Investigating alleged atrocities — or hiding actual ones

Perry de Havilland looks at the contrasting ways the USMC and the London police deal with allegations of gross injustice:

The alleged atrocity carried out by a fire-team of US Marines in Iraq is ghastly news and whilst I hope, like so many other allegations against Allied soldiers in the Middle East, it turns there is much less to this than meets the eye, the reports do seem to be indicating that this time there really was a monstrous massacre of innocents.

However the fact this horrendous incident has not been swept under the table shows that the US military does have structures that work as intended. Whilst it is appalling such a thing could have happened, it would be even worse if it had happened and the people responsible got away with it.

In that respect at least, one cannot but compare the accountability of the USMC with what happened when British police shot dead Jean Charles de Menezes, a innocent Brazilian man, and what we got was a stream of barefaced lies and complete fabrications and still no one has been brought to book (which should not just be the people responsible for the killing, but everyone involved with what has clearly been a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice).

It is a noted characteristic — of both bureaucracies in general and totalitarian regimes in particular — to automatically move to hide evidence of both natural and man-made disasters. That the USMC is (at least on the surface) moving to uncover the facts of the alleged atrocity is a very good thing: if a terrible crime like this has been committed, the swift investigation will minimize the chance of another atrocity.

The reactions of the London authorities to the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes reflects the habits of Soviet or Chinese Communist officials: deny, deflect, lie, or whatever else might seem necessary to keep the story from being told.