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.
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