The Breaker

It is now apparently claimed that if Breaker Morant's trial for murdering civilians had been properly conducted he would have got off on a technicality and thus should now be retrospectively pardoned. Well, yes, but one would hope that after winning his appeal he would then have been retried and, seeing as he had in fact killed the people concerned, found guilty. As it's a little late to run the retrial, we should probably skip the pardon. Given our recent problems in Afghanistan, do we really want to encourage our soldiers to believe that if they do decide to thin out a few suspicious-looking bystanders they'll have the thanks of a grateful posterity?



As a gesture of compromise, though, I'd be quite prepared to have Lord Kitchener retrospectively declared to be a Class A war criminal.

(as published in the Age letters Tuesday October 20, 2009)