On MS NOW’s “The Last Word” 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 a suspected drug trafficking ship in the Caribbean in September.
Host Lawrence O’Donnell said: “What do you see in this? And at this point: is it possible to commit a war crime if there is no war? What do we call it when there is no war?”
Whitehouse said, “Yes, the common word 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 determination, but for God’s sake, there are people whose ship has been blown up. Whatever they were doing now ended in an explosion in the water and now you have two survivors in the water. Even when you’re at war, a decent nation goes and rescues the survivors and then treats them like prisoners of war even in a war situation. In this case, I’m talking about, you know, making a Hollywood movie. For reference, when the bad guys machine-gun the survivors in the water, it’s not the Americans in the movies, it’s the bad guys. And we’re on the wrong side of this if we blow up the survivors in the water instead of trying to send rescue.”
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