For them even to be thinking of doing this nearly 50 years after the event in terms of evidence they must basically have a written or recorded statement where he says he killed them, did it without instructions, knew it was murder but would happily slot the taig bastards all over again.
I think everyone has always known it was murder from the circumstances, haven't they? including other local law enforcement who say they "begged" the British government not to send the mad team of psycho soldiers who were well known for shooting people? all that has changed is that it was long enough ago not to embarrass any currently living ex prime ministers.
Sunday Bloody Sunday'. What a great song. It really encapsulates the frustration of a Sunday, doesn't it? You wake up in the morning, you've got to read all the Sunday papers, the kids are running round, you've got to mow the lawn, wash the car, and you think "Sunday, bloody Sunday!".
That’s the point I was making about eyewitness evidence.
Personal recollections of something that happened 50 years ago singling out just one of many almost identical individuals is going to get ripped to shreds by any decent counsel.
Wot strutter said with the added suggestion that he must have said at some point “I killed the fookers and I’d do it again, you want some? Yeah? You, you’re the one I’m looking at aunt, come get it, I’ll murder you like I murdered them”.
Clergs, don’t become an apologist. It happened a very long time ago and it is a disgrace. These soldiers were deployed by the government and according to all reports they actively followed the rules of engagement.
Yeah Mossad have their own demons of which to be aware. Their executions of Palestinians, in many cases absolutely innocent of terrorism, are well documented. Not a group upon which to rely.
Presumably the Trial will take place at the Old Bailey rather than Norn Ireland.
I can’t see any mainland jury convicting from so long ago; possibly split decision and then a retrial with same result, assuming that the squadie hasn’t kicked the bucket by then.
The past, esp. during the Troubles, was assuredly a foreign country...
There was a better chance of a paperwork chain during a course of behaviour rather than one isolated incident. Same thing for the worst concentration camp guards, the survivors knew them long enough in order to be able to give good identification rather than ‘a man I saw once from a distance 50 years ago surrounded by very similar looking men dressed in an identical fashion’.
I think there's a strong moral argument for prosecuting every single soldier who was there (just as they would charge everyone involved in a robbery homicide with murder in the US even if only one pulled the trigger)
I mean there are literally photos of the whole thing happening
"oh I guess we will never know"
"there are dozens of eye witness accounts collected from immediately after the event, photographs from all angles and the people involved were known to have shot at civilians in the past"
I think there's a strong moral argument for prosecuting every single soldier who was there - No wrong, in fact stupid and wrong.
(just as they would charge everyone involved in a robbery homicide with murder in the US even if only one pulled the trigger) - Terrible example that has lead to multiple gross misscarages of justice.
The shooters and the guys in charge should have been prosecuted years ago.
If you all participate in a crime then you are all guilty, that's not a miscarriage of justice outcome unless you literally weren't involved in the crime.
British soldiers (indeed western soldiers) could benefit from a reminder that they are subject to the law.
IndeedI, it's not as though only one person shot. If several all shoot at a group of unarmed civilians, does it matter in law or ethics whose bullets penetrated their bodies?
All of that said, this seems terrible timing from a wider peace pov.
Once again you appear to be missing my point, which I cannot believe that you are stupid enough to do accidentally.
My argument relates not at all to how many should have been charged. It speaks entirely to the difficulty of proving the charge against one specific individual.
I do not think Derek Bentley deserved a posthumous pardon, he went prepared to do violence and violence was done. Genuinely don't understand the outcry in that case.
If someone commits a burglary with weapons and his pal also has weapons and uses them why is he not liable for the overall outcome of the violence? In some countries he would be, the English system seems foolish.
Genuine question he wasn't fitted up, he didn't turn up unarmed expecting a bit of light pickpocketing, he wasn't brain damaged. I accept there must have been technical reasons that he should not have been found guilty but if I were on that jury it would be thumbs down for him.
(1) The emotion in some of the posts above is disturbing. This happened nearly fifty years ago. There are things like this every day around the world. There were thousands of bad things during the Troubles in NI and GB. How do you select the ones on which you expend your emotion?
(2) Passing to the politics, the Good Friday Agreement granted an amnesty to hundreds of armed terrorists, many of whom did things much worse than anything that happened on Bloody Sunday (torturing people to death over many days, doing so repeatedly). It is rather odd that we are prepared to give the terrorists a free pass but not the squaddies - after all the terrorists sought out the opportunity to commit violence, but the squaddies had to go where they were told. This is a political point, not a legal one.
(3) Basic fairness: the squaddies didn't ask to be there. They were faced with a large, angry, hostile crowd. Their task was to keep the peace, on behalf of all of us. They were inadequately trained and prepared and equipped to do that except by use of lethal force.
(4) If the mob had burnt the city centre to the ground, which was clearly their aim, what would we be doing now?
Some legal points:
(3) A legal point: The eyewitness information is now VERY stale. Statements taken at the time are all very well, but any additional evidence offered now is likely to be of very low evidential value, as is any cross-examination. That alone is probably a reason to believe that no safe conviction is possible.
(4) Rules of engagement: it's going to be pretty hard for the prosecution to prove that the rules of engagement were not observed. This was a large, angry, hostile crowd. If a defendant says he thought the criteria for firing were met, it's going to be hard to disprove that.
(5) Where are you going to find a jury that is impartial on this one? What are the rules of selection, empanelment and challenge ?
I’m quite interested in how Clergham’s position of all to face justice or else fits with her equally strident view, previously expressed around these parts, that the jury system is shit and why would anyone be a witness it’s all bollox.
I assume that it depends on her view of the nature of an individual case which seems like a marvellously consistent and fair approach.
I also assume that this horrendous questioning of the red queen will invoke a similar response as Strutter’s.
In the current political uncertainty it’s nice to have some predictability.
It is not a new or esoteric point to say that what went wrong was the decision - a Cabinet-level decision at the time - to send a paratroop regiment to a civil policing task. That has been discussed forward and back since the day after the event itself.
So how come (genuine question, asked for information) the CPS were only considering prosecutions of the soldiers on the ground?
"They were faced with a large, angry, hostile crowd. "
erm no m8. They were faced with a protest, that became an angry and hostile crowd because of the actions of the criminally negligent if not murderously managed military response to the protest. The soldiers should not have been there. They were not at risk and should not have fired upon the crowd. Doing so murdered innocent people. Any soldier doing this should be tried for murder.
the fact you said "If the mob had burnt the city centre to the ground, which was clearly their aim" shows you be a aunt who is either ignorant of the facts or just a aunt ignoring them and making up lies.
What you are is abusive and emotionally incontinent.
You weren't there. You haven't spoken to anyone who was there. You don't live in Londonderry. There is no NEED for you to get all emotional about this.
Erm, I used to work for the Shed. I spent most of a year taking witness statements on this.
I have spoken to LOADS of people where there and who had their lives destroyed by this. I have sat in their houses and looked at the photos of their dead children.
Wibble: As both the Sheds historic questioning technique and the relevant interviews themselves are undoubtedly going to form part of the mix at trial I would respectfully request that you
1. Adjust your posting style
2. Pray to your own ceiling cat that this trial doesn’t involve your interviews
and yes, was at Shed too at that time along with a couple of other posters
I m also fairly clear in my memory (pun intended) that none of this was contemplated on “ that “interview course
I was an Army officer for over a decade, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both at Sandhurst and as a junior officer I worked with colour sergeants, warrant officers and late entry officers who had served in Northern Ireland as junior soldiers. Many of their stories, e.g. about Catholics being verbally abused, dragged out of cars at checkpoints and beaten, were appalling. While most of them were recounted with sense of regret and guilt about their actions (albeit often tinged with bravado), it highlighted that as well as the undoubtedly brave performance of many soldiers, there were also serious crimes committed. I am also aware from colleagues about incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan which revealed a more recent, but as casually brutal ‘us and them’ approach to killing ‘the other’.
Human nature is to form ‘in groups’ and turn on those who are outside them. This is a particular risk in militaries, with tightly-knit homogenous groups of angry, fearful testosterone-infused young men who have been repeatedly told how excellent they supposedly are. We are naïve if we expect the Army, and soldiers, to be above such indelibly human attitudes. We are inexcusably naïve if we enable people in that culture to commit murders, we enable to state to cover up those murders, and then we affect surprise that we have incited a vicious, bloody insurgency, the consequences of which we are reaping to this day (e.g. the withdrawal agreement backstop).
The culture is not the fault of individual officers or soldiers: those of us who chose to join the military were a small, self-selecting cohort. Amongst the qualities selected for were obedience to authority and deference to power. We served in a rank-focused, hierarchical organisation obsessed by status and symbols. As a base-fed organisation we did not recruit laterally and therefore we were almost unique in society in that senior leaders had no experience of ‘the real world’, having moved from school to Sandhurst, lacking any other frame of reference. While perhaps useful for cohesion in combat, for the majority of time we were not in combat this enabled a toxic culture of cover-up. We should be slow to criticise the Army for this: these are rarely conscious traits, but they are the reality. Neither murder victims nor the military itself however benefit if we fall prey to a tendency to deify the military and confer on them virtues which they simply do not, and cannot, possess. That is what a jingoistic and ignorant section of the population has sought to do in this case.
Stating the case against the soldiers, and the British state, at its highest:
1. British soldiers, on British soil, wearing British uniform, armed by the British government, went on the rampage and killed British citizens in cold blood.
2. They did so in part because of a sense of impunity infused in them after their battalion murdered eleven civilians in Ballymurphy, Belfast, a few months earlier, and that was covered-up (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballymurphy_massacre).
3. When questioned, the murderers lied repeatedly. When forensic evidence was taken, they changed their lies, by smearing the reputation of the innocent civilians who they had murdered.
4. The government convened the Widgery Inquiry. This was perhaps the most shameful aspect of the entire debacle. They appointed a judge whose previous career was as a distinguished British Army officer (and also a thoroughly undistinguished town planning barrister). Looking at it through a modern lens (a) a fair minded and informed observer would conclude that there was a real possibility of bias; (b) there were material failings in the Inquiry; and (c) it amounted to a state-sanctioned cover-up.
5. The Saville Report was long overdue. The soldiers had immunity if they testified honestly. They did not – see the Spectator article I will post next.
6. The prevailing attitude in a section of the population is to argue that (a) murderers who kill while in uniform should be protected because they wore a uniform; and/or (b) after a certain period of time, murderers should get away with it.
On the first point, culpability for military killings: I regard murder in the course of one’s duties as a potential exacerbating, not mitigating, factor: they used their positions to kill innocent civilians. They then lied about it for decades. If this is the standard by which we are to judge the British Army, then let us disband it now, and replace it with a muzzled Gendarmerie under strict, close civilian oversight, never to deploy overseas again. If deploying troops necessarily confers on them a carte blanche to kill civilians with impunity, then we can never in good faith ever let the infantry off the leash again except in high-intensity dismounted close combat against a peer or near-peer enemy in a war of national survival, i.e. a WWIII defence of the UK homeland scenario. I hope that we can do better than that: soldiers are trained, and know right from wrong. If questions of guilt arise, they are for a judge or jury. If issues of mitigation arise, they are for consideration in sentencing. Neither, in my view, justify a Nelsonian blind eye to cold-blooded killing of civilians.
The passage of time is the second oft-cited reason. The soldiers lied from the outset and have persisted in that choice over the decades. The British state was complicit in those lies, but the primary responsibility remains with those who – again, taking the case at its highest – killed in cold blood. The passage of time in this context, I would argue, has been kind to the soldiers. Of the four-man ‘brick’ (small combat team) responsible for a disproportionate number of the Bloody Sunday killings, two have died of old age. If I were religious, I would hope that they were in Hell; I’m not, so my view is that they got away with it. Of the remaining two, one has managed to escape because the PPS have found that the evidence fails to meet the prosecutorial test. The final protagonist, Soldier F, is to be charged. For an apparent murderer, he has had a blessed life: protected by his colleagues, the Army, and the British state - untl now. He should be grateful for the decades of freedom his dishonesty gave him, but if convicted – there is a trial to come, he may not be – he should be sentenced accordingly, so that soldiers in future know that impunity is not an option, and civilian lives matter.
In closing, I commend to you the words of Douglas Murray in his excellent Spectator article below: ‘…It is true that few people are comfortable with retired soldiers being prosecuted. But if soldier F did indeed presume he could get away with murder that day, who is comfortable with that presumption proving right?’
Someone kindly posted this article above, but it's behind a paywall. I subscribe and, in the circumstances, I think it's worth impinging on the Spectator's IP:
The case for prosecuting Bloody Sunday ‘Soldier F’
The soldiers of 1 Para weren’t just unapologetic killers, but unrelenting liars
It is more than 15 years since the Bloody Sunday soldiers last appeared in public. For months I sat in the room with them to watch their evidence at Lord Saville’s inquiry. And while Lionel Shriver is right that the sight of terrorists benefiting from an immunity denied to our soldiers is grotesque, there are competing qualms. Not only because British soldiers should be held to a higher standard than terrorists. But because, having watched all of the Bloody Sunday shooters testify, I can say with certainty that they include not only unapologetic killers, but unrelenting liars.
As one soldier after another appeared before Lord Saville, it became clear that the soldiers of 1 Para were intent on spurning this last effort to get to the truth of what happened that day. Almost without exception they stonewalled, sticking to the testimony they had given in 1972, repeating claims that had been repeatedly disproven and, when in difficulty, pleading forgetfulness. Not a plausible forgetfulness, but a highly selective, implausible type. Their evidence was evasive, frustrating and self-damning.
The Saville inquiry had promised immunity from further legal action to all witnesses who told the truth about their actions on the day. In that quiet inquiry room, one and a half decades ago, the soldiers of 1 Para might have come clean and admitted what they had done before sinking back into anonymity and retirement. Instead they stuck to their lies.
For example, on the day itself, four soldiers — E, F, G and H — moved as a brick into one of the more concealed areas of the Bogside. By their own evidence they were responsible for at least half of the deaths that day. By the time of the Saville inquiry, soldiers E and G were dead, but F and H were not, were called and clearly reluctantly appeared. H was the soldier who had fired the most number of shots that day, including 19 he said he fired at a single window that did not shatter. But it was soldier F — who fired 13 rounds on the day — whose performance in 1972 and 2003 was most disturbing. It always seemed to me that if anyone was deserving of prosecution, then it was him.
F started lying from the moment the shooting stopped. Like every other soldier who had fired, F was immediately asked to give the Royal Military Police (RMP) his justification for, and direction of, each shot. So in the early hours of 31 January 1972 F pointed on a map to a number of positions where he claimed to have fired at gunmen and nail-bombers. At no stage did he admit to firing at the rubble barricade where Michael Kelly had fallen, shot side-on in the abdomen. Yet while F was speaking to the RMP, at the nearby hospital a 7.62mm calibre bullet was being dug out of the spine of Michael Kelly’s body.
In the weeks that followed the rifles of the soldiers who had fired were sent to a Belfast laboratory for testing. Realising that unmentioned shots would be traced to his gun, F chose to radically alter his story.
So at Lord Widgery’s inquiry, several weeks after the day, F decided to recall firing at a ‘bomber’ at the rubble barricade. There was no bomber at the barricade. But the bullet that had lodged in Kelly’s body was indeed shown to have come from F’s rifle. And so at that earliest stage of the search for the truth, F’s first lie — and first murder — was exposed. And nothing happened. F stayed in the army and periodically received promotion.
Under questioning in 2003, the short and stocky F — then in late middle age — was reduced to monosyllabic answers, generally of either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. He claimed to remember almost nothing of the day, despite it being his first visit to Londonderry and — by his own admission — the most shots he had fired on any deployment up to that date. Under devastating questioning, F was shown to have killed at least four people that day. One of them was Patrick Doherty, shot through a buttock as he was crawling away. One more killing which soldier F had ‘forgotten’ about when first questioned by the RMP.
Then, while Doherty lay crying in agony, a 41-year-old man called Barney McGuigan stepped out from behind a block of flats to try to get help for the dying man. McGuigan was waving a white handkerchief. According to the testimony of numerous witnesses, including an officer from another regiment stationed on the city walls, soldier F — positioned on the other side of the road — got down on one knee and shot McGuigan through the head. No one who saw the mortuary photos of the exit wound in McGuigan’s face will forget what just that one bullet of soldier F’s did.
Unusually, F’s first name is in the public domain. It is ‘Dave’. It is public because a number of witnesses heard it shouted. One wounded civilian lying on the ground heard the brick of four soldiers calling to each other. ‘I’ve got another one’ shouted one. And then, ‘We’re pulling out, Dave.’
In 1972 Dave — F — committed perjury in front of Lord Chief Justice Widgery. He perjured himself again before Lord Saville in 2003. Perhaps on that disastrous day in 1972 he thought he was teaching the citizens of Londonderry some kind of lesson. Or perhaps — under what he presumed to be suitable cover — he just seized an opportunity to kill with impunity on British streets. It is true that few people are comfortable with retired soldiers being prosecuted. But if soldier F did indeed presume he could get away with murder that day, who is comfortable with that presumption proving right?
0
0
just one is a bit of a fooking joke but there we are
0
0
9 years after the Savile report FFS
0
0
For them even to be thinking of doing this nearly 50 years after the event in terms of evidence they must basically have a written or recorded statement where he says he killed them, did it without instructions, knew it was murder but would happily slot the taig bastards all over again.
0
0
I think everyone has always known it was murder from the circumstances, haven't they? including other local law enforcement who say they "begged" the British government not to send the mad team of psycho soldiers who were well known for shooting people? all that has changed is that it was long enough ago not to embarrass any currently living ex prime ministers.
0
0
Or the eyewitness evidence pointing to one soldier in particular may be overwhelming
0
0
Sunday Bloody Sunday'. What a great song. It really encapsulates the frustration of a Sunday, doesn't it? You wake up in the morning, you've got to read all the Sunday papers, the kids are running round, you've got to mow the lawn, wash the car, and you think "Sunday, bloody Sunday!".
0
0
1. what strutter said.
2. I suspect that they had to put at least ONE up
anyway, the SOS has said that they're all innocent so no need for a long trial.
0
0
That’s the point I was making about eyewitness evidence.
Personal recollections of something that happened 50 years ago singling out just one of many almost identical individuals is going to get ripped to shreds by any decent counsel.
0
0
Good AP by Wellerz there.
Wot strutter said with the added suggestion that he must have said at some point “I killed the fookers and I’d do it again, you want some? Yeah? You, you’re the one I’m looking at aunt, come get it, I’ll murder you like I murdered them”.
Otherwise it’s a total farce.
0
0
Given the colour of RoF, not at all surprised at some of the bias here.
0
0
I wonder if the govt would be happier to throw this chap to the wolves if it wasn't for the DUP.
0
0
Clergs, don’t become an apologist. It happened a very long time ago and it is a disgrace. These soldiers were deployed by the government and according to all reports they actively followed the rules of engagement.
0
0
Mossad only recently stopped actively hunting Nazis. There's plenty of time left to make our homegrown psychopaths face the consequences.
0
0
Yeah Mossad have their own demons of which to be aware. Their executions of Palestinians, in many cases absolutely innocent of terrorism, are well documented. Not a group upon which to rely.
0
0
Presumably the Trial will take place at the Old Bailey rather than Norn Ireland.
I can’t see any mainland jury convicting from so long ago; possibly split decision and then a retrial with same result, assuming that the squadie hasn’t kicked the bucket by then.
The past, esp. during the Troubles, was assuredly a foreign country...
0
0
Also the nazi point speaks again to evidence.
There was a better chance of a paperwork chain during a course of behaviour rather than one isolated incident. Same thing for the worst concentration camp guards, the survivors knew them long enough in order to be able to give good identification rather than ‘a man I saw once from a distance 50 years ago surrounded by very similar looking men dressed in an identical fashion’.
0
0
I think there's a strong moral argument for prosecuting every single soldier who was there (just as they would charge everyone involved in a robbery homicide with murder in the US even if only one pulled the trigger)
0
0
I mean there are literally photos of the whole thing happening
"oh I guess we will never know"
"there are dozens of eye witness accounts collected from immediately after the event, photographs from all angles and the people involved were known to have shot at civilians in the past"
"yep, lost in the mists of time"
0
0
You are being obtuse here, whether deliberately or not I don’t know.
The point is the evidential difficulty against a single soldier of the many involved.
0
0
I think there's a strong moral argument for prosecuting every single soldier who was there - No wrong, in fact stupid and wrong.
(just as they would charge everyone involved in a robbery homicide with murder in the US even if only one pulled the trigger) - Terrible example that has lead to multiple gross misscarages of justice.
The shooters and the guys in charge should have been prosecuted years ago.
0
0
If you all participate in a crime then you are all guilty, that's not a miscarriage of justice outcome unless you literally weren't involved in the crime.
British soldiers (indeed western soldiers) could benefit from a reminder that they are subject to the law.
0
0
Have you tried studying law ever?
Have you heard of Derek Bentley?
jesus.
0
0
IndeedI, it's not as though only one person shot. If several all shoot at a group of unarmed civilians, does it matter in law or ethics whose bullets penetrated their bodies?
All of that said, this seems terrible timing from a wider peace pov.
0
0
Once again you appear to be missing my point, which I cannot believe that you are stupid enough to do accidentally.
My argument relates not at all to how many should have been charged. It speaks entirely to the difficulty of proving the charge against one specific individual.
0
0
IF there is good enough evidence to charge an individual or more than one, then they should do so.
0
0
I do not think Derek Bentley deserved a posthumous pardon, he went prepared to do violence and violence was done. Genuinely don't understand the outcry in that case.
0
0
fook off strutter you revolting tede.
0
0
Ah you are fooking idiot then that does not understand law, ethics or justice.
Great to have you in the profession.
0
0
If someone commits a burglary with weapons and his pal also has weapons and uses them why is he not liable for the overall outcome of the violence? In some countries he would be, the English system seems foolish.
0
0
Genuine question he wasn't fitted up, he didn't turn up unarmed expecting a bit of light pickpocketing, he wasn't brain damaged. I accept there must have been technical reasons that he should not have been found guilty but if I were on that jury it would be thumbs down for him.
0
0
https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2015-0015-judgment.pdf
LORD HUGHES AND LORD TOULSON: (with whom Lord Neuberger, Lady Hale and Lord Thomas agree) - can explain far better than I
0
0
Ah, so when I point out that you are addressing an entirely different point from the one I actually raised I get an insult.
And my point remains unaddressed.
Good arguing.
0
0
I think HMG should set up The Clergham Inquiry into The Battle of Culloden.
0
0
Do not get me started on bloody Culloden
0
0
Some reflections:
(1) The emotion in some of the posts above is disturbing. This happened nearly fifty years ago. There are things like this every day around the world. There were thousands of bad things during the Troubles in NI and GB. How do you select the ones on which you expend your emotion?
(2) Passing to the politics, the Good Friday Agreement granted an amnesty to hundreds of armed terrorists, many of whom did things much worse than anything that happened on Bloody Sunday (torturing people to death over many days, doing so repeatedly). It is rather odd that we are prepared to give the terrorists a free pass but not the squaddies - after all the terrorists sought out the opportunity to commit violence, but the squaddies had to go where they were told. This is a political point, not a legal one.
(3) Basic fairness: the squaddies didn't ask to be there. They were faced with a large, angry, hostile crowd. Their task was to keep the peace, on behalf of all of us. They were inadequately trained and prepared and equipped to do that except by use of lethal force.
(4) If the mob had burnt the city centre to the ground, which was clearly their aim, what would we be doing now?
Some legal points:
(3) A legal point: The eyewitness information is now VERY stale. Statements taken at the time are all very well, but any additional evidence offered now is likely to be of very low evidential value, as is any cross-examination. That alone is probably a reason to believe that no safe conviction is possible.
(4) Rules of engagement: it's going to be pretty hard for the prosecution to prove that the rules of engagement were not observed. This was a large, angry, hostile crowd. If a defendant says he thought the criteria for firing were met, it's going to be hard to disprove that.
(5) Where are you going to find a jury that is impartial on this one? What are the rules of selection, empanelment and challenge ?
0
0
I’m quite interested in how Clergham’s position of all to face justice or else fits with her equally strident view, previously expressed around these parts, that the jury system is shit and why would anyone be a witness it’s all bollox.
I assume that it depends on her view of the nature of an individual case which seems like a marvellously consistent and fair approach.
I also assume that this horrendous questioning of the red queen will invoke a similar response as Strutter’s.
In the current political uncertainty it’s nice to have some predictability.
0
0
@Ray Vaughan
You're not much of a lawyer are you? Your post is riddled with legal inaccuracies.
But what you are is passionate and partisan and blinkered.
You transparently think of the legal process as a political weapon to be deployed when it suits your side and ignored or obstructed when it does not.
Do you think that your kind of attitude will help to build peace in Ireland?
0
0
It is not a new or esoteric point to say that what went wrong was the decision - a Cabinet-level decision at the time - to send a paratroop regiment to a civil policing task. That has been discussed forward and back since the day after the event itself.
So how come (genuine question, asked for information) the CPS were only considering prosecutions of the soldiers on the ground?
0
0
"They were faced with a large, angry, hostile crowd. "
erm no m8. They were faced with a protest, that became an angry and hostile crowd because of the actions of the criminally negligent if not murderously managed military response to the protest. The soldiers should not have been there. They were not at risk and should not have fired upon the crowd. Doing so murdered innocent people. Any soldier doing this should be tried for murder.
the fact you said "If the mob had burnt the city centre to the ground, which was clearly their aim" shows you be a aunt who is either ignorant of the facts or just a aunt ignoring them and making up lies.
0
0
@wibble
You're not much of a lawyer either, are you?
What you are is abusive and emotionally incontinent.
You weren't there. You haven't spoken to anyone who was there. You don't live in Londonderry. There is no NEED for you to get all emotional about this.
What you want is a good Two Minutes Hate.
0
0
Erm, I used to work for the Shed. I spent most of a year taking witness statements on this.
I have spoken to LOADS of people where there and who had their lives destroyed by this. I have sat in their houses and looked at the photos of their dead children.
So do fook off and die you aunt.
0
0
Lot of Irish and angry losers on this thread
0
0
well you are here of there are clearly some losers.
0
0
@Ray Vaughan
Talking to you about law is like taking a gun to a pillow fight. You don't get it and you never will.
You have given legalistic answers to points I labelled as political and not legal.
You have given muddled and incompetent answers to the limited legal points I made.
You are very clearly partisan and sectarian in your thinking. You don't want a legal process here, you want a ritual of hate.
0
0
Speaking of ignorance of issues that get a chap het up, it is maroon.
Purple is another colour.
0
0
Purple seems unlikely. Red and red on the colour wheel would just give a deeper shade of red. To get purple you'd need some blue.
0
0
British soldiers only ever paint thin red lines.
Good god man, have you never seen ‘Carry on up the Khyber’?
0
0
Wibble: As both the Sheds historic questioning technique and the relevant interviews themselves are undoubtedly going to form part of the mix at trial I would respectfully request that you
1. Adjust your posting style
2. Pray to your own ceiling cat that this trial doesn’t involve your interviews
and yes, was at Shed too at that time along with a couple of other posters
I m also fairly clear in my memory (pun intended) that none of this was contemplated on “ that “interview course
0
0
Tbf the PTSD would explain a lot.
0
0
I was an Army officer for over a decade, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both at Sandhurst and as a junior officer I worked with colour sergeants, warrant officers and late entry officers who had served in Northern Ireland as junior soldiers. Many of their stories, e.g. about Catholics being verbally abused, dragged out of cars at checkpoints and beaten, were appalling. While most of them were recounted with sense of regret and guilt about their actions (albeit often tinged with bravado), it highlighted that as well as the undoubtedly brave performance of many soldiers, there were also serious crimes committed. I am also aware from colleagues about incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan which revealed a more recent, but as casually brutal ‘us and them’ approach to killing ‘the other’.
Human nature is to form ‘in groups’ and turn on those who are outside them. This is a particular risk in militaries, with tightly-knit homogenous groups of angry, fearful testosterone-infused young men who have been repeatedly told how excellent they supposedly are. We are naïve if we expect the Army, and soldiers, to be above such indelibly human attitudes. We are inexcusably naïve if we enable people in that culture to commit murders, we enable to state to cover up those murders, and then we affect surprise that we have incited a vicious, bloody insurgency, the consequences of which we are reaping to this day (e.g. the withdrawal agreement backstop).
The culture is not the fault of individual officers or soldiers: those of us who chose to join the military were a small, self-selecting cohort. Amongst the qualities selected for were obedience to authority and deference to power. We served in a rank-focused, hierarchical organisation obsessed by status and symbols. As a base-fed organisation we did not recruit laterally and therefore we were almost unique in society in that senior leaders had no experience of ‘the real world’, having moved from school to Sandhurst, lacking any other frame of reference. While perhaps useful for cohesion in combat, for the majority of time we were not in combat this enabled a toxic culture of cover-up. We should be slow to criticise the Army for this: these are rarely conscious traits, but they are the reality. Neither murder victims nor the military itself however benefit if we fall prey to a tendency to deify the military and confer on them virtues which they simply do not, and cannot, possess. That is what a jingoistic and ignorant section of the population has sought to do in this case.
Stating the case against the soldiers, and the British state, at its highest:
1. British soldiers, on British soil, wearing British uniform, armed by the British government, went on the rampage and killed British citizens in cold blood.
2. They did so in part because of a sense of impunity infused in them after their battalion murdered eleven civilians in Ballymurphy, Belfast, a few months earlier, and that was covered-up (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballymurphy_massacre).
3. When questioned, the murderers lied repeatedly. When forensic evidence was taken, they changed their lies, by smearing the reputation of the innocent civilians who they had murdered.
4. The government convened the Widgery Inquiry. This was perhaps the most shameful aspect of the entire debacle. They appointed a judge whose previous career was as a distinguished British Army officer (and also a thoroughly undistinguished town planning barrister). Looking at it through a modern lens (a) a fair minded and informed observer would conclude that there was a real possibility of bias; (b) there were material failings in the Inquiry; and (c) it amounted to a state-sanctioned cover-up.
5. The Saville Report was long overdue. The soldiers had immunity if they testified honestly. They did not – see the Spectator article I will post next.
6. The prevailing attitude in a section of the population is to argue that (a) murderers who kill while in uniform should be protected because they wore a uniform; and/or (b) after a certain period of time, murderers should get away with it.
In closing, I commend to you the words of Douglas Murray in his excellent Spectator article below: ‘…It is true that few people are comfortable with retired soldiers being prosecuted. But if soldier F did indeed presume he could get away with murder that day, who is comfortable with that presumption proving right?’
I support the prosecution.
0
0
Someone kindly posted this article above, but it's behind a paywall. I subscribe and, in the circumstances, I think it's worth impinging on the Spectator's IP:
The case for prosecuting Bloody Sunday ‘Soldier F’
The soldiers of 1 Para weren’t just unapologetic killers, but unrelenting liars
Douglas Murray, The Spectator, 14 March 2019, https://www.rollonfriday.com/discussion/soldier-face-bloody-sunday-murd… (Accessed 14 March 2019)
It is more than 15 years since the Bloody Sunday soldiers last appeared in public. For months I sat in the room with them to watch their evidence at Lord Saville’s inquiry. And while Lionel Shriver is right that the sight of terrorists benefiting from an immunity denied to our soldiers is grotesque, there are competing qualms. Not only because British soldiers should be held to a higher standard than terrorists. But because, having watched all of the Bloody Sunday shooters testify, I can say with certainty that they include not only unapologetic killers, but unrelenting liars.
As one soldier after another appeared before Lord Saville, it became clear that the soldiers of 1 Para were intent on spurning this last effort to get to the truth of what happened that day. Almost without exception they stonewalled, sticking to the testimony they had given in 1972, repeating claims that had been repeatedly disproven and, when in difficulty, pleading forgetfulness. Not a plausible forgetfulness, but a highly selective, implausible type. Their evidence was evasive, frustrating and self-damning.
The Saville inquiry had promised immunity from further legal action to all witnesses who told the truth about their actions on the day. In that quiet inquiry room, one and a half decades ago, the soldiers of 1 Para might have come clean and admitted what they had done before sinking back into anonymity and retirement. Instead they stuck to their lies.
For example, on the day itself, four soldiers — E, F, G and H — moved as a brick into one of the more concealed areas of the Bogside. By their own evidence they were responsible for at least half of the deaths that day. By the time of the Saville inquiry, soldiers E and G were dead, but F and H were not, were called and clearly reluctantly appeared. H was the soldier who had fired the most number of shots that day, including 19 he said he fired at a single window that did not shatter. But it was soldier F — who fired 13 rounds on the day — whose performance in 1972 and 2003 was most disturbing. It always seemed to me that if anyone was deserving of prosecution, then it was him.
F started lying from the moment the shooting stopped. Like every other soldier who had fired, F was immediately asked to give the Royal Military Police (RMP) his justification for, and direction of, each shot. So in the early hours of 31 January 1972 F pointed on a map to a number of positions where he claimed to have fired at gunmen and nail-bombers. At no stage did he admit to firing at the rubble barricade where Michael Kelly had fallen, shot side-on in the abdomen. Yet while F was speaking to the RMP, at the nearby hospital a 7.62mm calibre bullet was being dug out of the spine of Michael Kelly’s body.
In the weeks that followed the rifles of the soldiers who had fired were sent to a Belfast laboratory for testing. Realising that unmentioned shots would be traced to his gun, F chose to radically alter his story.
So at Lord Widgery’s inquiry, several weeks after the day, F decided to recall firing at a ‘bomber’ at the rubble barricade. There was no bomber at the barricade. But the bullet that had lodged in Kelly’s body was indeed shown to have come from F’s rifle. And so at that earliest stage of the search for the truth, F’s first lie — and first murder — was exposed. And nothing happened. F stayed in the army and periodically received promotion.
Under questioning in 2003, the short and stocky F — then in late middle age — was reduced to monosyllabic answers, generally of either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. He claimed to remember almost nothing of the day, despite it being his first visit to Londonderry and — by his own admission — the most shots he had fired on any deployment up to that date. Under devastating questioning, F was shown to have killed at least four people that day. One of them was Patrick Doherty, shot through a buttock as he was crawling away. One more killing which soldier F had ‘forgotten’ about when first questioned by the RMP.
Then, while Doherty lay crying in agony, a 41-year-old man called Barney McGuigan stepped out from behind a block of flats to try to get help for the dying man. McGuigan was waving a white handkerchief. According to the testimony of numerous witnesses, including an officer from another regiment stationed on the city walls, soldier F — positioned on the other side of the road — got down on one knee and shot McGuigan through the head. No one who saw the mortuary photos of the exit wound in McGuigan’s face will forget what just that one bullet of soldier F’s did.
Unusually, F’s first name is in the public domain. It is ‘Dave’. It is public because a number of witnesses heard it shouted. One wounded civilian lying on the ground heard the brick of four soldiers calling to each other. ‘I’ve got another one’ shouted one. And then, ‘We’re pulling out, Dave.’
In 1972 Dave — F — committed perjury in front of Lord Chief Justice Widgery. He perjured himself again before Lord Saville in 2003. Perhaps on that disastrous day in 1972 he thought he was teaching the citizens of Londonderry some kind of lesson. Or perhaps — under what he presumed to be suitable cover — he just seized an opportunity to kill with impunity on British streets. It is true that few people are comfortable with retired soldiers being prosecuted. But if soldier F did indeed presume he could get away with murder that day, who is comfortable with that presumption proving right?
0
0
Wrong link above. It's https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/03/the-case-for-prosecuting-bloody-sunday-soldier-f.
0
0
Aw mate that nice thoughtful writing is totally wasted on this dumpster fire website
Join the discussion