If a soldier is on duty a la the 12 dead paras and 6 others from a ****e regiment get killed whilst on duty can it be classed as murder?
Can Policemen not be murdered "On duty", Firemen, emergency workers, and so on? There is nothing in law (which I am aware of) that lessens the severity of the offense when the victim is in uniform. In fact, Police murderers are often given lengthier sentences.
We are not talking about emergency service workers though. We are talking about heavily armed soldiers. Any RUC murder was justified though.
Again, there is nothing in law (of which I am aware) that allows people to shoot or blow up soldiers (or Policemen) with impunity. Throughout the history of warfare, men (not in uniform) who engage in acts of terror, spy, or shoot, at men in uniform, were usually summarily executed, because if they are not in uniform then they are not engaged in a War and the normal rules do not apply to them. That is why the IRA were rejected as signatories to the Geneva Convention. No better than the Japs really, except the Japs wore uniforms. Incidentally, If the British Army had adopted the tactics of the IRA then no IRA man would ever have seen the inside of a prison.
Yet the Army you served in armed and directed people without uniforms to murder innocent people because of their perceived religion/politics. Step away from the moral high ground Dev, and don't quote the Geneva Convention to me.
Why not mention the Geneva Convention, is it an unfair barometer of right and wrong? It exists for a reason, that people choose not to sign up to it (or fail to meet it's requirements) is their decision, and I don't think anyone could be in any doubt as to why countries or Armies would fail to meet it's aims.
Without the Geneva Convention we have no rules of war. If we had no "rules of war" then a lot of wars would have ended very differently.
Of course not, but you get my point about POWs? The Army took them, the vast majority of them, "alive". The IRA without exception murdered every soldier that fell into their hands. And it was murder, perhaps even a War Crime because it is totally unacceptable on every level. Imagine the Army worked without a Rule Book? Imagine the Army and RUC had followed that doctrine and simply killed every single man and woman they arrested? How many would have died? War's a dirty business, that's why we need rules because without them you don't have a war, you have a situation a bit like Syria and Iraq, where no rules are in force, that's not War, it's chaos.
