Marine A: the shambles that shamed us

Like it or not, and many in high places will loathe it, what we may now call The Blackman Affair is not going to go away. It will be recalled as a shambles and a glaring miscarriage of justice. Also remembered will be the ferocious, self-serving and vindictive role of the establishment in permitting this injustice to occur.

Posterity will say that a Royal Marine sergeant on an exhausting assignment in Northern Helmand, Afghanistan, in the late summer of 2011, shot and killed a Taliban terrorist who, though undoubtedly dying and wholly unsaveable, was not yet quite dead.

A more expanded account might add that a nearby corporal, secretly filming on a camcorder hidden under the scrim on his helmet, brought the evidence back to the UK where it eventually fell into the hands of the Military Police who passed it on to the Office of the Judge Advocate General. And that this worthy brought a charge of cold-blooded murder against the sergeant who at court martial was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison, a sentence mitigated at appeal to eight years.