Marine gets a life sentence for murder so why doesn't Defense Secretary?

A Royal Marine serving life for murder was utterly failed by senior officers, a secret report shows.
Leaked to the Mail yesterday, the dossier contains crucial evidence withheld from Alexander Blackman’s court martial.
Military chiefs solely blamed the sergeant for killing a mortally wounded Taliban insurgent in Afghanistan.
But their report into the incident says:
Blackman’s overstretched unit was being pushed to be too aggressive;
His senior officer was ‘not prepared’ for the demands of the warzone;
Signs that Blackman’s unit was cracking up were missed by commanders.
The MoD had censored the admission of command failings in Helmand.
But its report said: ‘Supervision by a commanding officer where Blackman and his men were based was insufficient to identify a number of warning signs that could have indicated they were showing evidence of moral regression, psychological strain and fatigue.’
Crucially, this shows that officers were partly responsible for the extreme state Blackman was in when he pulled the trigger.
The report will now form a major plank of his battle for justice, which was debated in Parliament yesterday.....

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...justice-Alexander-Blackman.html#ixzz3m7iSgRII
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Meanwhile, in response to a question from Green Party MP Caroline Lucas about the number of airstrikes undertaken ostensibly against ISIL by the British over the past year, Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said the estimated number of ISIL fighters killed as a result of UK strikes from September 2014 to 31 August 2015 is around 330. “This figure is highly approximate", ”he said, not least given the absence of UK ground troops in a position to observe the effects of strike activity.” He added that he believed that no civilians had been injured or killed by such strikes.

This announcement follows the extrajudicial murder of two British citizens in Syria justified on the highly implausible grounds that the alleged terrorists presented an imminent threat to the population in Britain thousands of miles away. It’s hence an absurdity that the government acted in self-defense. What Fallon’s announcement and the conviction of Blackman for murder highlight is a major contradiction.

Michael Fallon effectively admits that the British government doesn’t have the faintest idea how many people have been killed by British airstrikes in the year up to 31 August 2015. If he doesn’t know how many have been killed, it follows that he doesn’t know who has been killed and in what circumstances. Therefore he is unable to conclude, as he did, that it’s his belief that “no civilians had been injured or killed by such strikes”.

Logically, it’s only possible to claim you are under imminent threat from terrorists if you are able to identify the nature of the said threat and the only way to do that is to be able to identify those who are allegedly threatening you. How then, can the government claim self defense under such vague circumstances? Dropping bombs from a great height in order to supposedly ‘target’ terrorists can never be precise despite the propaganda claims to the contrary. Killing in this way is necessarily indiscriminate.

How can it be justified that officers’ who were partly responsible for the extreme state of mind of one of their underlings and a foreign secretary who oversees them all, get a free pass for murder (in terms of the latter, mass murder), while the guy at the bottom who pulled the trigger as a result of the actions of the said officers that led to his conviction, gets life imprisonment?

It’s reasonable to assume that there are certain circumstances in which somebody on the battlefield who is showing evidence of moral regression, psychological strain and fatigue and whose life would almost always be under imminent threat could be justified in killing an enemy combatant. But it’s impossible to envisage the mitigating circumstances by which it could be justified for others higher up the chain of command who oversee or give orders to somebody else to press a button on a computer screen in order to release bombs from a great height that would, by their very nature, kill large amounts of innocent people indiscriminately within the vicinity of the intended “target”.

Blackman was prosecuted so why not Fallon?

Discuss.

 

Come on folks, this is a significant story.

 

Another significant form of "ping pong" all governments play with media led sentiment.

"Ping", two 2, 1200 foot towers go to the ground identically in 20 seconds. "Pong", "we know who did it, and they have " WMD's. "Ping", attack two nations killing hundreds of thousands leaving a political vacuum for terrorist takeover. "Pong", oh, Osama was buried at sea and Saddam was executed. "Ping", blow up a wedding party with a drone. "Pong", hey, that soldier killed a dying man, let's show the world how committed to justice we are.

And so on, ad nauseum.

Our lawful and peaceful revolution​

 

Unless he was directly ordered to execute a dying man then no one else holds the blame, legally. I'm actually surprised this was tried and the soldier convicted for life. I know "mercy killing" is a war crime, but life seems a bit extreme.

 

That poor man.

 

I agree. He should of been prosecuted for manslaughter. The question remains, though, why if he was convicted, wasn't Fallon?

 

Fallon is the guy giving the order to kill Brits via drone strike, extrajudicial killings, correct? I agree, he and Obama should be jailed for the same crime (Obama was ordering US citizens killed a year or two back, same circumstance). Unfortunately there is no accountability for those at the top of government. Look at George Bush and Dick Cheney.

 

That's correct. It's always the guys at the bottom who actually pull the trigger who take the wrap, never the ones giving the orders. And there WERE mitigating circumstances that led the guy to kill an injured man which the redacted report didn't uncover. I mean these guys on the battlefield are under extreme stress and their lives imminently threatened which is a justifiable form of defense. The same cannot be said for those at the top who give orders to pilots to drop bombs from great heights that indiscriminately kill far more people, many of them completely innocent bystanders. And yet, it's the guy at the bottom, in this instance, that went to prison for the "murder" of one combatant, while the ones who give the orders that result in mass deaths, get off scott free. There is just something very wrong about that.