(personal underlines)
Who’d dare join the SAS now?
We should all feel scared to our bones about the persecution of the SAS, soldiers harried through the courts for jobs they did many decades ago. It’s not that the SAS should be allowed to behave like trigger-happy psychos, but as Paul Wood wrote in this magazine before Christmas, Special Forces are now being hounded and punished for simply following orders and conducting operations. And what will we soft sofa-sitters do when no one wants to be a soldier any more?
Wood described in particular the plight of 12 soldiers of a Specialist Military Unit (SMU) deployed in Ireland in February 1992 to apprehend a gang of IRA terrorists – the East Tyrone brigade of the Provisional IRA (PIRA). The Tyrone PIRA had procured a socking great Russian machine gun and planned to use it to attack a police station. The SAS got their men and retrieved the gun, and as a reward they’ve been subjected to decades of interrogation and now an inquest into the deaths of the terrorists shot during the operation.
When Wood wrote his piece, Justice Michael Humphreys, presiding over the inquest, had not yet reached a verdict or released his report. Well, now he has. He has decided that the use of lethal force was not justified and referred the case to the Director of Public Prosecutions.
I spent the weekend reading Justice Humphreys’s report, expecting to find at least some evidence of SAS wrongdoing – some reason to put the soldiers through so many gruelling years of investigation. But what I found is much weirder than that. The SAS unit seems to me to have behaved bravely in tricky circumstances, and certainly just as it had been trained to do. What’s bizarre is the picture painted by Mr Justice Humphreys of how he thinks the SAS should have behaved. It’s a glimpse into life lived by the light of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), and it’s both scary and surreal.
All accounts agree that the moon was full and bright in County Tyrone on the night of 16 February 1992, which was not great for soldiers lying low. The intelligence had been that the PIRA would meet at St Patrick’s in Clonoe before the attack, and the original plan was to apprehend them there, so the men of the SMU hunkered down behind a patchy hedge to wait. Even Justice Humphreys agrees that the hedge provided inadequate cover. But the PIRA didn’t stop by St Patrick’s Church. They drove their gun straight to the Royal Ulster Constabulary station and shot it up with 60 rounds of armour-piercing bullets. Only after that did they drive to St Patrick’s, whooping and shooting, intending to dismantle the gun and escape with the other members of their brigade, 20 IRA in all.
When the truck arrived at St Patrick’s Church, the SMU was waiting. But as the headlights swept towards him, the soldier in charge of the unit – Soldier A, the inquest calls him – judged it likely, given the scrappy cover, that he and his men would be spotted. He describes seeing PIRA members in the back of the truck, one of whom was holding a rifle in the air. So Soldier A opened fire. His men engaged and four IRA men wound up dead.
Article 2 of the ECHR states that everyone has a right to life and cannot be intentionally killed. The ‘Yellow Card’ instructions for opening fire in Northern Ireland insist that a ‘challenge’ must be given before opening fire, but also that a soldier may disregard this if he has reason to believe that announcing his presence to make an arrest would endanger his life, or the life of his men. Hard as I try, I can’t think of a more certain way for a soldier to endanger the lives of his men than by cheerily announcing their presence to 20 IRA terrorists with a burning hatred of the British Army and a heavy machine gun. What choice did Soldier A have?
But here’s how Justice Humphreys thinks things should have played out. In his summary of the events of 16 February, he’s remarkably breezy about the PIRA attack: ‘Some 60 rounds were fired but no one was injured’ – as if it was a naughty jaunt, no harm done.
What the soldiers should have done, insists Humphreys, is to calmly wait in their inadequate hiding place in the bright moonlight for the moment at which the PIRA boys began to unbolt their machine gun from the tailgate of the truck. Then, with every man occupied, it would have been a cinch to saunter up and lawfully arrest the lot of them, in accordance with Yellow Card protocol, no violation of the ECHR.
I long to see inside Justice Humphreys’s mind, the picture he has of this perfect and compliant operation: all 20 IRA men caught unawares and unable to shoot because their hands are full of spanners. Perhaps it stars himself as a sort of Justice James Bond. ‘Rats!’ the PIRA ringleader, Kevin Barry O’Donnell, might say, ‘you’ve outsmarted us with your spanner trick.’
Kevin Barry O’Donnell had, by the by, been acquitted a few years previously of bombing an army barracks. ‘I come from a devout Catholic family and do not support the taking of life,’ he said in court.
But the lesson of the Clonoe inquest, and the miserable decision to refer the case for possible prosecution, isn’t just that Justice Humphreys is delusional. It’s that attempts to ensure that military operations, especially Special Forces operations, comply with ECHR law often leads to terrible injustice and punishes the very people we rely on most. No one who didn’t secretly have it in for our country could think otherwise.
I only know three young people who’ve chosen to join the armed forces in recent years and they’re three of the brightest and most moral twentysomethings I’ve met. The idea that, for acting in our country interests, they might one day be hounded through the courts fills me with despair.
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