Should ‘Marine A’ —the 39-year-old Royal Marines sergeant convicted of murdering a wounded Taliban prisoner — be shown clemency in the form of a shorter-than-usual jail sentence?
No, says the Chief of Defence Staff, Sir Nicholas Houghton. He insists that any kind of special pleading would be wrong. The military ‘can’t put itself beyond the law,’ by ignoring this ‘heinous’ crime, he says.
A former Chief of Defence Staff, Sir Charles Guthrie, said earlier: ‘The military should observe the highest standards, and if some crime is committed, like everybody else they should pay the price. I don’t know whether there were any mitigating circumstances, but murder is murder.’
Did Sir Nicholas and Sir Charles confer — or arrive independently at the same conclusion?
The trial has been going on for some time. It’s likely there was some discussion among service chiefs — and former senior officers who might be asked to comment publicly — about what line to take when the verdict was in.
The top brass have decided to support the verdict and likely life sentence. Only Major General Julian Thompson, who led 3 Commando in the Falklands, said of Marine A: ‘I won’t condemn him. It is like a member of the family who has broken the law — you don’t reject them, but you support them.’
Establishment determination to stick to the letter of the law over Marine A is in contrast to its behaviour in the Chilcot Inquiry into how we were led into the invasion of Iraq by Tony Blair.
The committee chairman Sir John Chilcot, discloses that 25 notes from then-president George W. Bush to Blair — and some 200 Cabinet- level discussions — have been withheld by No 10.
As a result, the publication of the report, four years after the inquiry began, is delayed. Chilcot calls the delay ‘regrettable.’
However, we do have an insight into the Bush/Blair re-invasion conversations. Blair’s chief of staff was Jonathan Powell, whose wife, Sarah Helm, wrote a play, Loyalty, about this period.
Although she insists the work is fictional, it’s widely suspected of being an actual account of what happened.
In it, the character playing the role of Powell notes that Blair tells Bush in a telephone call about invading Iraq: ‘We will be with you whatever.’ ‘Powell’ later changes it to read, ‘You can count on us, whatever.’ Making Blair’s promise far more vague.
‘Marine A’ faced the full force of military law and was convicted of battlefield murder in Afghanistan, in which 446 UK troops — many of them Marines — have been killed in Taliban bombings and ambushes. Part of the evidence against him was provided by film from a helmet camera of a fellow Marine. There was also the diary jottings of a colleague who was present.
But I wonder in the circumstances if he would have been convicted of murder by a civilian jury?
Yet the military establishment supports Marine A’s conviction and sentence. Chief of Defence Staff Houghton calls his crime ‘heinous,’ meaning ‘utterly evil.’
Only the place and circumstances of the crime — an Afghanistan firefight — can now mitigate, i.e. lessen, the length of time he has to serve.
Seeing colleagues blown to pieces, shot dead, or wounded severely, will be considered. So might the claim of troops that the Taliban taunted them by hanging the body parts of blown-apart British troops from trees.
Marine A’s life — and that of his family — is destroyed for ending the life of a grievously-injured Taliban fighter who would probably have died anyway.
The honour and reputation of our military is upheld by this prosecution, allowing our top brass to mouth platitudes about not putting themselves above the law.
But can they be proud, too, of the shady, behind-the-scenes manoeuvring to save the face of Tony Blair, delaying the inquiry into a controversial war estimated to have cost 189,000 lives?
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/ar...#ixzz2kU0SPCST
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Originally Posted by tiger31
The taliban only chop off the prisoners heads in the end so for me eff them eye for an eye
, i don't know if the taliban take prisoners, they probably will not anymore 
