Monday on MS NOW’s “The Last Word,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said the United States was on the “wrong side” if survivors were killed during a follow-up strike 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 if there isn’t a war? What do we call it when there isn’t a 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 Pete’s sake, you’ve got people whose boat has been blown up. Whatever they were doing has now ended in an explosion on the water and you now have two survivors in the water. Even when you are at war, a decent nation goes and rescues the survivors and then treats them as prisoners of war even in a war situation. In this case, I mean, you know, to make a Hollywood reference, when the bad guys are machine gunning, the survivors in the water, it’s not Americans in the movies, it’s the bad guys. And we are on the wrong, wrong side of this if we’re blowing up survivors in the water rather than trying to send rescue.”
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