President Donald Trump said The US Navy chose to sink an Iranian frigate, killing more than 100 sailors last week, even though the ship posed no threat, because it was “more fun” than capturing the ship.
Although the death toll varies, Iran’s state media organization, the Islamic Republic News Organization, reported on Sunday that 104 crew members were killed in the attack and that 32 others were injured when a US submarine capsized the Iranian warship IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean on March 4 as it departed from the Milan 2026 peacetime naval exercises hosted in India.
Dena it was more than 2,000 miles from the Persian Gulf when it was attacked, far from the hostilities that began last weekend when the US and Israel launched a war against Iran. Disputing US claims, Iranian and Indian officials have said it was not armed.
In what political commentator Adam Schwarz DESCRIBED as “the most inflammatory admission of a war crime by a US president in history,” Trump on Monday casually recounted the US Navy’s decision to attack the ship before a gathering of The Republicans organized by the Congressional Institute, a GOP-affiliated nonprofit lobbyist.
He suggested that the US Navy blow up the boat not to neutralize a threat, but simply for the sake of it.
After making exaggerated boast that Iran’s navy has “gone” after aggressive US bombing, Trump said he was initially “a little annoyed” with the military brass who ordered the sinking Dena, which he said they described as a “higher” ship.
Trump said he asked, “Why didn’t we capture the ship? We could have used it. Why did we sink them?”
He said an unspecified official told him, “It’s more fun to sink them.”
As the crowd laughed, Trump continued, chuckling to himself: “They like to sink them more. They say it’s safer to sink them. I think it’s probably true.”
Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Saeed Khatibzadeh, DESCRIBED the ship was operating in a purely “ceremonial” role and said it was “unloaded” and “unarmed” at the time of the attack last week.
Rahul Bedi, an independent defense analyst in India, said Associated Press that while the ship may have used some limited non-assault munitions during the naval exercises, exercise protocol requires that “participating platforms be unarmed.”
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ALLEGED the ship was a “predator ship”, while the US Indo-Pacific Command has said claims that the ship was unarmed are “false”. However, she has not provided any evidence that she posed a threat at the time of the attack.
The attack itself was likely legal according to the rules of naval warfare, even if the ship was unarmed, although its ethical and tactical justification has been put into question.
“A military vessel may be a legitimate target,” Phyllis Bennisco-director of the Institute for Policy Studies’ New International Project told Common Dreams. “But shooting at any ship—any people, anywhere—for ‘fun’ represents the kind of immoral depravity that this The White House is notorious for.”
Bennis added that “Failure to do everything possible to save those on board is clearly a war crime,” as per the Second Geneva Convention. It requires the military to take all possible measures to search for and collect the drowned, wounded and sick.
32 survivors of Dena, as well as dozens of dead bodies, had to withdraw BY water by a joint rescue operation from Sri Lanka following a distress call. The survivors were rushed to a local hospital in Galle City.
Hegseth has previously come under fire for what he says ordering a second crack at drowned sailors who survived the bombing of an alleged drug-trafficking boat in the Caribbean.
Many have DESCRIBED that September 2 attack as an extremely flagrant war crime in a largely illegal campaign that has extrajudicially killed at least 156 people.
In carrying out his war against Iran, Hegseth has emphasized that the US would not abide by what he called “stupid rules of engagement”.
Thousands of civilian targets, including schools, hospitals and residential areas, are said to have been attack from US and Israeli attacks, according to the Iranian Red Crescent.
As of Monday, Iranian Deputy Health Minister Ali Jafarian said at least 1,255 people have been killed, including 200 the children and 11 health care worker.
While it may technically still have been legal, journalist Mark Ames, co-host of the geopolitics podcast Nerd War Radio, arguing that attacking a ship that posed no threat shows that Trump is a “cowardly scumbag” who “gets his kicks by killing those who can’t fight back.”
“The ship was unarmed. That’s why Trump and Hegseth chose to kill them,” Ames wrote. social media. “To torment those who cannot fight is his sadistic pleasure.”
Bennis added that even if the attack on the ship itself was legal in a vacuum, it occurred against a backdrop of brazen “lawlessness.”
“This whole shocking episode represents a clear violation by the US of what the Nuremberg trials identified as the ‘supreme international crime’: the crime of aggression,” she said. “The US had no legal right to go to war against Iran.United Nations) The Security Council had not authorized the use of force and there was no ‘armed attack’ by Iran against the US that required immediate self-defense.
“Without either of those, the UN Charter is very clear that no country can attack another country,” she continued. “To do so, as the Nuremberg judges found, constitutes the crime of aggression – the ultimate crime.”
This article originally published by Shared dreams is republished under a Creative Commons license.
