On Armistice Day, the BBC Puts the SAS in the Dock Again

At eleven o’clock this morning, the country stopped. At memorials in villages, market squares and cathedral cities, in factory yards and on military bases overseas, British people stood in silence for two minutes to remember the men and women who served and did not return. It is the one appointment in the national calendar that almost everyone keeps.

By then, the BBC’s coverage had been running for hours. Overnight, the corporation had led its news output with the Afghanistan Inquiry’s photographs of dead Afghans, under the headline: “New photos are ‘essential evidence’ of possible SAS war crimes, inquiry told”. Men in beds, heads on pillows, blood pooled around them. Seventeen people killed across two night raids in Helmand in February 2011. The youngest in each raid were 15 and 14 years old.

The photographs were released by the inquiry on Tuesday. The BBC did not release them, and its report does not suggest that it did. The story is real and it is grave. The objection is to the judgement with which it was handled on the morning the nation sets aside for its war dead.

The right to report is not the whole of the argument

The BBC has every right to report serious allegations involving British forces. That right does not absolve it of responsibility for the timing, prominence and presentation of its coverage, particularly on Armistice Day. A free press exists precisely to publish uncomfortable material about the state and its servants, and this publication would defend that principle against any government that sought to weaken it.

But a right to publish is not a licence to publish carelessly. The question is not whether the BBC could lead on this story. It is whether leading on it, in this form, at this hour, with these images, and without the facts that would have allowed a reader to weigh them properly, met the standard a public service broadcaster should set for itself on 11 November.

On any other morning of the year that judgement would be arguable. On this one it was wrong.

What the report did not say

The BBC’s report, examined in full, is a careful piece of writing in many respects. It uses the language of allegation throughout. Its headline says “possible” war crimes. Its copy says the inquiry “is examining allegations”, that counsel said the images “may be” evidence, and that further analysis “may be able to confirm” how those pictured died. Those are the correct legal formulations.

The difficulty is what the report left out, and the omissions are not marginal.

It did not tell readers that nobody has been charged in connection with these raids. It did not tell readers that Operation Northmoor, the Royal Military Police investigation into them, closed in 2019 with no prosecutions. It did not tell readers that the inquiry has published no findings against any individual. The word Northmoor does not appear in the report. Neither does the word prosecution, nor the word charge. The only reference to the earlier investigation is a passing phrase about “a five-year-long military police investigation”, which does not name it, does not say what it cost, and does not say how it ended.

A reader who encountered those photographs with their morning news was given no means of knowing that the matters described had already been investigated for five years, at a cost of around £10m, without a single charge resulting, and that the inquiry examining them has not yet concluded anything against anyone.

That is a failure not of legality but of completeness, and on this subject completeness is the whole obligation. A photograph of a man shot in his bed is evidence of a killing. It is not, of itself, evidence of murder, and the space between those two propositions is exactly where a public service broadcaster should stand.

Some of this context has appeared elsewhere in the BBC’s own output. The corporation has reported the inquiry’s costs and its failure to publish findings, and it reported in September that the Ministry of Defence had disclosed 97 million previously unseen files. That makes the omission in Wednesday’s lead report harder to explain, not easier. The material was known to the newsroom. It was simply not in the story that most people would read.

The report also carried no comment from the SAS Regimental Association, from any other veterans’ organisation, or from the soldiers these allegations concern. Whether those responses were sought is a question the corporation should answer.

What Remembrance asks of public institutions

Remembrance is not a demand for immunity. No serious person believes that a soldier who commits murder should escape the courts because he wore a uniform, and Great British PAC has never argued otherwise.

What Remembrance asks of institutions is restraint. It asks that the day be treated as something other than a news peg. It asks that the men who came home carrying injuries we cannot see, and the families who have lived for years with the consequences of service, be handled with the dignity the calendar itself sets aside time to mark.

The standard is not abstract. The BBC’s own editorial guidelines require due accuracy and due impartiality, and they warn against presenting allegations as established fact. They contain no rule about Armistice Day, and they do not need to. Some judgements are not written down. A broadcaster of the BBC’s experience is entitled to be judged on whether it knows where the line falls without having it drawn for it, and on Wednesday morning it did not find it.

The evidence, and what it cannot yet establish

The allegations must not be softened, because softening them would be its own form of dishonesty.

The inquiry is examining claims that SAS personnel murdered unarmed civilians and detainees on night raids between 2010 and 2013, and that weapons were planted on the bodies to make the dead appear to be insurgents. BBC Panorama’s 2022 investigation traced four raids in Helmand in which 26 people died, and its team was the first British outfit to reach the guesthouses where they took place, five years after the military police investigation was supposedly doing the same work. Weapons specialists told the programme that recovered rounds appeared to have been fired from above, which fits people lying or sitting rather than exchanging fire. Family members described clean shots to the head and chest. The inquiry has heard that a member of an Afghan partner unit told military police he personally saw a British soldier place a rifle on an unarmed man he had just killed. It has heard evidence of an alleged instruction to kill all fighting-age males on sight.

On Tuesday, Oliver Glasgow KC, counsel to the inquiry, took Lieutenant Colonel John Harvey through photographs of the dead. He suggested further analysis might establish whether those pictured were shot while asleep, and said the images appeared to contradict the accounts given by special forces. Colonel Harvey, who was Gold commander of Operation Northmoor, agreed the pictures “didn’t look right”. Under questioning he accepted that images which “cried out for examination” were never sent to forensic experts, and that the failure had “deprived all parties of potentially valuable information”.

That last phrase carries more weight than it is usually given. The failure deprived the investigation of evidence that might have incriminated. It also deprived the soldiers of evidence that might have cleared them.

The inquiry is now subjecting the photographs to expert forensic analysis. Until that work is complete, and until the inquiry reports, the honest position is that serious allegations remain allegations. They have not been proved. They have not been disproved. The absence of charges is not proof of innocence, and the publication of a photograph is not proof of guilt. Due process belongs to the dead of Helmand as fully as to the men who were sent to kill them.

Northmoor: the failure that harmed everyone

The evidence Colonel Harvey gave this week is the most important material the inquiry has heard on why nobody has been brought to justice in either direction.

Operation Northmoor was established in 2014, cost around £10m, and became the largest murder investigation in the Royal Military Police’s history. It closed in 2019 with no prosecutions. Harvey told the inquiry that an independent review team, brought in on the advice of the former Merseyside chief constable Sir Jon Murphy, recommended that the photographs should not go to forensic experts until a preliminary stage had been completed. Later, that team advised that commissioning an expert report would prove “futile, expensive and provide no additional benefit”. Harvey accepted the conclusion was “completely wrong”. He accepted too that he was in an impossible position, because the review team had the backing of the Provost Marshal (Army), his superior officer, who was separately briefing the director of Special Forces.

The decision that left the most sensitive exhibits unexamined was not taken in a newsroom or a human rights law firm. It was taken inside the military police, endorsed by a former chief constable, and supported by the Provost Marshal. If ranks were closed, they were closed by the institution itself.

Institutional incompetence is not a cover-up, and this article does not allege one. But incompetence repeated across two conflicts, at public expense, has not yet produced any public accounting for how those decisions were taken or by whom. It has left a single consistent outcome: no answer for the bereaved, and a cloud that has not lifted for the men who were there. More than fifteen years after the February 2011 raids, both the Afghan families seeking the truth and the service personnel whose conduct remains under scrutiny are still waiting for it.

The inquiry that cannot finish

The Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan was announced to the Commons on 15 December 2022 and commissioned by the then Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace. He confirmed as much himself in a written statement on 5 July 2023. It sits under the Inquiries Act 2005, is chaired by a Lord Justice of Appeal, and has power to compel witnesses and documents. It is a serious instrument, properly constituted, and it was never designed to deliver criminal convictions. That is not its function and it should not be criticised for failing to perform one.

It has nonetheless failed to deliver what it was asked to deliver, which is an account of what happened. When Lord Justice Haddon-Cave opened it, he said it would aim to report, at least on an interim basis, within 12 to 18 months. Nearly four years after it was announced, no interim or final findings have been published. The inquiry’s own expenditure to the end of the 2024-25 financial year was £14.68m. The Ministry of Defence, responding to a BBC Freedom of Information request, put the overall cost to the taxpayer at £58m to March 2026, a separate figure that includes departmental costs and 74 officials spending more than half their working time on it.

In September the department disclosed that it had found 97 million previously undisclosed files potentially connected to the inquiry, a discovery the chair called “troubling” and “extraordinary”. The Ministry later conceded that only around 1,200 might prove relevant, and its lawyers apologised that it had “fell short”. The chair has set a deadline of 30 April 2027 to hear all evidence.

None of that £58m is money wasted. Inquiries are expensive by design, and the disclosure failure is the Ministry’s, not the inquiry’s. But an inquiry that cannot say when it will finish, into events now fifteen years old, has stopped being a search for truth and become a condition of service. That is the grievance, and it is a legitimate one.

Labour’s responsibility now

The Conservatives commissioned this inquiry, and that is a matter of record. Ben Wallace took the decision in December 2022. This article does not need to relitigate it, and it will not pretend the decision did not happen in order to spare a party’s feelings.

But the Conservative Party has been out of office since 2024. The Government that owns this question now is Labour, and Labour has not yet said what it believes about historic investigations into the Armed Forces.

It has not been idle. It has legislated on Northern Ireland, where its Troubles Bill would repeal and replace parts of the 2023 Legacy Act; the Bill passed the Commons by 330 votes to 178 on 20 October and is now in the Lords. It has funded and supported the Afghanistan Inquiry, and its defence officials have apologised to the chair for the disclosure failures. Two of those three things are the minimum a government can do.

The third is the problem. On Northern Ireland, ministers have a framework, a stated position and a public defence of it, whatever one thinks of the merits. For Afghanistan, and for the wider question of how allegations against service personnel are investigated, no equivalent has been published or proposed. No statutory deadline for disclosure. No defined evidential standard for reopening a case that has already been investigated and closed. No requirement anywhere in statute that an investigation conclude within a stated period. No published assessment of whether the legal support available to a former soldier called before an inquiry years after leaving service is adequate, accessible and guaranteed rather than discretionary. And no route by which a man who has been investigated and cleared is told, in law, that the matter is closed.

Legal representation at public expense does exist for those the inquiry designates as core participants, and the Ministry has funded lawyers for former officers and senior figures, a cost that forms part of the £58m. That is not nothing. But it is a discretionary scheme administered case by case, not an entitlement, and it tells us nothing about the witness who is not designated, who is named in evidence, and who must find representation of his own fifteen years after the event. The Government has not said whether it considers that acceptable.

The constitutional difference is real and should not be elided. Northern Ireland cases arise from a domestic conflict within the United Kingdom’s own legal order. Afghanistan operations engage the European Convention on Human Rights and the law of armed conflict, and no government can legislate its way out of an international obligation by winning a division in the Commons.

That is precisely why the answer must be procedural rather than rhetorical. Fixed disclosure deadlines with consequences for missing them. A statutory maximum period between allegation and conclusion. Independent oversight that reports publicly and on time. Proper evidence handling at the outset, so that photographs are forensically examined in 2011 rather than 2026. Guaranteed legal support for the individual under investigation. And a clear route to resolution, so that a case which cannot be proved is formally closed rather than left open indefinitely.

None of that amounts to immunity, and none of it would prevent a prosecution where the evidence justified one. A deadline for a decision is not a bar on the courthouse door. The distinction between wanting cases concluded and wanting them suppressed is one ministers should be able to hold, and on the evidence so far they have not tried.

There are questions the Government should answer this week. How long does it consider an acceptable period between an allegation and a conclusion? What evidential standard should govern the reopening of a case already investigated and closed? Will it legislate to compel the Ministry of Defence to meet disclosure deadlines rather than apologise for missing them, and will anyone be accountable when it does not? Who pays for the legal defence of a former soldier facing an inquiry a decade and a half after the event, and is that support guaranteed or discretionary? And does the Attorney General accept that an investigation which never ends is itself a denial of justice, to the families of the dead as much as to the men under suspicion?

Those are answerable questions. They have not been answered.

The political divide

Reform UK has at least produced a proposal. Its new Shadow Armed Forces Minister, Angus MacIntyre, who left the RAF Regiment as a serving wing commander after 40 years, pledged within 100 days of taking office to end the prosecution of veterans or resign. His party’s published policy would legislate to end current cases and bar further proceedings for historical conduct on sanctioned operations within the chain of command, require the Defence Secretary to certify future prosecutions, and impose a 10-year limit after an incident. It would not cover conduct outside combat or in a civilian capacity.

That is a serious attempt at a legal architecture rather than a slogan, and it deserves examination rather than applause. A statute that extinguishes live cases against a defined category of defendant is an extraordinary thing for a parliament to do, and it raises hard questions under the Human Rights Act for bereaved families who would lose their route to a court. Every protection against delay carries a risk that a genuine case is shut down before it can be brought, and any party proposing one should say plainly how it would guard against that.

What cannot be defended is the alternative: Operation Northmoor, the 97 million files, £58m and no findings. Between an imperfect law and an indefensible process, the argument for the law is not difficult to make.

A nation that asks a great deal

Brigadier Ed Butler, who commanded 22 SAS and led British forces in Helmand in 2006, is now president of the SAS Regimental Association. He has warned that the legal jeopardy is already changing behaviour. He told The Telegraph that he knew two fathers, both with sons in the Army, who considered attempting selection and decided against it, citing the inquiry and “the whole lawfare matter”. He told LBC that the worst case is “a completely whittled-down special forces capability, because no one would be prepared to join it and do these high-risk, high-return operations if their back isn’t covered”.

This is not an argument for impunity. It is an argument about what a country is asking for when it asks a few hundred men to do things the rest of us will never see, and whether it is prepared to say when the account is closed.

It should also be said that the Afghan families have waited longer than anyone. They were promised answers more than a decade ago and have received a documentary, a £58m inquiry and no findings. Delay is not neutral. It has damaged every party to this dispute, and it has been the one consistent feature of British handling of these cases since 2010.

Where the judgement falls

The BBC has every right to report serious allegations involving British forces. That right does not absolve it of responsibility for the timing, prominence and presentation of its coverage, particularly on Armistice Day.

Its investigations have also uncovered matters of real public interest, and this publication has said so. Hannah O’Grady’s reporting in September on the Ministry of Defence’s disclosure failure was public service journalism by any measure, and without the corporation’s work over eight years there would be no inquiry at all.

That record makes the failure of judgement on Wednesday harder to excuse, not easier. An organisation capable of that reporting is capable of recognising that a story of this gravity, involving named allegations against serving and former personnel, with no charges brought, no findings made and a forensic question still unresolved, required more care than it was given. It required the additional context the report omitted, particularly the absence of criminal charges, the conclusion of Operation Northmoor without prosecutions and the inquiry’s lack of findings against any individual. And it required a decision, taken deliberately, about whether the lead item on the morning of 11 November should be this one at all.

The answer to that question was not beyond the corporation’s wit. It simply did not ask it.

At 11 o’clock this morning, the country stood in silence for the men who did not come home. Their sacrifice does not depend on shielding anyone from lawful scrutiny, and it is diminished by any suggestion that it does. What it demands is something harder: that the state investigate honestly, conclude promptly, and treat everyone caught up in these cases, the dead, the bereaved and the accused alike, as entitled to the truth within their lifetime.

Britain asks a very great deal of the people it sends to war. The least it can offer in return is a process that ends, and a broadcaster that tells the whole story while it runs.

GREAT BRITISH PAC REACTION

Great British PAC believes the past twenty-four hours have exposed two failures of responsibility: an editorial one at the BBC, and a political one in the Government that has left British veterans facing more than fifteen years of uncertainty since the February 2011 raids.

On the morning of Armistice Day, the corporation led its coverage with photographs of dead Afghans, framed around possible war crimes, without telling its audience that no one has been charged, that the military police investigation closed without a prosecution, and that the inquiry has so far made no findings against any individual. The allegations are serious. The presentation was not serious enough for the day and was not complete enough for the story.

The Government’s failure is older and more consequential. Ministers have had more than two years to set out how historic allegations against service personnel should be investigated: within what time, to what evidential standard, with what disclosure obligations, and with what finality for a man who has been cleared. They have legislated for Northern Ireland and published nothing comparable for Afghanistan. Veterans are left waiting for a hearing timetable that runs to April 2027, with inquiry-related costs already reaching £58m and no reporting date in sight.

Great British PAC makes four demands.

The BBC must explain its Armistice Day editorial judgement. The corporation should set out publicly why this story was given lead billing on 11 November, why these photographs were chosen and presented as they were, what editorial safeguards were applied before publication, whether any concern was raised internally about the date, and why readers were not told that no charges have been brought and no findings made. A public service broadcaster that asks the country to trust its judgement must be willing to account for it.

The Labour Government must protect veterans from unnecessary investigative delay.Ministers should publish a framework with statutory deadlines for disclosure, investigation and conclusion, a defined evidential standard for reopening closed cases, guaranteed rather than discretionary legal representation for former personnel examined years after leaving service, transparent public reporting of progress, and meaningful protection against unjustified repeat investigations of the same conduct. Accountability and delay are not the same thing, and the Government should stop treating them as though they were.

The Afghanistan Inquiry must deliver transparency and accountability. The inquiry should publish a clear timetable to conclusion, report its costs and progress in public at regular intervals, ensure the newly disclosed material is examined rather than merely logged, and treat every party before it with equal fairness: the bereaved Afghan families who have waited fourteen years for answers, and the service personnel whose reputations remain unresolved.

Britain must honour its service personnel without abandoning justice. Great British PAC does not seek immunity for anyone. We seek a system in which credible allegations of unlawful killing are investigated rigorously and independently, and in which those investigations reach a conclusion the public, the bereaved and the accused can all see. Due process for a British soldier and justice for an Afghan family are not competing objectives. They are the same objective, pursued honestly.

Richard Thomson, National Director of Great British PAC and former Royal Marine, said:

“Today, of all days, should belong to those who gave everything: their lives, their futures and every moment they would never live, so that we might enjoy the freedoms we possess today.

Remembrance is not merely two minutes of silence. It carries a responsibility – to build a country worthy of their sacrifice. In too many ways, Britain is failing to meet that obligation.

Serious allegations must, of course, be properly investigated. But timing, context and restraint matter. For the BBC to cast suspicion over British service personnel on this sacred morning was profoundly disrespectful.

Our veterans have endured years of uncertainty and repeated accusation. Today, they deserved dignity. The BBC should be ashamed.”

The two minutes of silence this morning were not a request for special treatment. They were a request for seriousness, for restraint and for honesty about what service costs. The BBC owes its audience an explanation of how it honoured that request. The Government owes veterans something more: a date by which they will know the matter is closed.