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Posted by nomilk 9/7/2025

Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission(www.nytimes.com)
331 points | 260 commentspage 4
some_guy_nobel 9/7/2025|
Not as bad as Bay of Pigs, but despicable nonetheless. Kudos to the journalists who surfaced this.
vkou 9/7/2025|
The Bay of Pigs was arguably an act of war, this was a war crime.
some_guy_nobel 9/8/2025||
I think you can credibly make either claim for both.
vkou 9/8/2025||
An act of war follows the rules of war. You are allowed to shoot in an area where civilians are, if you are aiming for a military asset.

You can't just massacre a village because some villagers saw you.

The animals who did this were not following the rules of war. The animals who covered it up, and did not prosecute them deserve to hang with them, too.

loki49152 9/9/2025||
.... as opposed to what? What do you think they should have done, sat around waiting to be captured so the could be featured in a NoKo TikTok video?
clueless 9/5/2025||
>They found no guns or uniforms. Evidence suggested that the crew, which people briefed on the mission said numbered two or three people, had been civilians diving for shellfish. All were dead, including the man in the water. Officials familiar with the mission said the SEALs pulled the bodies into the water to hide them from the North Korean authorities. One added that the SEALs punctured the boat crew’s lungs with knives to make sure their bodies would sink.

Nothing to see here but a bunch of psychopaths killing innocent people as they screw up their own mission

clueless 9/5/2025||
and then... "Many of the people involved in the mission were later promoted."
aaomidi 9/5/2025|||
That has basically been the entire point of the US military since the end of the Cold War (and before that too, but you could argue there was a better reason back then)
rasz 9/6/2025|||
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_abductions_of_Jap... where NK would send raiding parties to Japan, supposedly finally ended in the eighties.
mac-attack 9/5/2025|||
The lung puncturing was especially brutal. Literal hitmen actions
iamdelirium 9/5/2025||
Sounds like SEALs all right.
neilv 9/7/2025||
Yesterday's HN post on the story, with some discussion, but was flagged:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45143759

    [flagged] US special forces killed North Korean civilians in botched 2019 mission (reuters.com)
    68 points by hnlurker22 1 day ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 28 comments
ChrisArchitect 9/7/2025|||
It's a dupe. Earlier, source, unflagged.
Mistletoe 9/7/2025||
Why was this flagged? Absolute worst feature of HN, I don’t know why it continues.
Seattle3503 9/7/2025|||
I don't mind it. Looking at the comments, it seems like a number of people got facts wrong (based on the articles that have been written) and emotions were high. It's just hard to have these conversations and HN isn't necessarily the place to have them.
nomilk 9/7/2025||
Point taken, but sometimes 'heated' conversations happen on topics of great importance, and are sometimes the conversations from which we learn the most. (certainly not always, but sometimes).

A non-HN example: often when two people I have huge respect for as intellectuals go at it in debate over something, I can often infer that the topic is of some importance (I might not have ever heard of the topic before), and when smart people differ greatly in their views, at the very least, it's an 'interesting' topic, perhaps warranting further inquisition.

dang 9/7/2025||||
You can't judge this by individual datapoints that you disagree with.

To answer your question, imagine HN's frontpage saturated by stories that you would consider entirely offtopic and sensational. To a first approximation, that's what HN would be for everyone if it weren't for user flags.

Of course the system is imperfect and overcorrects. But the presence of the current post on the frontpage already shows that sometimes—often, in fact—the overcorrection gets adjusted.

neilv 9/7/2025|||
Something can be flagged (or downvoted) because people think the topic or discussion is off-charter or incorrect, or to suppress information/discussion for ulterior reasons.

In some forums, tactics like flaming, disinformation, off-topic noise like jokes, upvoting diversions, etc. can also suppress information/discussion.

3np 9/7/2025||
Upstream reporting: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/navy-seal-north-korea-...
dang 9/7/2025||
Thanks, we've changed the URL to that from https://reason.com/2025/09/05/navy-seals-reportedly-killed-n... now.
Seattle3503 9/7/2025||
This is much better. Some of the other sources made it seem like the seals were killing witnesses, rather than confusing civilians for patrols and panicking.
ChrisArchitect 9/7/2025||
[dupe] Earlier, source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45137040
nibman 9/7/2025||
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iknowitsakek 9/7/2025||
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nython 9/7/2025||
> The plan called for the Navy to sneak a nuclear-powered submarine, nearly two football fields long, into the waters off North Korea and then deploy a small team of SEALs in two mini-subs, each about the size of a killer whale

The lengths some people willing to go just not to use the metric system

neilv 9/7/2025||
People died under troubling circumstances. Hopefully the strange quirks of the news org's writing style don't derail discussion.
marcosdumay 9/7/2025||
A football field is close to 100m, independently of whether people manage the balls with their feet or with their hands.
fnordpiglet 9/7/2025|||
And killer whales are about the size of mini subs whether people steer them with their feet or hands too!
ProAm 9/7/2025|||
100 yds :)
marcosdumay 9/7/2025||
1 yard is ~0.9 m
ProAm 9/11/2025||
1 foot is 0.3048 m
s5300 9/7/2025|
[dead]
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