Alexander Blackman

"andy" said:
I used to think he was in the right. That he shouldn't even be prosecuted maybe...

An interview with an ex marine on TV last week changed my mind on it. He felt that what Blackman had done could only make things worse for our forces

His point was that a Taliban fighter who thinks he will be executed when captured is a much tougher fighter to fight against. That they are now fighting for their lives when beforehand they would always have in the back of their heads that they could down weapons and let themselves be captured

Obviously a tough job but it sounds like he had time to think about it and knew exactly what he was doing and how wrong it was by the ways he attempted to cover it up.
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The trouble is you don't win in the long term by capturing your enemies because too many bleeding heart liberals will campaign to have them released and provided with nice compensation pay outs. Take that nugget that blew himself up recently. You win by killing them.
 
Dis86 said:
The trouble is you don't win in the long term by capturing your enemies because too many bleeding heart liberals will campaign to have them released and provided with nice compensation pay outs. Take that nugget that blew himself up recently. You win by killing them.
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This.

Its a cancer you cut the cancer out and destroy it utterly without remorse or reason.
 
He got it reduced due to mental illness..

If he was mentally ill why was he even serving? diminished responsibility? he just got away with murder.
 
Its part of the legalities of war (for which our enemies don't follow)

He shot an unarmed combatant in cold blood after he had already been wounded by Apache gunships.
 
enigma27 said:
He got it reduced due to mental illness..

If he was mentally ill why was he even serving? diminished responsibility? he just got away with murder.
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By the end of a tour over there you'd have no one left on the front lines if you removed all the people showing signs of one mental illness or another.
 
Complete waste of public money.

We are fighting people who have not signed up to a nice gentleman's agreement.
 
John40 said:
No he hasn't.
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How has he not..?? he was convicted of murder.. the guy was injured and should have been given medical attention.. he decided to drag his body away from prying eyes and shoot him dead and then mock the situation by commenting he had 'broken the Geneva convention'

The only reason it was changed to manslaughter is because his legal team argued he had mental health issues and diminished responsibility yet he was fully aware of what he did and the rules he had broke.

We are not savages... our army should play by the rules otherwise we are no better than the enemy.

He should be in prison for at least another two years
 
enigma27 said:
How has he not..?? he was convicted of murder.. the guy was injured and should have been given medical attention.. he decided to drag his body away from prying eyes and shoot him dead and then mock the situation by commenting he had 'broken the Geneva convention'

The only reason it was changed to manslaughter is because his legal team argued he had mental health issues and diminished responsibility yet he was fully aware of what he did and the rules he had broke.

We are not savages... our army should play by the rules otherwise we are no better than the enemy.

He should be in prison for at least another two years
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He hasn't got away with anything, certainly not murder.If anything I think he's been treated despicably and I hope the faceless ones will be named and shamed which is apparently the plan.
 
If this was the SS executing US marines we'd have a completely different story, I don't like Taliban but the convention needs to be respected, I don't know if I'd follow it, hope I never need to find out.
 
jumpy said:
I'd heard on R4 the other day that they'd gone back out to do a combat assessment following an apache strike - Paraphrased from the guy being interviewed 'there's not usually much left, just bits of human beings'. So I'm assuming rockets or 30mm cannon - you know those negative thermal images where you hear the dag dag dag dag dag dag of the cannon, followed by the splash of the rounds on the screen and the glowing bits of people that gradually fade out as they cool?

Under those circumstances it might be seen that the most humane thing to do is to put a bullet into anyone you find clinging to existence. Who knows.

The guy on the radio also said it was a common tactic of the taliban to use our humane treatment of injured fighters against us when medical evacuation was deemed necessary; in other words they'd try and ambush those trying to save one of their own. He mentioned that many british soldiers thought this was an unnecessary risk to take.

Too many shades of grey here. However despite my regard for my fellow man, I don't believe most of these radical fighters can be reasoned with. So, is it worth the risk of your life for the few who might reform, to hold out your hand toward a rabid dog in the hope it wont bite you. Or is it more sensible and pragmatic to just kill them when you encounter them and be done with it and move on and accept the reality that nothing about fighting any kind of war is going to leave your hands or your conscience clean?

Fortunately for most of us here, we are considering this from our comfy chairs and not in some godawful desert **** hole where your next step could be your last.
What is the right answer? I don't know.

I do know that underneath the thin veneer of civilisation, human beings are brutal and ugly and it doesn't take much to bring that out in most people given time and the right stimuli. So perhaps it's worth protecting that illusion as far as we must to convince ourselves that we're better than that; even regarding those who we train to kill for politics and ideology.
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Good post, against my initial opinion, now I'm not so sure.
 
enigma27 said:
He got it reduced due to mental illness..

If he was mentally ill why was he even serving? diminished responsibility? he just got away with murder.
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He hasn't 'got away' with anything. A panel of top Appeal Court judges decided he wasn't guilty of murder. If the evidence of mental illness presented to the Appeal Court was in any way insufficient then the judges would have dismissed it. They didn't and made a judgement based on all the evidence, not just part of it as in the original case.

enigma27 said:
How has he not..?? he was convicted of murder.. the guy was injured and should have been given medical attention.. he decided to drag his body away from prying eyes and shoot him dead and then mock the situation by commenting he had 'broken the Geneva convention'

The only reason it was changed to manslaughter is because his legal team argued he had mental health issues and diminished responsibility yet he was fully aware of what he did and the rules he had broke.

We are not savages... our army should play by the rules otherwise we are no better than the enemy.

He should be in prison for at least another two years
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As per my reply above - the original court decision was wrong, otherwise a murder conviction would have remained. Why should he serve further punishment because you say so?
 
enigma27 said:
He got it reduced due to mental illness..

If he was mentally ill why was he even serving? diminished responsibility? he just got away with murder.
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It was serving that probably caused his mental illness. Have you read the full judgement and the medical reasons that were presented?
 
enigma27 said:
He got it reduced due to mental illness..

If he was mentally ill why was he even serving? diminished responsibility? he just got away with murder.
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Until you go to war and have people trying to kill you every day and constantly knowing in the back of your mind the next step you take may kill you or remove your limbs you can't begin to imagine the mental strain that would take on a man.

It's called Afgan roulette for a reason.
 
FishFluff said:
We're supposed to be better and more civilised than them.
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Better.. I do not think so, we are the same.

Civilised I would say we are, in our way of thinking and upbringing.

Still we can blame the Russians for this mess in the first place.
 
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