On MS Now’s “The Last Word” on Monday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said the United States was on the “wrong side” if survivors were killed during a follow-up attack on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean in September.
Host Lawrence O’Donnell said, “What do you see in this? And this point: Is it possible to commit a war crime when there is no war? What do we call it when there is no war?”
Whitehouse said, “Yes, the general term would be murder.”
O’Donnell said, “Is that what you see here?”
Whitehouse said, “I don’t know enough about the circumstances to, you know, make a final legal decision, but for Pete’s sake, you have people whose boat has been blown up. Whatever they were doing has now ended in an explosion on the water and now you have two survivors in the water. Even when you’re at war, a civilized nation goes and rescues the survivors and then even in a war situation treats them as prisoners of war. In this case, I mean, you know, to make a Hollywood reference, when the bad guys are firing machine guns at survivors in the water, it’s not the Americans in the movies, it’s the bad guys and if we’re blowing up survivors in the water instead of trying to send a rescue then we’re on the wrong, wrong side.
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