Wrongs perpetrated by the British Army (the original title was buggering me)

Things
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Saville Report due on Tueday and looks like there’s some soldiers in trouble. Not before time obviously.

Bloody Sunday killings to be ruled unlawful

Soldiers face prosecution over fatal civilian shootings after 12-year inquiry publishes findings

The long-awaited report into the Bloody Sunday massacre will conclude that a number of the fatal shootings of civilians by British soldiers were unlawful killings, the Guardian has learned.

Lord Saville’s 12-year inquiry into the deaths, the longest public inquiry in British legal history, will conclude with a report published next Tuesday, putting severe pressure on the Public Prosecution Service in Northern Ireland to prosecute soldiers.

Lord Trimble, the former leader of the Ulster Unionists and one of the architects of the Good Friday agreement, revealed to the Guardian that when Tony Blair agreed to the inquiry in 1998, he warned the then prime minister that any conclusion that departed “one millimetre” from the earlier 1972 Widgery report into the killings would lead to “soldiers in the dock”.

One unionist MP who did not wish to be named described the conclusion of unlawful killings as a “hand-grenade with the pin pulled out that is about to be tossed into the lap of the PPS” in Northern Ireland.

Thirteen unarmed civilians, all of them male, were shot dead at a civil rights march in the Bogside area of Derry in January 1972. A 14th man died of his wounds several months later.

The killings electrified nationalist protests against British rule in Northern Ireland and Bloody Sunday became a critical moment in the history of the Troubles, dramatically boosting the popularity of the Provisional IRA in the province and, according to many people, acting as a catalyst for much of the violence that followed.

The results of Saville’s hearing will be released to the public at 3.30pm on Tuesday when David Cameron announces its publication to the House of Commons.

Up to 10,000 people are expected to march around lunchtime that day into Guildhall Square in Derry, where they will watch live reports about the inquiry’s conclusions on giant television screens. They will trace the same route that the civil rights marchers had attempted to take on Bloody Sunday, which the Stormont government, dominated in 1972 by unionists, had banned.

Families of those killed in the massacre 38 years ago have focused on a number of soldiers who were identified and gave evidence during the 12 year old tribunal. These include “Soldier F” who, according to the relatives of the Bloody Sunday dead, shot four to six of the victims. Told during the inquiry that his evidence amounted to perjury, he did not demur.

Though witnesses were protected from self-incrimination, an exception was made for perjury. And government law officers made it clear that criminal prosecution against an individual was not ruled out in the light of any evidence that emerged from other witnesses or from documents. Sources familiar with the inquiry said yesterday that Saville may not explicitly recommend criminal prosecutions and much will depend on his message, whether direct or indirect, to the PPS.

The PPS, headed by Sir Alasdair Fraser, will make the decision on prosecutions because the killings occurred in its jurisdiction, rather than the Crown Prosecution Service in London. Fraser will have to take into account the public interest in a prosecution, and the likelihood of securing a conviction.

Among survivors who were shot on the day and the families of the dead, there are many demanding that a number of British paratroopers should be prosecuted through the courts.

They could initiate a private prosecution and sue for compensation in a civil court.

Trimble, a Nobel peace prize winner, said that during the all-party talks of late 1997 and early 1998 he told Blair that a new inquiry would end up with soldiers being dragged through the courts.

He described the establishment of the tribunal during the peace talks as a “sideline deal independent from the Belfast agreement”.

On his warning to Blair, Trimble said: "I just reminded him that the Widgery report of 1972 concluded that the troops’ behaviour, to quote from the report, ‘bordered on the reckless’.

“Then I told the prime minister that if you moved from one millimetre from the that conclusion you were into the area of manslaughter, if not murder,” he said.

“I pointed out to Blair that we would see soldiers in the dock. I told him that at the time of the talks leading to the Belfast agreement,” Trimble said.

Blair and the then Northern Ireland secretary, Mo Mowlam, announced the establishment of the Saville inquiry on 30 January 1998 – the 26th anniversary of the shootings, citing “compelling new evidence”.

At the time Blair and Mowlam, who has since died, were locked in the intensive negotiations between unionists and nationalist that ultimately led to the Good Friday agreement of 1998.

However, Trimble said that the inquiry was “not in any way part of the agreement”.

He added: “At the time of the talks the parties, it seemed to me, did not want to be obsessing on the past. The problem was that Blair, for reasons that I can’t understand, gave in to pressure for a selective inquiry.”

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Louise Jensen (March 19, 1971 – September 16, 1994) was a tour guide from Denmark who was abducted by British soldiers, Allan Ford, Justin Fowler, and Geoffrey Pernell, while working in Cyprus. The soldiers, who were members of the Royal Green Jackets, repeatedly raped Jensen, then beat her to death with a shovel before burying her in a shallow grave.

On 27 March 1996, the three soldiers were convicted of abduction, rape and manslaughter and sentenced to life imprisonment. Their sentences were cut to 25 years on appeal in 1998, and they were released in August 2006 after spending just under 12 years in custody.

Louise Jensen was working as a tour guide for the Danish travel company Star Tours at the time she was killed.

One long-term effect of this case was for the British military to declare certain tourist resorts on the island as out of bounds to military personnel

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oh ah Up the RA!!! H’on Dan Breen!!!

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The Brits destroy the old Summer Palace in Beijing, 1900. The second time they do this in the space of 40 years. A British soldier takes up the story. “We went out, and, after pillaging it, burned the whole place, destroying in a vandal-like manner most valuable property which [could] not be replaced for four millions. We got upward of £48 apiece prize money…I have done well. The [local] people are very civil, but I think the grandees hate us, as they must after what we did the Palace. You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places we burnt. It made one’s heart sore to burn them; in fact, these places were so large, and we were so pressed for time, that we could not plunder them carefully. Quantities of gold ornaments were burnt, considered as brass. It was wretchedly demoralising work for an army.”

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It wasn’t Blair who brought peace to Ulster but brave British soldiers about to be branded as criminals

By General Sir Michael Rose

The low thump, thump, thump, was unmistakable. It was the sound of the Thompson machine gun, a chunky low-velocity weapon.
We all knew it was the IRA’s weapon of choice. They liked its macho feel, and had used it on us a couple of weeks earlier when we were patrolling on the nearby Lonemoor Road.

But they had not hit any soldiers that day; they’d hit and injured a 12-year-old girl.
The sound this time came from somewhere near the Rossville Flats in the Bogside, a nationalist area of Londonderry and a known stronghold of the IRA.

I was standing looking down on the Bogside when I heard it, with Sgt Garrett, my second-in-command in the Coldstream Guards. I asked him to note down the time - 4pm on January 30, 1972, and then we moved rapidly down the hill towards the sound of the gunfire.

The Army was returning fire now, and the fight was growing in intensity. Not many hours afterwards, 13 men lay dead, seven of them teenagers. Another man was to die four-and-a-half months later.
What happened on Bloody Sunday was a terrible thing, not just for the affected civilians, but also for the Army.

Witnesses testified that the killed and injured were unarmed, that some were shot in the back, that civilian protestors were injured when Army vehicles ran over them.

Today the actions of the soldiers who returned fire against the IRA that day will almost certainly be declared by Lord Saville to have been unlawful and, 38 years after the event, this will increase pressure for their prosecution.
The killings may or may not have been unlawful - but it is my firm view that it is not possible to judge with any certainty after an interval of more than 30 years whether they were or not.

Furthermore, the £190million expense of this inquiry is nothing less than obscene when British soldiers have been dying in Iraq and Afghanistan daily for want of vital equipment and cuts in the defence budget.

But what I find perhaps most distasteful about this 12-year-long inquiry is that the role of British soldiers in Northern Ireland has been brushed aside for the sake of political expediency.

The truth is that peace was brought to the Province not by Prime Minister Blair, kowtowing to former terrorists such as Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.

It came to Northern Ireland as a result of the courage of the British Army, the Ulster Defence Regiment, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the intelligence services.

By the time Blair offered this inquiry as a sop to Republicans, the IRA had already been militarily defeated by the very soldiers whose reputation he knew it would undermine.

The events of Bloody Sunday were terrifying, fast-moving and chaotic. But as I told the inquiry when called as a witness, there is one thing of which I am absolutely certain.

It was the IRA who started the firing with the Thompson machine gun - and, inflammatory though it may sound, I believe they started firing with the express intention of causing civilian deaths.

The security forces’ policy was to contain the nationalist civilian protest planned that day behind steel barriers in the Bogside - to prevent them from entering the Protestant area of the city. The Army was on one side of the barriers, the protest on the other.

Brigade orders were that the Army should not enter the Bogside - for it was known through intelligence sources that the IRA intended to create a bloodbath by drawing the security forces into a firefight with their gunmen in the middle of the civil rights march.

But when I and my second-in-command got down there, we were astonished to find that the barricades had been drawn aside and the paras were moving through into the Bogside, exchanging fire with the IRA gunmen who mostly seemed to be firing from the blocks of flats facing us.

I asked one of the platoon commanders why they had ignored orders.
He told me, above the increasing sound of firing and the screaming from the scattering crowds in front of us, that they had been told to do so by the Commander Land Forces.

It was rumoured that the commander had been irritated by the stones and nail bombs that were being thrown by some of the crowd and had decided to overrule the brigade order and told the paras to arrest the troublemakers. It was a disastrous decision.

I soon found myself taking cover beside a paratrooper who was lying in a gutter by the corner of a building, carefully firing up at the opposite blocks of flats.

When I asked him what he was firing at, he pointed at some crouched figures running along the balconies of the flats. I could see that at least one of them was carrying a rifle.

As I lay in the gutter, I could see bullets hitting the wall of the building above me. There was no doubt that the IRA gunmen were firing from their positions on the galleries of the flats opposite, where I was taking cover.
In my view, it is entirely possible that they could have been responsible for some of the civilian deaths, shooting from on high down into the streets below where the crowd was trying to escape from the killing zone.

But it was absolutely clear that in exchanging fire with the terrorists, the British Army had fallen into the trap laid for them by the IRA, who had set out that day to commit murder and mayhem, caring nothing for the lives of their own republican supporters.

Indeed, I believe it was their specific aim to get as many people killed as possible. For the deaths would serve as a ruthlessly cynical recruiting tool. As the news of the dead in Londonderry that day spread around the world, the result was much the same as Irish people everywhere rallied to the nationalist cause.

In Northern Ireland, in the Irish Republic and in the U.S., thousands of young men and women joined the IRA.
The people of Northern Ireland and the British Army have already paid a high price for what happened on Bloody Sunday, for the consequence of the decision to move the barricades and exchange fire with the terrorists was to heighten and prolong the conflict, probably by decades, with massive loss of life, suffering and destruction.

The decision to hold the Saville Inquiry has been little more than a grotesquely expensive exercise in propaganda, designed by Blair to bring the IRA further into the political process.

But as I have said, the IRA had already been militarily defeated. They had been forced into taking the political route only because they had no further military options to pursue.

How ironic now that the soldiers who brought peace to Northern Ireland are likely to be treated as criminals as a result of this inquiry, while former terrorists such as McGuinness and Adams - who did everything to prevent peace - are feted in their roles as ministers.

Nor should the effect of the Saville Inquiry on the British soldiers fighting today in Afghanistan be underestimated. Some will be the sons and even grandsons of those being accused of unlawful killing.

Even if they are not, they will be asking themselves whether each time they open fire on the Taliban, they might not, in some distant future inquiry, be asked to justify their actions. This is no way to go to war.

If anyone should be the subject of a judicial process, it is Tony Blair. He should be held to account for his actions in launching the disastrous, costly and unnecessary war in Iraq.

Meanwhile, it will be the British Army and people who bear the cost of this equally disastrous, costly and unnecessary inquiry.

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Rule Britania! Britannia rule the waves. Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.

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[quote=“ChocolateMice, post: 148030”]
Rule Britania! Britannia rule the waves. Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.
[/quote] :rolleyes:

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General Sir Michael Rose…you are one lying cunt.

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BREAKING NEWS: Saville Inquiry criticises actions of UK Army - including no warnings given by soldiers. UK PM says he is ‘deeply sorry’

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Are there grounds for prosecutions?

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Just came from Newstalks twitter, havent seen anything else since to be honest.

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It is live on bbc 2 now, they have interupted Royal Ascot for it

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Only fair considering the IRA interrupted Aintree

1 Like
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Some despicable shit from unionist politicians on the BBC.

Regrettable mistake, young soldiers, guerilla warfare situation, they were confronting terrorists, the people shot weren’t marchers, hierarchy of victims and so on.

Horrendous stuff. I’m amazed at what cunts these people are.

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:clap:
:clap:

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:clap: :guns: :clap:

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15/06/2010 - 15:48:50
Fourteen civilians killed on Bloody Sunday died as a result of “unjustifiable firing” by British soldiers, the long-awaited Saville Inquiry found today.

British Prime Minister David Cameron told the Commons that the inquiry said none of the casualties posed any threat to British troops.

He said the inquiry found that the first shots were fired by British troops, no warnings were given, and some of the soldiers lost control.

The 14 civilians died after British troops opened fire on a civil rights march in Derry on January 30, 1972.

Mr Cameron told MPs: “What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. It was wrong.”

He added that “”what happened should never have happened“.

“The Government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of the armed forces. And for that, on behalf of the Government, indeed on behalf of our country, I am deeply sorry.”

The inquiry found that the soldiers of the support company who went into the Bogside, where the march was taking place, did so ``as a result of an order which should not have been given’’ by their commander.

It concluded that “on balance” the first shot in the vicinity of the march was fired by British soldiers.

None of the casualties was carrying a firearm and while there was some shooting by republican paramilitaries, “none of this firing provided any justification for the shooting of civilian casualties”.

In no case was any warning given by the soldiers before opening fire and the support company “reacted by losing their self-control … forgetting or ignoring their instructions and training”.

The result was a “serious and widespread loss of fire discipline”.

Afterwards, many of the soldiers involved “knowingly put forward false accounts in order to seek to justify their firing”.

The inquiry found that some of those who were killed or injured were clearly fleeing or going to the assistance of others who were dying.

The report’s detailed review of the events catalogued scenes of horror that included the image of unarmed victims shot dead as they tried to crawl away.

The key finding were:

:: “The firing by soldiers of 1 Para caused the deaths of 13 people and injury to a similar number, none of whom was posing a threat of causing death or serious injury.” This also applied to the 14th victim, who died later from injuries;

:: “Despite the contrary evidence given by soldiers, we have concluded that none of them fired in response to attacks or threatened attacks by nail or petrol bombers.” The report added that no one threw, or threatened to throw, nail or petrol bombs at soldiers;

:: The accounts of soldiers were rejected, with a number said to have “knowingly put forward false accounts”;

:: Members of the official IRA fired a number of shots, though it was concluded it was the paratroopers who shot first on Bloody Sunday;

:: The North’s Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, second in command of the provisional IRA in Derry in 1972, was “probably armed with a Thompson submachine gun”, and though it is possible he fired the weapon, this cannot be proved. The report concluded: “He did not engage in any activity that provided any of the soldiers with any justification for opening fire.”

:: Saville concluded the commander of land forces in the North, Major General Robert Ford, would have been aware that the Parachute Regiment had a reputation for using excessive force. But he would not have believed there was a risk of paratroopers firing unjustifiably;

:: The commanding officer of the paratroopers, Lieutenant Colonel Derek Wilford, disobeyed an order from a superior officer not to enter troops into the nationalist Bogside estate;

:: Saville found his superior officer, Brigadier Patrick MacLellan, held no blame for the shootings as if he had known what Col Wilford was intending, he might well have called it off;

:: No blame was placed on the organisers of the march, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association;

:: Neither the UK norNorth governments planned or foresaw the use of unnecessary lethal force.

The report referred to one person who was shot while crawling ... away from the soldiers'' and another who was probably shot when he was lying mortally wounded on the ground’’.

A father was “hit and injured by Army gunfire after he had gone to … tend his son,” the report said.

“The immediate responsibility for the deaths and injuries on Bloody Sunday lies with those members of the support company whose unjustifiable firing was the cause of those deaths and injuries,” the report said.

It added that “none of the casualties was posing a threat of causing death or serious injury, or indeed was doing anything else that could on any view justify their shooting”.

Mr Cameron said: “These are shocking conclusions to read and shocking words to have to say. But you do not defend the British Army by defending the indefensible.

“There is no point trying to soften or equivocate what is in the report. It is clear from the tribunal’s authoritative conclusions that the events of Bloody Sunday were in no way justified.”

Memories of the Bloody Sunday dead boomed out across Derry’s Guildhall Square as bereaved relatives read out the names of their loved ones to an audience of thousands who had packed into the space in front of the city’s historic walls.

As each relative in turn came to the microphone on the steps of the venue, they read out a name of one of those killed by the Paras, before shouting the word: “Innocent.”

John Kelly, whose 17-year-old brother Michael was found by the report to have been shot by soldiers without justification, made an emotional address to the crowd that recalled the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

“We have overcome,” he declared, prompting cheers from the throng.

He said the report had vindicated the families and it would now be the verdict of history for all time.

Mr Kelly produced a copy of the shamed Widgery report, which had largely exonerated the soldiers only months after the killings.

He said the whitewash had been laid bare, before ripping the Widgery document into pieces.

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I wonder if finally worldwide recognition of the atrocities carried out by the British Crown in this country will be realised.

Shower of despicable cunts.

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Agreed farmer. Looks to be a decent report. Hopefully the word allegedly can be stricken from the records about that day and justification can be ignored forever.

Horrific actions from a shower of cunts.

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Ya it looks a good report and probably goes as far as the victims families were hoping. It certainly leaves no doubt that the events of that day were murder. Shove it up your hole Michael Rose.