A REMINDER TO us all, me included, to remain skeptical of the hysterical media. An excellent article from The Telegraph here. This is the British Colonel who gave such a stirring speech before the war and was subsequently charged with "war crimes" by one US reservist and a HOST of media outlets. Read it.

Col Collins - or so it is said - asked for his guns, and when Nasir said he didn't have any, the colonel is said to have hit him with his pistol. Then Nasir remembered: ah yes, he had a couple of Kalashnikovs. When Nasir's son Nawfel hesitated about retrieving the guns from the garden, the colonel is alleged to have fired a shot into the carpet, at which point Nawfel found he had a perfectly clear memory of where the guns were.

Look. It is simple. There were two rival organisations vying for power in the village of al-Nukhaila in the immediate aftermath of the war. One was the party of terrorist gangsters who had been responsible for the deaths of about two million people in the past quarter of a century. The other was the British Army. There was no third civil or judicial power to turn to.