In the Daily Telegraph (1 September) a Brigadier Ed Butler protested, claiming that prosecuting British special forces makes us vulnerable to the Russians. That recruitment numbers are down due to soldiers fearing ‘lawfare’ and that Andy Burnham is not ‘having the backs’ of our troops.
That this is not about national security is precisely the point. He is advocating state murder with impunity.
The British military does not exist to protect us. It exists to protect King Capital. The SAS are the sharp end of the stick. They exist to kill whoever the British state labels an enemy whenever King Capital requires resources, markets, or strategic advantage to be secured. When Brigadier Butler warns that accountability threatens the special forces, defending our safety is the last thing on his mind. He is defending the state’s right to commit murder abroad with no repercussions.
And the ‘witch hunt’ he is talking about does not even exist.
Since 2001, across two decades of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan there has been precisely one prosecution of British armed forces personnel for a war crime under the International Criminal Court Act. Just one. Corporal Donald Payne was convicted of inhumane treatment in the killing of Baha Mousa, an Iraqi civilian who died with 93 separate injuries to his body after 36 hours in British custody. He was hooded, forced into stress positions, deprived of food and water and beaten in a detention facility that used to be run by Saddam Hussein’s cousin. Seven soldiers were court martialled, six walked free. Payne was acquitted of manslaughter and only convicted of inhuman treatment. Sir William Gage the head of the public inquiry said it was ‘an appalling episode of serious, gratuitous violence on civilians’. The investigation found that the hooding and stressing techniques of detainees that had been banned by Heath’s government in 1972 had become written UK policy again.
That is the sum total of war crimes accountability for Britain’s 21st century wars.
But crimes are documented. A BBC Panorama investigation found that one SAS squadron alone could have unlawfully killed 54 people during a single six month tour in Helmand Province in Afghanistan. The ongoing public inquiry is looking into more than 80 suspicious deaths involving UK Special Forces in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013, including children. One ex-SAS member told the BBC that on some operations ‘the troop would go into guest house type buildings and kill everyone there… It’s not justified, killing people in their sleep’. Witnesses said that they saw detainees being handcuffed, taken back inside buildings and shot. They described ‘drop weapons’, AK-47s being brought into raids and planted on corpses to make executions look like combat, they described squadrons vying for body counts, they described children murdered.
The International Criminal Court found that there was a reasonable basis to believe that British forces had committed war crimes in Iraq, including wilful killing, torture, rape; the court only closed their preliminary examination because it accepted Britain’s promise that it would investigate itself. Britain did not.
Operation Northmoor and the Iraq Historic Allegations Team were the major UK military police investigations into war crimes committed by British armed forces abroad. IHAT investigated over 3,000 allegations, it spent £34 million, it secured zero prosecutions of soldiers.
And in Afghanistan it was the same story, Operation Northmoor was the Royal Military Police’s inquiry into 675 allegations of unlawful killing by UK Special Forces. No prosecutions. The inquiry was dismantled through leadership interference, digital evidence deletion, and strategic narrowing of scope.
But, Brigadier Butler calls this a witch hunt.
Sergeant Alexander Blackman was caught on camera executing a wounded, unarmed Taliban fighter in Afghanistan saying as he pulled the trigger ‘I just broke the Geneva Convention’. He was convicted of murder, reduced to manslaughter on appeal, and released after three years – he was never charged with a war crime.
When Butler talks of ‘morale’ it is the kind of ‘morale’ of killers who think they are untouchable. The ‘backs’ the government is supposed to have is the back of an assassin. We’re told that Britain needs men who murder children, plant weapons on corpses and falsify reports in order to keep us safe from Russia but Russia does not threaten us because the SAS is short of recruits, Russia threatens British capitalist interests just as British capital threaten Russians. These are the wars of rival ruling classes fought with the bodies of workers on both sides.
The military industrial complex is not a conspiracy, it is the natural machinery of an economic system where a minority owns all wealth and requires violence to protect it.
The UK spent £89 billion on its military in 2025, that is 2.4 percent of GDP, the government will increase that to 3.5 percent by 2035. That jump alone would be equivalent to £36 billion a year, roughly £500 for every person in the country.
Weapons manufacturers make billions, UK arms exports to Saudi Arabia since the Yemen war began have been worth about £3.3 billion. Politicians wrap themselves in the flag, newspapers like the Telegraph sell the myth that questioning soldiers is treason and workers are told to salute, to enlist, to die, to look away when the bodies pile up
We don’t have to look away, we recognize this system for what it is. A worker in Basra and a worker in Birmingham have the same enemy, the class that sends one to kill the other for oil, for territory, for power.
Every demand for accountability, prosecution, inquiry, leaked document, is a crack in the wall of impunity.
There is no reform that will make the SAS moral, there is no law that will stop an army built for state violence from committing state violence. The only answer is the abolition of the system that requires violence to maintain it. That means socialism, common ownership of the means of production, production for use and the end of the nation state and its armies.
A.T.
