Show 325 - Who's the Boss?

0:00Dan Carlin, Common Sense.

0:30the person who ordered that and she's in big trouble the good news for people like us living in a place like the united states is that we have a lot of safeguards in our system intended to make any weird occurrence like that extremely unlikely if any of those safeguards were challenged that would be reason enough to get me out of my cave overdue as i am on all my work and dealing with what many of you were dealing with too 2025 is a tough year and a lot of people understand that it would take a lot to get me you know out of what i was doing that i really want to finish and come and do a common sense show it would take somebody sort of chipping away at some of those protections that make it unlikely anything like what happened in bangladesh would ever happen here and yet here i am there's a lot of chaff out there in our society right now that is obscuring the really important things.

1:29And there's not a ton of really important things, but the ones that are there, it's hard to tell the difference between those and whatever crap is thrown around in order to make it harder to see the important diamonds in the rough. Steve Bannon has a phrase for that, and I'm going to paraphrase it, is flooding the zone with crap. It's a tactic. But remember what the tactic is for. they don't want you to see the important things so they throw up all kinds of unimportant things to distract you and make it so that by the time you notice what you should have been focused on the whole time it's too far along for you to do anything about it and this brings us to something that six democratic lawmakers said the other day and the president's unhinged response to them now i've learned both to trust what the president says when he throws out those unhinged responses even when he backs them up and says oh i didn't mean it you know because that's been a tactic we've been dealing with since day one but i take the man seriously he's the most powerful man in the world i assume that the initial um truth social social post is is are his true feelings at ground zero and if that's the case you need to be thankful that we have all these safeguards because even if he's joking and who would joke about death and executing people and well but even if he's joking and he's walked it back any attempt to weaken the safeguards that protect us in this country and have for a long time well that's wheat not chaff that's something that drags me away from events 23 or 2400 years ago and reminds me that what's going on right now in real time has more impact on my life and your life and well hard to think about alexander when you've got things like this going on what is this well a group of six democratic lawmakers the other day most of them all of them with military or intelligence backgrounds made a video and put it on social media and the video essentially reminds active duty service members that they can refuse to follow illegal orders.

3:44If somebody says to them, shoot a bunch of protesters or commit a war crime, you not only have the right to say, no, I won't do that, you're expected to, and you'll be prosecuted if you go ahead and do it anyway, and if you say, but they ordered me to do it, that won't get you out of jail. And by the way, that's been reinforced in court case after court case. now u.s service personnel and by the way personnel in a lot of other countries understand this since 1947 i think it is we've been drilling this into our own people but even going back to maybe the war of 1812 i think it is you know you've got cases where our government holds people accountable for not using their judgment when orders are given to them that are wrong and the president freaked out at democratic lawmakers by the way not just the president all his advisors and a ton of his fans on on social media they freaked out that these lawmakers reminded our military personnel of something they already know very well something they take an oath to something they take classes about nobody knows better than our military personnel that they have a duty to say no if an order is illegal but the reactions from people online make it sound like they thought we were robots and one of the things we said when we did a series on the war in the asia pacific theater in the second world war was the astonishment of soldiers from or marines from the united states or great britain or a number of other countries when confronted with the Japanese soldiers willingness to do stuff that virtually no other large military in the world could expect their soldiers to do suicidal stuff i want you to charge that defense position that it is 100 sure you will die and it is 100 sure you will not affect the war effort one iota you know how many militaries do that maybe you have a few elite units who are crazy almost but you know who's nobody's going to do that except the japanese in the second world war will reliably it scared the heck out of my stepfather he was in the navy the very tail end of that war and he would have much rather fought the germans because well when they've had enough they go off with their tail between their legs and lick their wounds the japanese don't and that's what made them so particularly astonishing establishing it was in that war of course that the biggest and most important and famous legal precedent ever set on this entire question we're talking about now was established because that's when after the war hitler's toadies cronies and generals were hauled before the um prosecuting attorneys of the victorious powers and when asked for some sort of statement as to their guilt on all these things that they've done their defense was to blame their superiors i was just following the orders not my fault that by the way is one of the most well-known and discussed rationales in all sort of crimes of war type studies it's called the superior orders defense and it rarely works especially when we're talking about war crimes or atrocities or things that never should have been done and the soldiers knew or the Marines knew it never should have been done.

7:20In the United States, those Bangladeshi soldiers who opened fire on their own people because they were told to would have been in trouble. And that's a feature, not a bug. That is our last line of defense in this country against somebody who might want to use our military against us. Because when you get depressed, hacks, folks. You have to understand something. And this is why I crawled out of my hole today to talk to you. And this is why this is wheat and not chaff. There's a lot of nonsense that floats around our system right now. Keep your eyes on the things that have always mattered. The guns, the soldiers, the military equipment.

8:05Militaries determine who's in power and have since Sumeria or before. And the United States is somewhat insulated from this dynamic because we have such a long and powerful tradition of the military being subordinate to the civilian authorities it's our military composed of our people right these are our men and women who volunteer for this right they're not gang pressed into this to serve for the king these are people who join the military to serve their country and protect their people right at home protect the homeland. Why don't we like that term? The homeland. So if somebody ever tries to wrest those military folk from us, this is something that should grab your attention because that is a firewall.

8:59That's a key protection that keeps the worst stuff from happening, the sort of stuff that don't happen in the United States, but does happen in other countries. And let me point out that before you think this too one-sided as i always say just imagine this power and worry on the side you are most concerned about right if you're not worried about the current president having um a the power to do something nasty then just imagine in the hands of the people you are most afraid of that's the proper way to view these things right powers change hands and that's why the most important safeguard we have is actually with the individual soldier sailor marine on the ground we should also add airmen of course it's at that level that those people are told that if somebody tells you to do something you know is wrong you better not do it trump freaked out at this and so did his supporters so when the six democratic lawmakers said what they said uh which was remind these soldiers that they took an oath to the constitution that they have a duty to not enforce um illegal orders he wrote quote this is really bad and dangerous to our country their words cannot be allowed to stand seditious behavior from traitors multiple explanation points and lots of caps everywhere lock them up Question mark, question mark, question mark.

10:31Then he posted another post. Seditious behavior punishable by death. Then he posted another one. Seditious behavior at the highest level. Each one of these traitors to our country should be arrested and put on trial. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. We won't have a country anymore. An example must be set. And then he reposted a bunch of things other people said, including one that said, hang them, George Washington would. now just to show how desensitized we are to all of this i would call it nonsense and obfuscation and carnival barking pt barnum shock jock trying to shock us all into you know looking at them and paying them close attention and deflect from things they don't want us seeing except i'm pretty good and you you probably are too at putting myself back in the moment and trying to imagine what a social media series of posts like that would have done to us if Trump had done it on his very first day in office in his first term right first day in sworn in yesterday seditious behavior traitors death the astonishment shock and then almost immediate unity to do something about that would have been palpable back then but you know we get there by degrees and you just sort to shrug your shoulders now and go, well, he does that.

11:57And predictably, after an outcry, he walked back the death thing. But he's still talking about, you know, the other elements being profoundly, you know, can't stand all this kind of stuff. First of all, it's it's speech. And remember, speech is one of those rights. I was going to say that the founders gave you, but all they did was enunciate it because, according to them, you're born with it as a free person. You have a right to free speech and the most important speech. And they say this time and again is political speech your ability to criticize the leadership your lawmakers anything like that that's the number one reason they enunciated it for you and according to them it's a right that's inherent in you just by being born a free person that's your right so when he gets all mad the talk show host can criticize him or people might write bad tweets or whatever sorry pal welcome to the job criticizing the president is as american as apple pie it's the national sport and always has been in fact it was the national sport before the constitution of the united states was even drafted in 1787 so what kind of country does this guy want but the reason that these particular posts stand out from all the other nonsense he throws out there to flood the zone with crap is because it deals with the truly important questions here who controls the country and i mean you know you may say well he's the president he controls the country no he doesn't we do the country belongs to americans the military is ours not his and any attempts to blur that line is to try to chip away and and make a crack in the most important firewall we have that separates us from a place like Bangladesh when it comes to a government that is of the people by the people and for the people or a government that is sicked on the people we can talk about transgendered people and immigration and you know Epstein and war with Venezuela as if there's no relationship between the two all day long those issues pale in comparison and an importance though to breaking down the firewalls that keep us safe and the number one last fail safe on the ground is the soldier that will not do what his superior tells him to do when what his superior tells him to do is wrong and listening to the trump supporters say this will destroy the military this will the country will fall and trump said that he's still saying that so in other words if our military does what they've always been told they have to do what they are exquisitely educated and what they swear oaths to that they take so so seriously if they simply do that they're somehow seditious and treasonous or if somebody reminds them that they're supposed to do that they're seditious and treasonous might be worth diving into the uniform code of military justice or something and notice that you know troops are required to disobey orders that are contrary to the Constitution, orders that are clear violations of the laws of war, like targeting civilians or torturing people, orders that are above and beyond the authority of those ordering it.

15:15Don't you remember, John Yoo, we used to talk about this all the time during the George W. Bush administration, during the so-called torture hearings, when the Congress was trying to get to the bottom of what the government was thinking in terms of what they could order people to do and what they could do. And it was over whether or not, you know, John Yoo was asked a specific question about whether the president could order a little boy's testicles crushed in front of his father to get the father to, you know, confess or say something. And where's the bomb? I'll crush your son's testicles if you don't tell me.

15:42And John Yoo's answers to one of these questions was it would depend on why the president thought he had to do that. And people freaked out because that's too much power for the president to have. Of course, presidents don't tend to think that. But that's why we have multiple branches of government co-equal, not subordinate, co-equal branches of government whose job it is to check each other and of course we've been talking about for years how unbalanced that system has become and we're like a wobbling top now and everybody sees it the stability and equilibrium of the system is now wobbling and the current president uses that as a tactic i mean he he pulls the creases that start to appear in the edifice of our country and pull them apart wider for all sorts of reasons i mean why why do this deflecting maybe the epstein thing who knows or maybe he just naturally does it he seems like a guy that throws out these kinds of comments they cause earthquakes to happen and he just moves on to the next earthquake almost blissfully unaware of the fallout that the most powerful man in the world in control of 5 000 nuclear weapons that his simple utterances can do to markets around the world i mean think about think about how foreign countries must feel right now and i'm sure you're not really worried about that but i mean there's a reason the presidents have always been so careful about what they said and how they said it because they don't want to you know destroy the equilibrium of the good times you know that we have here without starvation and without global war i mean we have starvation and war everywhere but you know what i mean the stability of the planet and then to go around and try to pit us against each other by suggesting somehow that if our soldiers do not act like Japanese troops in a bonsai charge or who will commit suicide on command, that somehow the country will go down the tubes.

17:30If you get to a point where the president, this president or any other president were to order our troops to do something in the country here and a lot of them refuse to do it, you damn well better believe they've got a good reason for that and you're going to want them to refuse to do it because they would have been asked to do something terrible i mean if you ask if you tell if you're you're in a wartime situation i was reading the comments on social media which i haven't been on and it's been wonderful but um i did go on and read some comments about this and some of the lines from these people who are saying that this is an absolute travesty and will destroy our military i mean they were talking about it like it was a scene from a few good men and it's jack nicholson saying we follow orders or people die, forgetting that the whole point of the movie is that there's orders you're not allowed to follow.

18:18And the people on the ground at ground zero who are ordered to do it are the ones who have to make that judgment. It's acting like we don't understand that that's always been the case. I mean, the Nuremberg trials are the classic sort of precedent, but there are events in American military history going back, I think, to the War of 1812 where that same superior order's defense was used and shot down. I believe the guy who ran the Anderson prison after the Civil War, he was tried and hanged. I think he tried to use it. Came up, as we said, in Nuremberg, certainly with the Germans, but it came up during the Vietnam War more than once.

18:59I mean, everybody cites the My Lai Massacre as a case where, you know, we killed like 350 to 550 Vietnamese women, children, and old men and the defense was they were ordered to do it what makes me lie so specifically shocking is that there was no danger i mean there's more than a hundred troops there there's helicopters they're facing a bunch of civilians old people infants women and they certainly weren't ordered to do the gang rapes which they also did i mean something like between 20 and 30 of these guys were originally brought up on charges afterwards. And the person who eventually, you know, sort of said that this can't happen was given a medal, a helicopter pilot.

19:48The Army sort of tried to either cover it up or not make a big deal out of it until the news broke and then all hell broke loose. But that was at a time when the Army was starting to fray. And by 1970, 71, it was so badly frayed that the next decade, that entire generation of war leaders, people like Colin Powell and his generation, would be involved in an attempt to reshore up a force that had been badly worn down in terms of not just the people, but the ethics and the morale and the cohesiveness. That's a situation that is inexplicable. and the idea that you should follow orders when it involves you mowing down civilians and just so you know this is something where they took a lunch break william westmoreland the general in charge of the whole affair pointed out that they took a lunch break plenty of time to consider what you're doing but me lie you can be accused of cherry picking because it is so unbelievably stand out i mean there's nothing quite like that uh in the latter part of the 20th century mid late 20th century so you don't want to be accused of cherry picking a situation so let's pick a different vietnam war era incident where the soldiers in this case they were marines where the marines were accused of doing bad things and the people who said that they were following orders were held accountable for not saying no, for not using their judgment.

21:33The case was called United States versus Keenan. And originally I was going to give all the horrific details of this because I wanted to point out how that case so matches all of the complaints that the people screaming bloody murder about how can you put troops in this situation, you know, where they have to make these decisions that will compromise their entire service in the war, you don't follow your superior's orders, you're going to get in terrible trouble. But if you do follow those orders and those orders are illegal, you're also going to get into trouble, which is what happened to PFC Marine Charles W.

22:09Keenan. And in that case, you're not talking about, you know, a hundred men led by officers with helicopters and people that you can, you know, go to and ask questions. And you're talking about a combat patrol led by a corporal who was like 22 or something. He's in charge, and there's 10 of you, and you're in enemy country. That is about as difficult a situation as you can put people into. And if you can't tell the difference between, you know, the enemy and yourself, and you're in Viet Cong country, and you find they go into this village. This is the story. So it's on the morning. The court documents say 8.30 to 9 a.m.

22:51September 22nd, 1966, when the army is still in good shape, the Marines are still in good shape. cohesiveness wise discipline wise all that stuff and these 22 year olds and younger head on into bandit country they know there's vc vietcong nearby they head into this uh little hamlet there's there's two of them and they start searching the buildings you know you never know where there's going to be a booby trap or somebody waiting to ambush you or what have you and originally i had recorded a version of this where i went down point by point what happened And then I thought to myself, you know what?

23:27I don't want to reopen old wounds or family things. Nobody needs that. So rather than go, you can find details on all this stuff. The pictures of my lie, by the way, which many of them were not available when I was a kid. There's incredible things to look at. When you look at them, you will know in your heart of hearts that soldiers should have said, I'm not going to do that. And that that's what an American would want of their soldiers, right? And their Marines and their airmen and all that. We want you to be discerning. You know, don't gang rape people and then kill them, for example. That's not what happened in the Kenan case.

24:05In the Kenan case, the corporal who was commanding the whole thing, his last name was Lachko. they went up into this area and the events led to lachko killing a woman and then an old man and in those situations pfc keenan found himself being told to do things and when he did him he got in trouble afterwards for not saying no in an appeal he was found to uh they found sort of a loophole the question of when the woman that the corporal in charge of the patrol shot when she actually died became an incident in the case because pfc keenan was either asked should he finish her off or was told to finish her off by his leader in the patrol and he shot her with a burst from his automatic weapon at close range but in the appeals situation it was determined that the woman was probably dead already so that's kind of a technicality it's same thing you had in the manson case with leslie houghton stabbing rosemary la bianca and the case saying that la bianca was probably already dead when she did that that's a weird sort of a loophole but that loophole didn't exist with the later killing of the old man that they ran into again neither of those people the old man nor the old woman uh it was testified in court were supposed to be dangerous but with the old man situation after the corporal in charge of the platoon lachko shot the old man he told everybody else to open fire while screaming it open fire damn you open fire and they did and then tried to say afterwards that they were just doing what they were told they were told that they you know you follow orders it's basically the follow orders of people die thing and keenan and lachko uh and another guy end up in court over it we should point out that these courts are not made up of namby, pamby, liberal, or even conservative judges.

26:04They're not made up of liberal or conservative or suburban housewife juries. Usually, not always, but usually the prosecution and defense attorneys, the defense attorneys can be civilians, but usually they're military. The prosecutors are military. It's just like you would have seen in something like A Few Good Men. It's a military court. And these are people who understand the reality of what the military is asked to do what their roles are in terms of having some sort of decision making and morality gauge while they do it and also the real world effects that a trial like this will have on the war effort by the 1969 appeal in u.s versus keenan the military is going to lose something like 12 000 guys or something in 1968 69 each year they're going to suffer something like 150 i looked at the casually 150 000 wounded in a year i mean this has real bearing in a hot war situation this is a message that you're sending to the other troops on the ground in country this is what will happen to you if you do not use your judgment and if you listen to the final part of the court documents you can go check out this court case the court lays out the problem and the problem is that you are not an automaton it's just like we said you are not a japanese soldier who's expected to slit his own belly if his commander tells him to you you're expected to use your judgment and one reason why it's important for military personnel even if they're basically kids to use their own judgment is you don't know what the situation of the person who's giving you the orders are.

27:49In the case of the U.S. versus Kenan court case, originally Corporal Lachko, the guy in charge of the patrol, was convicted of murder. But on appeal, that sentence was lowered because of his state of mind. Now, I've seen different descriptions of his state of mind, everything from he was considered temporarily insane or just that there was some sort of mental health situation that was not taken into account by the earlier court. The bottom line, though, is that shouldn't surprise us. People can lose it due to stress or all kinds of other things. And that's why just in case your commanding officer is ordering you to do something and they're not in their right mind, you need to be in yours.

28:37And remember, this is not a bunch of civilians making this determination. And these people are making determinations that they know darn well will affect conduct on the ground because when this case is first tried the war is still going on and when the appeal happens the war is still going on and in 1966 the year all this occurred the u.s is suffering about 17 to 18 deaths on average per day because in 66 they'll suffer something like 6300 6400 kia think about the last time we suffered that in a year in this country so that's heavy duty fighting by modern american standards so this is real world hot blood you know war stuff and the determination that this court makes affects people on the ground and how they behave and what their standards of conduct are expected to be or else and that court issued a ruling which if i read it to you and i will sounds like i'm repeating myself over and over they use the same terms and they say it again and again they batter it into your head you are not a robot the key element in the summation in the case is when the court says that a Marine is a reasoning agent.

30:01In other words, not an automaton. Let me read you the last paragraph I have here in the case details that the court said. It sounds like they're instructing a jury, you know, telling them what they need to consider and what the rules are. It sounds like I'm repeating myself three times here, but I'm not. They are. For emphasis. I'll read it to you verbatim. Quote, we've had evidence in the case regarding orders by a superior and the legality thereof the general rule is that the acts of a subordinate done in good faith and in compliance with a supposed duty or order are justifiable this justification does not exist however when these actions are manifestly beyond the scope of his authority or the order was of such a nature that a man of ordinary sense and understanding would know it to be illegal.

30:57Thus, the acts of a marine done in good faith and without malice in the compliance with the orders of a superior are justifiable unless such acts are manifestly beyond the scope of his authority and such that a man of ordinary sense and understanding would know them to be illegal. Therefore, if you find beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused under the circumstances of his age and military experience could not have honestly believed the order issued by his squad leader to be legal under the laws and usages of war then the killing of the alleged victim was without justification a marine is a reasoning agent they write who was under a duty to exercise judgment in obeying orders to the extent that where such orders are manifestly beyond the scope of the authority of the one issuing the order and are palpably illegal upon their face then the act of obedience to such orders will not justify acts pursuant to such illegal orders end quote in other words if one of the commanders during the myli massacre had ordered one of their soldiers to gang rape one of the prepubescent children at that conflict you would have had a responsibility to say that's illegal and i won't now this is a difficult situation to put people into as one of the people in one of these situations had said if i didn't do that they would put me up against a wall and shoot me this is exactly by the way what the germans claimed at nuremberg that to not follow the orders of an Adolf Hitler was to sign one's death warrant and maybe one's family's death warrant, and they were hanged anyway.

32:50One of the complaints I've seen online from people when the six Democratic lawmakers said that the military are supposed to refuse to follow illegal orders. It's what illegal order? You have to name the illegal orders, but you don't. it's all in the uniform code of military justice the things that you can and can't do and if you said what illegal order that expects you to then in any situation lay out any possible thing that you're not supposed to do it doesn't work like that you have several general categories you can't be told to commit acts against the civilian population that amounts to torture or murder you can't violate the constitution as much as you think you can't do and they're broad categories because you don't know what you're going to be asked to do on the ground if i say to you thou shalt not gang rape children in vietnam during an operation there do i have to specifically lay that out to you or is that the sort of thing that would be covered in a broader sense by your oath of office and a what did the court say a judgment made that where orders are manifestly beyond the scope and authority of the one issuing the order right no officer can tell you to gang rape a child and have that be okay that's not within their purview right that's not within their capabilities to tell you to do that or whether it's palpably illegal on its face right they tell you to do something that's palpably illegal go rape that child um if you do it you're not getting a get out of jail free card and if you don't do it well if they don't line you up against a wall like that one soldier was worried about then maybe you'll get a medal afterwards for being the person who stood up and represented the best traditions morals and ethics of the military like some of these people were awarded medals in the my life situation for doing the right thing rather than have to spend the rest of your life having people ask you questions about you know something that happened to you on one horrific day in september 1966 that you have to spend the rest of your life living with not to mention the victims too and the uniform code of military justice that congress put together uh creates real rules that protect us all and the oath of enlistment that these folk take i mean the u.s army oath of enlistment has the out clause for following orders right at the very end i mean it reads i and then you put your name in there do solemnly swear or affirm that i will support and defend the constitution of the united states right the constitution not a person against all enemies foreign and domestic that i will bear true faith and allegiance to the same and that i will obey the orders of the president of the united states and the orders of the officers appointed over me and here's your out clause according to regulations and the uniform code of military justice so help me god end quote there's your out clause right according to the universe so if you get ordered to do something that's wrong you use your agency as a thinking marine soldier airman etc etc and you do what's right and we assume you will because that's been drilled into you and you'll get in trouble by the way if you don't just like pfc keenan did and so when the president of the united states says that the democratic lawmakers who simply reminded the troops of an oath they already know very well should get in trouble for doing so he's saying they're treasonous and seditionists for reminding people of the rules that troops are required to follow if they themselves want to stay out of trouble i mean does the president think it is seditious and treasonous for the you know the military drill instructors and whatnot who teach and instruct our new recruits about all this stuff are they treasonous and seditious too they're the people at ground zero telling them what the six democratic lawmakers are only reminding them about you see what i'm saying here is that if you start shipping away at what we're telling our troops on the ground is their responsibility.

37:13And if right now we're saying their responsibility is to only follow orders if they're lawful, what are you doing? And for those people who act like it's somehow this big change and we're going to destroy the military, no, the big change is what we're talking about doing now, undercutting something that our troops have been, well, studying, paying attention to, and then teaching the new brethren who follow after them since 1947. And in a more spirit-like way since far before that, you can flood the zone with crap all you like but this is a giant red alert amongst all the nonsense that's out there this is stuff that matters this is where the power is and so right now that power is in the hands of us it can't be allowed to drift into the hands of anyone else if in 50 years some other president decides he wants to take whatever our military looks like in 50 years and turn it against the people like the president of bangladesh did i would hope that our safeguards like our troops on the ground being able to make discerning contextually oriented decisions as these young just out of high school corporals and privates were forced to make in the keenan case in a war zone i would hope that they'd be able to make those decisions because it's the rubber meets the road moment like that sort of fictional scenario from five or so decades from now in my mind's eye it's that rubber meets the road moment there where we depend on these people these men and women who are us to protect us sometimes you protect us overseas fighting people from other countries and sometimes you protect us by being our last line of defense against someone who would hurt us let's hope that never happens and let's stop chipping away at the very things that helps make sure it never will Thank you.