cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38323356
Oct. 31, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ET Michelle Goldberg
Andy O’Brien, a former Democratic state legislator and newspaper editor, told me that outsiders didn’t fully understand how radicalizing the second Trump presidency has been for ordinary Democrats. Even senior citizens, he said, were becoming “fire-breathing leftists. They’re just pissed off.”
These voters understood that Platner had made mistakes, but they saw him as a fighter. “Five years ago, he would have been dead in the water, I think,” said O’Brien, who now works with the labor movement. “But this is such an unprecedented time. I think a lot of people really believe that we need somebody who can effectively fight against fascism.”
Maine is an overwhelmingly white state, but it’s not just white guys who feel this way. “We’re sticking by him,” said Safiya Khalid, a Somali American activist and former member of the Lewiston City Council.
I think people can change for the better, and Graham seems to have done exactly that.
Even if he had changed, his record of poorly-informed decision making makes him a bad choice to be a leader.
here’s his reddit post where he’s talking about circumventing direct orders to commit even more warcrimes than he would normally be allowed to by the US military:
spoiler
There’s all sorts of reasons I could point to why Graham Platner is unfit to be a leader in any leftist movement but the most glaring one is that as far as I can tell from his statements he thinks the US wasn’t engaged in anything wrong overseas.
I have addressed this before.
Nothing about that post is a war crime.
At that time, the BC did not want to authorize mortars for returned fire when getting hit with indirect fire, that was detected by acoustic sensing to translate the source firing positions.
So the marines created an even less explosive yield return fire solution that he is talking about. A 40mm HEDP grenade has a smaller blast radius substantially than a mortar. They are authorized to use indirect fire weapons when attacked. They spent a lot of time and effort to calculate exact trajectories and angles needed to return fire to the calculated coordinates.
In sum, he created a less harmful indirect fire solution with a lot of due diligence to make it accurate to the threat.
It not a war crime.
because civilians were in the area?
I don’t know how so many keep missing the point here.
Routinely, one weapon system is not authorized for use, when another of lesser explosive yield is authorized for use.
They did not, due to concerns for collateral damage, want to use the higher powered indirect fire option (mortars). So the marines created a way to calculate trajectory for use of a lower powered option (40mm grenades).
Every single conflict in the last 100 years occurred with noncombatants in the theater of conflict. None, I repeat none, hold themselves to the standard of never using a munition is it could harm a civilian at all. We try like hell to avoid it, and you do due diligence to target attackers embedded in civilian infrastructure as precisely as possible.
In the very same deployment, in the very same AO, the same command team did change authorization later for the larger indirect fire munition (mortars). There was no evacuation of civilians. Decisions on what weapon to employ are made based on ground conditions at the time.
Tell me this; what is the standard of when you can use a munition? 90% confidence no civilian casualties? 99%? 99.99999%? If it is 100% no military force could ever fire a shot, so why does this use of force in a calculated way to avoid civilian collateral damage not make the cut but other instances do?
Nah, this is even more fucked.
The US Military actually thought it would be fucked up to throw explosives at those kids. platner and his unit told Uncle Sam to hold their beer while they figured out a way to still throw explosives at children without getting caught.
I assume he put that front and center on his CV when he was applying for a gig at Blackwater.
No. The reason that he himself acknowledged was that it was a civilian rich environment. And he and his unit still wanted to use indirect fire that they themselves weren’t even sure would work (hence everyone hiding the first few times) and where they never knew if the grenades actually hit the enemy but it did scare them. What were the enemy surrounded by? That’s right, civilians.
Which, according to some random googling I did, is covered by Article 51 in that attacks are prohibited if it may be expected to cause collateral damage to civillian targets.
So you can argue that you would need a lawyer to follow up on that. But… that is the argument used for trump et al as well.
Either way: Not a story I would gleefully tell people.
Alright, so again, I didn’t just randomly google these topics. I was in Iraq at the same time. I was a marine. I am deeply intimately familiar with the system in question. I currently synthesize high explosives. I have participated in ballistics research and high explosives effects research in Aberdeen proving grounds.
I was there, and used the weapon system in question.
That out of the way, here is some nuance.
Marines taking indirect fire were authorized at the time to use indirect fire weapons to suppress that indirect fire. By definition, indirect fire lands on a target you cannot observe. When an infantry rifle squad employs indirect fire from say, a M203, it is because you cannot hit the target with direct fire of a rifle or cannon.
A mk19 is simply a larger version, but the rounds almost universally issued as HEDP. The majority of their utility is in being light armor penetrating because they are constructed with an inverted cone that is base detonated. It sends the majority of its energy into the direct front of the impact in a focused plasma from the explosive detonation in the projectile. It is surprisingly ineffective as an area fragmentation weapon, even when labeled as dual purpose. I watched them get fired at attacking insurgents where the grenades detonated right next to them along a wall and do no damage to anything but the small hole in the wall of that explosive jet. On multiple occasions.
As for employment, we used indirect fire, regularly, in theater against incoming indirect fire. This was done in often, urban environments and cities. Most of all the fighting in the country after the initial invasion weeks occurred inside those cities, because no real point in fighting in open desert for nothing.
So to be very clear, mk19s were employed OFTEN in operations in urban areas, against indirect fires, as indirect fire suppression.
Further still, it is the literal smallest indirect fire weapon option to exist in the arsenal, so you could not be more judicious to respond to incoming fire than the use of a 40mm grenade.
I personally watched firefights where we used them to similar effect though not anywhere near as much advanced planning was used as he described in that Reddit post. Using the marine corps published calculations for trajectories, mapping out impact areas in advance to ensure accuracy to the limits you can within a remote FOB, is the work mortar men do to ensure accurate fire returned.
So if every single incident of returning indirect fire is a war crime, then there are a hell of a lot more war criminals in the military that need prosecution.
To be very clear, we never should have been there fighting in cities in unjust war or inversion, but it is incredibly clever ingenuity that chose the minimal explicit yield possible, with lots of effort specifically to avoid collateral damage when used. The pre-sighting described and calculating trajectories is not the work you spend weeks on if you intend to harm the wrong person.
You can believe no indirect fire weapons should ever be used in cities, and that is a fine enough opinion. You would be saying that in he face of everyday single conflict in the history of warfare in the last 100 years though and all people involved in indirect fire in places not entirely around military occupants as war criminals. Done enough opinion, but that is a vastly different interpretation that what is currently followed as a war crime in ANY modern conflict.
Yes. We understand you have experience in committing war crimes. We aren’t asking if lil skorzeny did a good job of it.
It’s almost like using indirect fire in an environment full of civillians is a no no?
Not the topic but…
Yeah. I personally wouldn’t use the word “clever” to explain “figuring out how to randomly throw grenades at civillians without getting caught after being specifically told not to do that”
I believe that he believed his commanding officers said that was the case because the risk to civillians was too great. He stated he didn’t care because he apparently knew better than everyone else because his gunnery sergeant took a seminar.
But hey, thanks for confirming that your “expertise” really is in the whole “getting away with committing warcrimes” area. Which, to be clear, nobody is denying that platner has admitted to doing. What we are more concerned with is the “committing warcrimes” part of that and why he (and apparently you) feel the need to tell everyone you did that.
as far as I’m concerned every US president should be at the front of that list and it definitely shouldn’t stop there