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by Shaun king,
“If the United States is at war, then Pete Hegseth is a war criminal. If the United States is not at war, then Pete Hegseth is a murderer.”
Of course it was an international war crime, but the world does not currently have a single force willing to apply any of these laws. They basically function as legal theories with few consequences
Earlier this week the United States did something truly despicable. It’s an undeniable war crime. It’s mass murder. And ultimately is going to cause ships across the world to be open targets. This is not how the American media has reported it at all.
Thousands of miles away from Iran, an Iranian ship was invited to participate in an international boat show by India. The United States was also invited to participate and was scheduled to be there until the day before when they pulled out. The Iranian ship, which was unarmed, was there for what was basically a glorified military boat parade.
The United States knew this. None of it mattered. Without warning the United States torpedoed the ship, slaughtered the crew, which was mainly young sailors, and left the survivors there to drown. The United States then filmed and watched as Iranian sailors died and drowned. Even Nazis didn’t do this when they targeted ships.
In the end, Sri Lanka recovered 87 bodies and rescued 32 survivors. Dozens more are still missing. Then America’s Secretary of Defense celebrated the sinking as “quiet death” and posted the snuff film of the ship being hit and the young sailors dying all over the Internet
Now let’s talk about what happened at sea—because this story is not a footnote. It’s a warning.
Quiet death?
That phrase is morally rotten. What does it even mean?
Because there is nothing “quiet” about bodies floating in the Indian Ocean, about families waiting for sailors who never come home, about a country forced to pull corpses out of the water while the government that fired the torpedo performs triumph on camera.
Let’s do the thought experiment that this country avoids because it would expose the lie instantly.
Imagine a U.S. Navy ship takes part in a multinational fleet exercise—something like an international “boat show” for navies—waving flags, taking pictures, shaking hands. Imagine it sails in international waters thousands of miles from home, not in the middle of a firefight.
Now imagine Iran torpedoes it.
And then imagine Iran watches and films everyone dying and then posts it on the Internet.
How do you think Americans would react?
We would have wall-to-wall specials for weeks. Not hours. Weeks. We would know every sailor’s name. Their kids’ names. Their hometowns. The sports they played in high school. The prayers their mothers said. There would be vigils. Flyovers. Emergency hearings. Flags everywhere. A national story told with endless empathy.
And again: rightly so. Human beings in the water deserve grief, outrage, and accountability—no matter the flag they serve under.
But because the sailors were Iranian—and because Americans have been trained for decades to see Iranians as disposable—this story is being processed like a tactical vignette. A video clip. A chess move.
That is not journalism. That is conditioning.
Ryan Grim wrote on X that the Iranian ship was invited, alongside the U.S., to the Indian naval exercise—and then the U.S. pulled out at the last minute and torpedoed it.
A former Indian foreign secretary, Kanwal Sibal, wrote that the ship would not have been there if India had not invited it, and he added the claim—attributed to what he said he had been told—that ships in the exercise could not carry ammunition.
What did the U.S. do for the shipwrecked?
The Independent / The Conversation lays out the rescue obligation: under the Second Geneva Convention, parties must take all possible measures to search for and collect shipwrecked survivors. Responsible Statecraft calls the question even more urgent. It quotes the text of Article 18 of the Second Geneva Convention and says the U.S. still had an obligation to do what it could to help rescue survivors, even if it couldn’t physically take them onboard. It reports that Sri Lankan authorities indicated they learned of the incident from the ship’s own distress call and did not even know it was Iranian until speaking with survivors. I
Here’s what ABC News adds: even U.S. military law experts say the legality question is “murky” because Congress has not authorized the war, and officials across the government refuse to even call it war while describing “military action” that is expanding in scope.
So what do we have?
A torpedo strike thousands of miles from the main theater of war.
A crew in the water.
A rescue carried out by Sri Lanka.
A legal obligation that demands “all possible measures.”
And U.S. authorities refusing to give the public a clean, documented account.
That’s not just a legal issue. That’s a moral one.
And it is disgusting to watch a government celebrate “quiet death” while the world asks whether it did “all possible measures” for men drowning in open water.
What this really is: impunity exported to the Indian Ocean
This story is not only about an Iranian frigate. It’s about the precedent.
A powerful state sinks a ship far from the main theater and then celebrates it.
The world is told the legalities are “murky” because Congress didn’t authorize it.
Meanwhile, the people most impacted—the dead and the missing—are treated as an afterthought.
This is how empires talk themselves into believing they can do anything. And it’s how the rest of the world learns the same lesson: the law only exists for those without power.
A society that can laugh at “quiet death” is a society with a broken soul.
And if Americans can’t feel the wrongness of this because the victims are Iranian and Muslim, then what we’re really witnessing isn’t just war abroad.
It’s dehumanization at home.
Source: https://www.thenorthstar.com
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