There were three clear and identifiable strands in the response of British people to the shooting of IRA terrorists on the streets of Gibraltar. The first was profound relief that a bloody outrage had been averted and many lives saved by keen detective work and decisive action by the SAS. A second was profound concern that unarmed and untried people had been executed in cold blood by the agents of the State. The third response lay somewhere between these two extremes: a recognition that the IRA operation had to be stopped, combined with some misgivings as to whether the bombers had to be shot dead rather than arrested or even wounded.
The interim verdict on the justification for the Gibraltar shootings has to be one of “not proven”. That makes it all the more regrettable that the Prime Minister has set her face against any form of judicial inquiry. One is needed – if only to allay forebodings that the SAS is now being used as the instrument, in the war against terrorism, by which capital punishment can be introduced by the back door.
As Dr David Owen rightly said last week: “In a democracy no one – the SAS, the Special Branch, the police, or the armed services – can take the law into their own hands.” If the Government has learnt nothing else from what happened in Gibraltar last Sunday, it should at least no longer be in any doubt that even the most apparently necessary emergency measures to ward off a terrorist threat will always have their awkward political and diplomatic repercussions.
Key quote
There is no such thing as collective guilt
Kurt Waldheim, president of Austria
Talking point
For the first time in the seven-year Gulf War, Iran has begun manufacturing chemical weapons, apparently for use against Iraq’s main cities. It is believed that the Iranians are in sight of equipping their lethal stockpile of surface-to-surface missiles with chemical warheads and unleashing them in the “war of the cities”.
Revealed: Iran’s chemical weapons