"Marine A" Update

In 2013 I reported on the case of "Marine A", a serviceman in the Royal Marines who had killed an injured prisoner-of-war in Afghanistan and was originally prosecuted for murder, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/marine-a.html. Now he has been released from prison and his name has been revealed as Alexander Blackman, a sergeant before his discharge from the service. When I wrote the first article I didn't know what the outcome of this case would be; now I must say that I'm pleased he has been released. His wife fought a legal campaign assisted by a newspaper and the spy novelist Frederick Forsyth (see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/frederick-forsyth-was-real-spy.html). Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39740931. It turned out Blackman was suffering from a mental illness at the time. That's hardly surprising seeing as mental problems are an epidemic in the military land forces. Having had to take care of injured soldiers at my hospital, and process the remains of those who have been killed in this continuous 21st century super-war, I can understand why. The authorities have a very strange attitude to killing other human beings that is rife with double standards and hypocrisy. I realize the difference between shooting somebody in peacetime lying on a city street and shooting somebody injured on a battlefield just after a long fire-fight in which he almost killed you. However the government wanted to put Sgt. Blackman on trial for murder at the same time they themselves ruthlessly plan the cold-blooded extermination of millions of innocent people for the sake of Israeli imperialism and oil company profits. They arrange the sales of armaments to brutal regimes such as Saudi Arabia where the targeting of Yemeni schoolchildren is official military strategy. They deal death, injury, grief and misery in multiple digits, as they sit at a mahogany table in a suit. They never have to put on a tin hat and pick up a rifle and go to fight themselves... nor clean up the mess afterwards, like I had to. As I said in the background article, what right do they have to judge Blackman? Remember that the very same legal system declared that Tony Blair was innocent at the Chilcot Inquiry, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/blair-exonerated-at-chilcot.html. Our society also permits the termination of pregnancy as a normal and regular clinical practice. Kill a newborn baby and that's murder, but kill it five minutes earlier in the womb and that's medicine. I'll have to write a separate article on the morality of abortion; the point for now is that society has a strangely contradictory and kaleidoscopic view on the ethics of taking human life. I hope Alexander Blackman will have a bright future now, back home with his family.

See here for more information: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/trident-submariner-speaks-out.html.

And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/the-end-of-whistleblower-hunting.html.