We talked to dozens and dozens of seals for this project and I just think you can't underestimate the amount of moral stress and strain that they have been enduring over the past 20 years and

part of that is frustrating on another level because it's all basically happening in secret that basically after 9-11 we decided that we were going to fight wars on the whole

covertly and that the seals and other special operators were going to become the tip of the spear and they were sent out on manhunting missions to get members of al-Qaeda and enemy Iraqis and enemy combatants and as once you put it that they were killing people so close you could smell their bad breath before they did it

Hello and welcome to wise is happening with me your host Chris Hayes you know the phrase war crime or war crimes or war criminal packs a very profound specific moral punch for a reason right I think a lot of that grows out of the wake of war two honestly in the Nuremberg trials and the sort of recognition of the gasliness the sort of she was going to be in the war.

So you're evil of what the Nazis had done but of course like laws of war extend before then and there has been this long wrestling amongst international legal theorists and generals and military leaders in different countries in different places to essentially try to civilize war right to draw these distinctions between things you can and cannot do even when you are engaged in the act of killing and violent.

And destruction and you know I think there's a certain kind of radical critique of that literature and that development that says all wars a crime and this is a way of sort of dressing it up and and making it seem safe for consumption or it's a way of making uncivilized barbarity and brutality seem like fine and civilized and something that nations can do.

But there's also a way in which I think particularly in the wake of war two the distinctions between you know soldiers engaging on a battlefield and you know the torture and murder of people seems like a really important moral salient one and you know the US has committed war crimes this is something that ill on Omar in a lot of trouble for saying but that's just like an absolute fact it's happened in my lifetime multiple times there have been war crimes committed in Afghanistan torture was a war crime the torture the waterboarding that was a crime.

We engaged in was a war crime unit we said it wasn't because it wasn't technically torture and there was a very prominent case recently of an accusation of a war crime against a man named Eddie Gallagher who is a chief petty officer a Navy seal who with his Navy seal team took captive a 17 year old ISIS fighter and mausole and posed with him with his corpse.

He was accused of stabbing into death of murdering him and then posing with the corpse he was tried and you know sort of remarkable turn of events which we'll talk about acquitted on the murder but convicted of the crime of posing with the corpse and he was then subsequently pardoned by Donald Trump and became a kind of right when cause a lab.

And I remember reading about the case and falling pretty closely and the thing that was most striking was the fact that the people that turned him in were the people on that Navy team.

The warriors that fought with him and I remember thinking wow it must have really freaked them out to do that because obviously there's incredibly intense camaraderie there's also like a definitely pretty strong no snitching norm I think in combat units like that.

And so I remember thinking wow this guy must have really been off the rails but the story sort of floated at the periphery of the news and I always kind of wanted to dig deeper into it and so I was super psyched when I saw that the very very excellent podcast host and producer Dan Tabersky had a new podcast out about the case called the line it's on Apple original podcast it's out now it's really excellent and I would suggest that after you listen to this interview you go listen to all the episodes we're going to just sort of touch on some of it but it's really interesting.

It's really well produced really well reported tons of great interviews and voices in there and it's my great pleasure to welcome Dan Tabersky to wise is happening.

Hey thanks for having me happy here. Dan tell me how you got into the story.

This is actually the first podcast project that I ever made that was not my original idea.

My first one was podcast called missing Richard Simmons about what happened to Richard Simmons when he stepped out of the spotlight in 2017 I did a couple others including one last year called running from cops.

That's great by the way. Thank you.

You should check that out. Yeah missing Richard Simmons is really great too. I should say I've listened to both.

Good. Thank you.

Wait one second. Tell us what running from cops is because it's really a great important. Yeah podcast.

Running from cops is basically an investigation into the show reality show cops and how it's influenced our perception of policing in America and it came from my own sort of I don't want to say obsession but I've seen I asked made I've seen maybe 500 episodes of the show of cops even before we started reporting the podcast.

That show at the age of 11. Yeah. That show would come on and I thought how is this legal. Yeah exactly thinking it like at the time bad boys bad boys.

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