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.