Quote:
Originally Posted by Damien
I said that we were not as we have such rules. The important thing is to abide by them because they're what separate us from the terrorists. If he still start abiding by their rules ("There you are. Shuffle off this mortal coil. It's nothing you wouldn't do to us.") then we've lost something important.
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Why remove that comment then? It's hardly contentious...
My understanding of what you'd written was that defending this incident made us 'not much better' than the terrorists and I've heard a few people saying the same. To those who do think that and still can't see the difference, I would say it's this: our forces clearly try very hard to have different standards from those of the terrorists and rightly so. In this case one individual acted in this manner for reasons we can only guess at. It was one breach, not official policy, not rules of engagement or common occurrence and it wasn't done indiscriminately simply because the guy was of a different religion. It was done because he was an enemy who'd earlier been attacking our troops and for one reason or another one of our soldiers decided he'd had enough and finished him off. That was wrong and the name given to the crime may still be murder but it doesn't put the solider in question on anywhere the same level as the terrorist and his actions clearly don't represent the vast majority.
There is obviously no carte blanche to act in this manner and the fact that a prosecution has resulted is the best possible proof of that. Mitigation whether strong or weak doesn't alter that fact.