Yahoo: Chris Kyle: Ex-US Navy Seal Sniper Shot Dead

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that is true it was more that the us saves europe from stalin than hitler.although america was a force in japan and the pacific the soviets did most of the work in europe,3 million people died in stalingrad (volgagrad) alone.
but had the us not been involved europe would have been stalins for the taking.

i disagree that japan surendered because of russian advances.russia would have backed any chinese invasion of japan but stalin did not want japan.the russians wanted to spread communism and with communist ally china in the far east stalin would not want to invade japan.give arms and aid to china yes but russia never conquered just to get more land they wanted to spread comunism

There are four simple steps:
a) Do you believe that the war in which the sniper killed was morally or legally justified?
b) If not, do you believe that following the orders of superior officers absolves the sniper from personal responsibility?
c) If your answer to both question is "no", it follows that, in your opinion, the sniper is personally responsible for premeditated and unjustified killing. That is commonly called murder.
d) Someone who has murdered 160 times is commonly called a serial killer.

a) Immature. The US was at war. Chris Kyle, an enlisted soldier, had no way of changing this fact. Under the rules of war, his actions were no different from that of the common foot soldier. He was just more effective. The entire concept of "I don't like this war, so the actions of individual X are unjustified" is meaningless when people are *actually* there in physical combat. Given his training and role (A SEAL sniper), his targets were probably much less likely to be innocent bystanders than those killed by rank and file US soldiers.
b) Personal responsibility is the default concept. Command responsibility - even after the My Lai Massacre - is still controversial.
c) Irrelevant, due to my response to (a).
d) Irrelevant, due to my response to (a).

And why are people focusing on snipers, and not bomber pilots? Guess which category of soldiers causes the most collateral damage...

Yep!



Sniping is a recognized and approved method by all four branches of the US military.
That's why they have sniper schools.
It's not murder and it's not serial killing.
Every war was unjust and illegal in someones mind.

This person didn't just serve as a sniper, he then wrote a book about it and gleefully proclaimed that he enjoyed it and that the people of Iraq were not human, and then tries to make even more money off the blood he shed by setting up a mercenary outfit and to use his notoriety to further militarise society. This man was shameless. Had he done his job and shut his mouth he wouldn't be so objectionable. Interesting how things happen; after he is shot and deified in the media, another ex-soldier has the whole LAPD peeing in their pants and actually had a real cause. I'm sure that he is far more a folk hero than Kyle ever will be. Kyle appeals to the fascist inside people, Dorner appeals to a far better side of people.

^ Yet you worship Dorner, who was a coward and a murderer.

I think you're just trolling for attention.

A coward? It's the usual boilerplate; people who go on suicide missions for the Enemy are supposed to be cowards whilst drone operators are the most courageous people on Earth!

You seem to have been listening to Art Bell too often.

I have never heard of Art Bell. I remember when Bill Maher said that it was stupid to call the hijackers "cowards" when compared with US officials lobbing cruise missiles all the time and that they actually pilot aircraft into buildings and he was effectively forced off the air for telling this truth. Typical. I don't particularly like him either but he was right.

Maher was technically correct but it wasnt even his comment. Conservative pundit Dinesh D'Souza said it on the show and Maher agreed with him. But Maher took all the heat from the right and lost his old tv gig as a result.

Maher made hand gestures representing the crashing the aeroplanes into the towers and said that it was not cowardly. As for DeSouza, The neocons at the time were using this line also to suggest that Americans must accept more military casualties so that it can carry out ground operations when previous wars were causes deemed too frivolous for that. It was that people become used to having those "transfer tubes" come home after a series of bombing attacks.

Why is it immature to ask the question whether a war is justified?


If "I don't like this war" were the definition of "unjustified", I would agree that it would be immature to make that the basis for deciding whether someone is a serial killer. But I think the immaturity lies in the definition of "unjustified". Are you seriously proposing that should be the definition?


How should I reconcile that with this:
That sounds a lot like saying that Chris Kyle bears no personal responsibility for whatever he did while following orders merely because he lacked the power to pull the US out of the war. What have I overlooked?


If the appendix to "Obedience to Authority" is correct, it was not at all controversial after WWII during the war crimes trial of a Japanese officer. He was found guilty of war crimes because his troops killed civilians at a time when the officer was no longer in communication with his troops and could neither know what they were doing nor give them orders to stop. IIRC the court reasoned that the officer was responsible for training his troops in such a way that they would not commit war crimes, and he was hanged for failing in this responsibility.

About My Lai, a book was recently published based on the secret war crimes files at the Pentagon obtained when the author was trying to find out about PTSD and the role witnessing atrocities had on this. It's no surprise that the Vietnam War was systematic My Lai-style acts simply because of the fact that from the very top the plan was total war against the Vietnamese nation itself, to kill more people than can be replaced, the birth rate so to speak, and this was supposed to be called "crossover point", and that famously the metrics of success was "body count"; to kill as many people as possible.

Units were given quotas of people that had to be killed. The whole nature of the war aims showed that they didn't believe this was a war against a political faction but a war against the entire nation, despite the official story. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers were sent there with this terrible mission.

I always knew Iraq would go badly because of the hatred and contempt the American leadership had for the whole Iraqi society, this was war against the Iraqi nation and the Arab nation. This would work as well as the Nazis going into Slavic territories. Kyle shows this attitude that the Nazis had in the Slavic territories. This guy would have joined the Einsatzgruppen in a second.

Chris Kyle really is the poster boy for American fascism.

The point is that it is irrelevant. One might as well call a German machine gunner mowing down Allied soldiers on a beach in Normandy in WWII a serial killer. The concept of a serial killer only makes sense within the context of an otherwise peaceful framework of society. For actions directed against enemy soldiers in a state of war, this concept is meaningless.

Only if you abandon or restrict the concept of personal responsibility. Are you saying the soldier has no duty to judge whether the war is justified? Having been excused from that responsibility, is the soldier then only responsible for following the laws of his country and the treaties his country has signed up to?

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: That's why I used the word "Immature" in the first place. You are imposing naive legal categories (justification, responsibility) upon people who do not have the luxury of being naive.

The reality of warfare is that you have people - often young and inexperienced - cowering in a trench, hiding in a barn, sitting below a window, carrying out orders which are incomprehensible to them because they are only informed on a "need to know" basis. To these people, concepts of laws, treaties etc. are worth less than toilet paper once the bullets start flying.