Mick Smith - Times Online - WBLG

Will the MoD or the Americans ever get this right?

Over the coming weeks and days you will hear endless voices telling you that it is impossible to prevent friendly fire incidents like the one that killed Privates Aaron James McClure, Robert Graham Foster and John Thrumble at Kajaki on Thursday. That may be so, although until we find out what caused this particular case, we simply won’t know for sure whether or not it could have been avoided. What we do know, because of data collected by Prof Sheila Bird of the Medical Research Council - after the MoD admitted to MPs that it does not collect such date - is that such incidents are three times more likely to happen to non-US forces than US forces, and that the British are most likely of all the coalition forces to be hit.

Fiasco in Iran Part II: The Ministry Fights Back

The fiasco that was the decision to allow the sailors and marines arrested by Iran to sell their stories has led the MoD to draw up hopelessly restrictive, and totally unenforceable, regulations preventing servicemen and women from talking about issues related to their work on internet forums or blogs. Simon McDowall, the MoD’s Director-General Media and Communication, who oddly as the man in charge appears to have been nowhere when the decision to allow the sailors and marines to sell their stories was taken, tells us “there is now far less of a chance of having the kind of mishaps that we had with Iran now there are clear guidelines", as if somehow, that whole fiasco was the result of soldiers posting on the irreverently named ARmy Rumour SErvice, AARSE, or airman on the RAF’s similar and somewhat enigmatically named E-Goat.

Will James Miller's Family Ever Get the Justice They Deserve?

Lord Goldsmith seems an unlikely recipient of applause from someone who has persistently questioned why Britain ever went to war in Iraq, but his support for the family of James Miller definitely deserves a few plaudits. Miller was shot dead in Gaza in May 2003 by the second of seven shots all of which were captured on video and featured in the award-winning Channel 4 television documentary Death in Gaza. The Israelis have always claimed that Miller was caught in a firefight and that the first two shots, the second of which killed Miller, were not fired by an Israeli soldier, the implication being that he was killed by a Palestinian.