No Justice for Soldiers

Think about the sheer cynicism of the timing. Today is 11 November—Armistice Day. Across the country, ordinary Brits are standing in silence at war memorials to honour the men who bled and died for this nation. And how does our state broadcaster mark the occasion? By splashing a grainy dark photograph across its front page with the headline: "New photos are 'essential evidence' of possible SAS war crimes, inquiry told". They couldn't wait twenty-four hours. What we are witnessing at the Afghanistan Inquiry is not the pursuit of justice. It is a coordinated, eight-year crusade driven by a triangle of activist journalists, human-rights law firms, and risk-averse Whitehall bureaucrats who view Britain’s elite warfighters with contempt. Look at the machinery behind these headlines. For nearly a decade, a dedicated unit inside BBC Panorama—led by Hannah O’Grady and Joel Gunter—has worked in lockstep with human-rights solicitors at Leigh Day and anti-military NGOs like Action on Armed Violence to hunt the men of 22 SAS. When Inquiry Counsel Oliver Glasgow KC drops a selective line in court, lobby correspondents at Sky News and The Guardian transcribe it as gospel. Have we learned nothing from the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) farce? Back then, the exact same legal-media ecosystem dragged thousands of British soldiers through a decade of hell over alleged war crimes in Basra, burning £60 million of public money before the whole thing collapsed with zero murder convictions and lawyer Phil Shiner struck off in disgrace. Now look at yesterday’s "bombshell." Lieutenant Colonel John Harvey, the Royal Military Police Gold Commander who ran Operation Northmoor, told the inquiry that photographs from 2011 Helmand night raids "cried out for examination", yet never sent them to forensic experts. Think about that for a second. Operation Northmoor lasted five years, cost over £10 million, had more than a hundred investigators, and ended in zero charges and zero convictions. Now, fifteen years after the event, the investigator in charge complains that his team didn't check the photos properly—and the media spins his admin incompetence as proof of an SAS cover-up! Even worse is how this witch hunt started. As the Inquiry’s own disclosures have let slip, the initial briefings against the SAS didn't come from the operators taking fire in Taliban compounds; they came from staff officers sitting in headquarters and petty inter-regimental rivalries, amplified by an MoD legal bureaucracy terrified of the ECHR. Ever since judges extended the ECHR onto foreign battlefields, Whitehall’s permanent civil service has treated our soldiers as sacrificial lambs to appease international courts. In 2011, the British state sent young men into the most lethal provinces of Afghanistan night after night to dismantle Taliban networks in pitch darkness. When they came home, the state handed them over to civilian lawyers with slow-mo replays and hindsight. As Brigadier Ed Butler, President of the SAS Regimental Association, rightly warned, this relentless lawfare is actively disarming Britain. Who in their right mind will volunteer for Special Forces selection tomorrow when they know that fifteen years later, a BBC journalist and a KC will be picking through photographs of a firefight to put them in prison? The Tories talked tough for fourteen years, yet it was a Conservative Defence Secretary who set up the Inquiry and left our veterans at the mercy of the ECHR. Labour’s Attorney General is cut from the exact same cloth. Only Reform UK has had the backbone to draw a line in the sand—with Zia Yusuf and new Shadow Armed Forces Minister Angus MacIntyre (himself a 40-year veteran) pledging to end the persecution of our veterans within 100 days and strip human-rights lawfare out of combat operations. On Armistice Day of all days, this national self-harm needs to stop.