delta. But SEAL Team 6 is more isolated from the rest of the Navy
.. Operators are trained “to slice and dice every major artery,” said one former SEAL.)
The rules boiled down to this, the noncommissioned officer said: “If in your assessment you feel threatened, in a split second, then you’re going to kill somebody.” He described how one SEAL sniper killed three unarmed people, including a small girl, in separate episodes in Afghanistan and told his superiors that he felt they had posed a threat. Legally, that was sufficient. “But that doesn’t fly” in Team 6, the noncommissioned officer said. “You actually have to be threatened.” He added that the sniper was forced out of Team 6.
.. Emphasizing these lines and rules becomes even more important when you’re fighting a lawless, remorseless enemy,” said Geoffrey S. Corn, the former senior law of war expert for the Army’s Office of the Judge Advocate General and now a professor at South Texas College of Law. “That is when the instinct for revenge is going to be strong. And war is not about revenge.”
.. When Captain Moore asked what had happened, the squadron commander, Peter G. Vasely, denied that operators had killed any noncombatants. He said they had killed all the men they encountered because they all had guns, according to the former Team 6 member and a military official.
.. But the killings prompted a high-level discussion about how, in a country where many men carried guns, Team 6 could “guarantee that we’re only going after the real bad guys,” one of the former senior team leaders said.
Richard Marcinko – founder of Seal Team 6
Demo Dick is raw. So is the truth – the truth about war. “In Vietnam, I’d discovered who could kill and who couldn’t in combat. But that was fifteen years ago, and less than half of SEAL Team Six had ever been in combat. So there was only one way to find out who’d pull the trigger, and who’d freeze – which was to play this thing out and see who did his job and who didn’t. War, after all, is not Nintendo. War is not about technology or toys. War is about killing…” he writes.
More on the Right Questions to Ask About Iraq
“Question 1. Do you accept the conflation of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons into the unified category of Weapons of Mass Destruction?”
.. Every candidate who has ever held such office, and has advocated sending US troops to Iraq, Iran or Syria, should be asked the following question: “Have you personally read the intelligence reports– and can we check the logs to verify?”