Why it was right to name Marine A as Alexander Blackman | Alex Andreou

It weighs heavily on me to say it, but however much of a hero Blackman was, at the point of killing the insurgent he acted like a coward

Today a panel of senior judges, led by the lord chief justice, Lord Thomas, decided that the identity of the marine convicted of murdering a Taliban insurgent in 2011 while on tour in Afghanistan could be revealed. Social media users, as social media users so often do, knew better. Not having heard any of the relevant legal argument, not having seen the full reasoning for the decision, not understanding the legal principles in question or having studied the relevant precedent, they disagreed. They took to their keyboards and have overwhelmingly condemned the decision, some even saying Alexander Blackman is a hero and should be given a medal.

Looking at Blackman’s career, there is no doubt that he has spent the majority of his adult life being a hero. Listening to the audio from that terrible day, there can also be no doubt that at the moment when he shot an already incapacitated and disarmed enemy combatant, he acted like a coward. Anyone full of admiration for a life spent serving us, in the face of unimaginable danger, is absolutely right. Anyone, however, attempting to excuse his actions during that horrific minute is absolutely wrong.

Chief of the defence staff, General Nicholas Houghton, seems to understand this. “Murder is murder,” he said. “[Our armed forces] are not above the law of the country, or the law of armed conflict.” We should demand special dispensation in all sorts of ways for former military personnel: for their pensions, for their rehabilitation, for support after they leave the forces, so that they never end up discarded by the very society they sought to protect.

Asking for special dispensation, however, in the way any aspect of this crime is treated – and this includes anonymity – is to blur the line of admiration for a soldier’s impossibly difficult job with condonation for this terrible act. It is to extend “I could never do his job” to include support for when he does his job catastrophically badly. It is to accept that he fired that bullet on our behalf. It is to value one life above another.

It is easy, on an emotional level, to have sympathy for the horror-filled path that led Blackman the hero to that moment of cruelty. To think how easy it would be to step over the line. But his job was precisely not to step over that line. It is easy to think that the man he killed would have done the same thing. But his job was precisely to be better than that. Our stated mission in Afghanistan is to train their forces to our standard. Such a calamitous lapse of those standards sets that mission back and puts every one of his fellow soldiers in an even higher degree of mortal peril.

Preserving his anonymity is to coalesce around him …read more