The British army is a killing machine, not a police force
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1792728,00.html
Our soldiers forced an Iraqi into a canal in Basra and he drowned. But
it's Bush and Blair who are responsible for his death
Max Hastings
Thursday June 8, 2006
The Guardian
Few people will, or should, feel comfortable about Tuesday's outcome of
the court martial of three British soldiers who had been charged with
the manslaughter of a teenage looter in Iraq. This is not because the
accused were acquitted, but because the story is so ugly. Ahmed Karheem
was pushed into a Basra canal. He could not swim. He drowned.
The verdict seemed just, because the soldiers acted within a context
created by circumstance and accepted by their superiors. But if they
were not responsible, then who was? "Wetting" wrongdoers, with varying
degrees of harshness, had become a commonplace sanction in the absence
of legally enforceable ones. The British army, like the US military,
was utterly at a loss about how to restore order amid anarchy for which
its political leadership had refused to prepare.
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