On Monday on MS NOW's “The Last Word,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-N.C.) said the United States was on the “wrong side” if survivors were killed in a subsequent strike on a suspected drug ship 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 is no war? What do we call it when there is no war?”
Whitehouse said: “Yes, the usual word is murder.”
O'Donnell asked, “Is this what you see here?”
Whitehouse said: “I don't know enough about the circumstances to make a final legal decision, but for Pete's sake, you have people whose boat was blown up. Whatever they were doing has now ended in an explosion on 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 mean, you know, make a Hollywood reference: when the bad ones guys shooting machine guns, survivors in the water, these aren't the Americans in the movies, they're the bad guys. And we're on the wrong, wrong side if we're blowing up survivors in the water rather than trying to send rescuers.”
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