On how to view the past
Jun. 15th, 2010 11:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumDavid Cameron has just pissed off some friends of mine. I may be doing the same with this post (should they ever read it).
Today was the release of The Saville Report which is the result of 12 years, thousands of interviews and £195 million, of inquiry into the events of, Bloody Sunday (for those who have not the time, nor the inclination to read through 5,000 pages of detail there are the principal conclusions which only run to 60 pages).
How did David Cameron, who was five when it happened (just as I was), piss them off? He apolgised. More, he did not promise immunity to those implicated in the report.
That report says the dead were innocent. Guilty of nothing; that the soldiers had no legitimate targets, and were not acting out of fear for their lives, or the lives of others (it does say that of the 14 dead, 3 were shot by soldiers acting in "fear and panic" and 11 were not).
David Cameron said, ""Mr Speaker, I am deeply patriotic.
I never want to believe anything bad about our country.
I never want to call into question the behaviour of our soldiers and our Army who I believe to be the finest in the world.
And I have seen for myself the very difficult and dangerous circumstances in which we ask our soldiers to serve.
But the conclusions of this report are absolutely clear.
There is no doubt. There is nothing equivocal. There are no ambiguities.
What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable.
It was wrong."
I have friends in the British Army. Friends who, because of the price they, and their mates, had to pay in N. Ireland, have a bone deep antipathy to the Irish. The dislike of the French, is mostly teasing (they have a thousand years of genial hostility between them). Not so the way they feel about the Irish Republicans.
I understand it (though as someone of Irish descent I can't quite share it even to the point of being more than more than merely quiet when they are being angry, and not playing, "rebel tunes" when they are in earshot).
Unjustified, and unjustifiable.
I am not, actually, trying to lay blame on 1 Para (I don't think, as one person said, they need to be stripped of all awards. It was a single act, by a singular group, and; while 1 Para must, sadly, carry the shame of those people's actions; and that days deeds, it doesn't diminish the rest of their record). No, I am more interested in the response Cameron made to a MP who was trying to make an equivalence between "terrorists" (a term which is often problematic, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and while I think the Provos, esp. in the '70s and '80s were well beyond the realm of fair insurgency (bombs in London, no. Soldiers are legitimate targets; it's what we are paid for. The various supporting elements [e.g in this case, The Orangemen] are probably fair game, but random people, far from the actual area being contested... I don't think so).
The MP wanted to know why, if the soldiers were facing prosecution why the IRA members (some of whom are known; one of whom is an MP in N. Ireland), aren't in the same spot.
He said he didn't want to draw equivalence between soldiers and terrorists, because soldiers act under the rule of law.
This is where this touches home. Bloody Sunday made The Troubles worse. It strengthened the IRA. It's why the "help the Irish" jars in US bars were always full. The cover up, the assertion that the dead were bomb-throwers, the lack of accountability, all of that gave people a grievance; one they couldn't get redress for in other ways.
We are doing the same thing in Iraq, and Afghanistan.
I have personal knowledge of it. A guy we had in the pen was arrested in the plain sight of his brother. US MPs took him away. When his brother when to the Coalition Provisional Authority to ask why, he was lied to. Spun a tale of all the groups which might have done it, but no... No Way was is the US.
Only it was. The brother saw it. I know about this because the guy was a Big Deal in South Baghdad, and it made the papers. I got to read about it, and I compared the brother's account to what I'd been told when I talked to the guy, and they were the same (inside the variability of eyewitness accounts, it was the same story).
If he'd just disappeared, instead of being taken home... how many people would have lost all faith in the honest intentions of the US?
How many similar stories are there?
Soldiers act under the rule of law. Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Khandahar... places the Gov't says the law has run out.
Bloody Sunday, as much as anything else; in the 400 years of struggle to reclaim independence, made The Troubles as bad as they were (and it's an interesting thing that the families of the victims are looking to the Crown Prosecution to give them redress... they don't want jail for the soldiers, just trials, and [they hope, even expect, convictions] that will be enough for them to say justice was done).
What troubles could we avoid, were we to take a good hard look at what we are doing, and treat the people who have legitimate complaint as if they had legitimate complaint?
Today was the release of The Saville Report which is the result of 12 years, thousands of interviews and £195 million, of inquiry into the events of, Bloody Sunday (for those who have not the time, nor the inclination to read through 5,000 pages of detail there are the principal conclusions which only run to 60 pages).
How did David Cameron, who was five when it happened (just as I was), piss them off? He apolgised. More, he did not promise immunity to those implicated in the report.
That report says the dead were innocent. Guilty of nothing; that the soldiers had no legitimate targets, and were not acting out of fear for their lives, or the lives of others (it does say that of the 14 dead, 3 were shot by soldiers acting in "fear and panic" and 11 were not).
David Cameron said, ""Mr Speaker, I am deeply patriotic.
I never want to believe anything bad about our country.
I never want to call into question the behaviour of our soldiers and our Army who I believe to be the finest in the world.
And I have seen for myself the very difficult and dangerous circumstances in which we ask our soldiers to serve.
But the conclusions of this report are absolutely clear.
There is no doubt. There is nothing equivocal. There are no ambiguities.
What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable.
It was wrong."
I have friends in the British Army. Friends who, because of the price they, and their mates, had to pay in N. Ireland, have a bone deep antipathy to the Irish. The dislike of the French, is mostly teasing (they have a thousand years of genial hostility between them). Not so the way they feel about the Irish Republicans.
I understand it (though as someone of Irish descent I can't quite share it even to the point of being more than more than merely quiet when they are being angry, and not playing, "rebel tunes" when they are in earshot).
Unjustified, and unjustifiable.
I am not, actually, trying to lay blame on 1 Para (I don't think, as one person said, they need to be stripped of all awards. It was a single act, by a singular group, and; while 1 Para must, sadly, carry the shame of those people's actions; and that days deeds, it doesn't diminish the rest of their record). No, I am more interested in the response Cameron made to a MP who was trying to make an equivalence between "terrorists" (a term which is often problematic, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and while I think the Provos, esp. in the '70s and '80s were well beyond the realm of fair insurgency (bombs in London, no. Soldiers are legitimate targets; it's what we are paid for. The various supporting elements [e.g in this case, The Orangemen] are probably fair game, but random people, far from the actual area being contested... I don't think so).
The MP wanted to know why, if the soldiers were facing prosecution why the IRA members (some of whom are known; one of whom is an MP in N. Ireland), aren't in the same spot.
He said he didn't want to draw equivalence between soldiers and terrorists, because soldiers act under the rule of law.
This is where this touches home. Bloody Sunday made The Troubles worse. It strengthened the IRA. It's why the "help the Irish" jars in US bars were always full. The cover up, the assertion that the dead were bomb-throwers, the lack of accountability, all of that gave people a grievance; one they couldn't get redress for in other ways.
We are doing the same thing in Iraq, and Afghanistan.
I have personal knowledge of it. A guy we had in the pen was arrested in the plain sight of his brother. US MPs took him away. When his brother when to the Coalition Provisional Authority to ask why, he was lied to. Spun a tale of all the groups which might have done it, but no... No Way was is the US.
Only it was. The brother saw it. I know about this because the guy was a Big Deal in South Baghdad, and it made the papers. I got to read about it, and I compared the brother's account to what I'd been told when I talked to the guy, and they were the same (inside the variability of eyewitness accounts, it was the same story).
If he'd just disappeared, instead of being taken home... how many people would have lost all faith in the honest intentions of the US?
How many similar stories are there?
Soldiers act under the rule of law. Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Khandahar... places the Gov't says the law has run out.
Bloody Sunday, as much as anything else; in the 400 years of struggle to reclaim independence, made The Troubles as bad as they were (and it's an interesting thing that the families of the victims are looking to the Crown Prosecution to give them redress... they don't want jail for the soldiers, just trials, and [they hope, even expect, convictions] that will be enough for them to say justice was done).
What troubles could we avoid, were we to take a good hard look at what we are doing, and treat the people who have legitimate complaint as if they had legitimate complaint?
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 05:05 pm (UTC)That's exactly the point I was thinking of too. It's not just when we're in foreign countries either. The release of the report immediately made me think of Kent State and its aftermath, and it caused me to look up what happened to the Guardsmen who opened fire there.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 05:13 pm (UTC)I don't think Kent State is parallel. I've done a lot of research on it (being in the Guard, where dealing with that sort of thing is part of the job description; and getting a lot of riot/crowd control training, as a direct result of Kent State had a lot to do with it).
Quick summation.
1: The Guard should never have been there. The Governor's decision to send them was probably criminally negligent.
2: They were not adequately trained.
3:They should not have been given rifles. They never should have been allowed to load (certainly not one and all).
4: They were, actually, very restrained. They let the crowd push them back until they were cornered, and being pelted with stones; absent any body protection.
5: The shooting was one, ragged, volley. It seems to have been the result of an accidental discharge by one of the troops.
6: An officer (I want to say a retired general, but I forget) corralled them, got them back into order and removed them from the area.
It was horrid, tragic, and awful. It never should have been able to come to pass, but the circumstances were really different.
Which is all I want to say about it.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 08:57 pm (UTC)However, I can very much see what you don't want to go into it, and I respect that.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-17 03:10 pm (UTC)Without arguing about alleged rocks, how far can you throw a rock?
no subject
Date: 2010-06-17 03:36 pm (UTC)A lot less far than a bullet travels, though, depending on the rock, quite a ways. I have been hit, so that my scalp was torn open, from 100 feet. A baseball weighs 5 ounces, and can be thrown accurately about 200 feet.
I have seen grenade throwing competitions (and grenades weigh more than a lb.) where the winner managed to throw one almost 75 yards, and landed in a limited area (bounded left to right, 25 feet across).
I can throw one, to within a selected 10 meter circle at 35 yards.
One of the side effects of panic fire, it's not always aimed at the threat, so it's not that surprising to me that people well away from the troops were hit.
The critical event seems to have been the accidental discharge; soldiers know where shots come from, and someone shooting outbound, esp. when one is feeling endangered, almost always causes sympathetic fire.