The Release of Sergeant Blackman: War Crime Punishments Compared

We are all, hopefully, familiar with the details of the case of Sergeant Alexander Blackman, formerly of the Royal Marines. The fact that he was filmed shooting a wounded Taliban fighter in Afghanistan in 2011, convicted of murder in 2013 and sentenced to ten years in jail was widely publicised. Equally well publicised was the campaign to reduce his sentence, which has led to his crime being downgraded to manslaughter and his early morning release yesterday. Blackman faces a promising, if uncertain future. Although he cannot return to service with the Royal Marines, he has had offers of jobs in the security industry and both he and his wife are rumoured to be considering book writing offers. It does not stop there, as the Telegraph says:
"A rather more illustrious path could even be on offer from Hollywood with a producer said to be interested in telling his story and talk of Kate Winslet as Mrs Blackman, Tom Hardy as him and Al Pacino as  Jonathan Goldberg QC, the lawyer who led his successful appeal"."
On the downside, the Blackmans will never be safe from attack from Islamist extremists, and already face the prospect of moving house and possibly even changing their identities.
What is of interest to me, however, is the fact that this case became politicised to a marked degree, eliciting a wide range of responses from all shades of opinion. There are those who take the view that Blackman is nothing but a criminal who knowingly violated the Geneva Convention by committing murder and deserved all he got. In 2015, Stop the War writer, Matt Carr said:
"... what Blackman did had nothing to do with ‘survival’. He chose to shoot someone he didn’t need to kill...".
 The polar opposite view is that Blackman was under pressure when he did what he did and allowance must be made for the fact. There are also the grounds which led the courts to change Blackman's charge from murder to manslaughter: the fact that his unit had been stationed in Helmand Province for too long and that he was suffering from mental illness, among other things.
There is scope for middle ground here, but those sympathetic to Blackman have made the running in this case. The Daily Mail on Thursday thundered triumphantly:
"A Mail investigation had revealed vital evidence was ‘deliberately withheld’ from the court martial during Sgt Blackman’s original trial.
Thriller writer Frederick Forsyth, who was in court yesterday, said the ‘villains’ who locked up Sgt Blackman should ‘hang their heads in shame".
Mr Forsyth did not name any of these villains. Presumably he means the senior officers who deplored what Blackman did and the prosecution team that convicted him. Forsyth has hinted that there will be consequences for these people; respect for the legal process appears to be confined to verdicts that he and others agree with.
I take the view that, if Blackman was not given a completely fair trial in the first place, then this verdict is to be welcomed. If, however, all such future trials are to be conducted with partisan pressure from the politically motivated of either side, then justice will not be served. As the Guardian editorial said yesterday:
"....the rules of war...are not a matter of etiquette, but morality; not a luxury, but a necessity...because of the extremity of the situation, and the pressure upon troops, that clear rules are needed".
It's worth comparing the Blackman incident to war crimes committed by troops from other countries. It comes as a surprise to find that no French soldiers were ever tried for war crimes committed during the Algerian War of Independence, despite many allegations against them. To be fair, their FLN opponents never held any such trials either.
The United States Army, like ours, has a mixed record when it comes to such offences. We all remember the outrage caused when the ill-treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq became public. A number of military staff were punished, but as the LA Times reports, those prosecuted were small fry. There are a number of ex-soldiers in prison for crimes in Iraq. There is, for example, in a case that resembles that of Alexander Blackman, that of Sgt. Derrick Miller, one of what Fox News calls "The Leavenworth Ten":
"... Sgt. Derrick Miller of Maryland, on a combat mission in a Taliban-held area of Afghanistan, was warned the unit’s base had been penetrated. An Afghan suspected of being an enemy combatant was brought to Miller for interrogation and wound up dead. Miller claimed the suspect tried to grab his gun and that he shot him in self-defense. But he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison."
Miller is serving a life sentence, as are a number of others. As with Blackman, however, there are people working to secure pardons for all such offenders. A New York Times article says that there is little public support for this:
" Few in the public appear to support revisiting cases in which troops killed unarmed civilians".
Lastly, of course, there are the many thousands of crimes against humanity committed by the German forces in WW2. These are well enough known, but what is less well known is the leniency of some of the sentences passed on German war criminals after hostilities ended. Many were dealt with severely, as were the Nazi leaders tried at Nuremberg; many more were not. In just one small example, Damien Lewis, in his book "The Nazi Hunters", records the fate of 14 Germans who had summarily executed eight unarmed SAS prisoners in 1944:
"...the final sentences...were close to laughable. Six...were found not guilty. Of the remaining eight, only one received a ten-year sentence. and two were given sentences of two and three years respectively".
Most of the Einsatzgruppen commanders, who commanded units estimated to have killed a million people behind the German lines in Russia, were given sentences that were later commuted by German courts. A similar thing happened after the Malmedy massacre carried out by the SS during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. Lest anyone should bemoan the apparently light sentence of Sergeant Blackman, it needs to be said that precedents have been set.

The bodies of US soldiers, massacred by the Waffen SS at Malmedy, 1944.