Push to talk –or– Can you hear me now?

Monday, 14 March 2011

…under the rules of engagement, the walkie-talkie the Taliban pair were carrying was designated a hostile act. Osmond fired warning shots [from 200+ yards away] with his pistol and then picked up his L96 … he fired a single shot. The bike tumbled and both men fell onto the road and lay there motionless. When the British patrol returned, they checked the men and confirmed they were both dead, with large holes through their heads.

Dead Men Risen: The snipers’ story, The Telegraph

Listen. I understand that those two were probably very bad men and might have even been on the way home to cut off their wives’ and sisters’ noses and clits and maybe go out later to scare a brace of Army into shooting an NFL star.

Let’s just be clear. Those men were executed for carrying a walkie-talkie and not heeding warning shots that were from so far away they could not have possibly been understood to be such. You now live in world where picking up a walkie-talkie is the same thing as picking up a gun with the intent to kill an agent of the government.

If you think the theater is what makes the bad guy and not the trigger men, the ghost of Jean Charles de Menezes would like to point out that you have neither pedigree nor the small arms to keep a standoff going more than an hour.

The Telegraph also asks, on the very same day, Why is there no looting in Japan?

But there’s no way that could be related. I mean what could a country which has initiated no foreign aggression in 60 years and where there is no looting in a humungous disaster have to do with a country having the widest currency of foreign violence which is also home to this snippet from the Daily Mail: Britain’s violent crime record is worse than any other country in the European union… Official crime figures show the UK also has a worse rate for all types of violence than the US and even South Africa – widely considered one of the world's most dangerous countries.

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