On State Killing and the Rhetoric of Accountability

Oliver Webb-Carter wants you to believe that holding the SAS accountable for extra-judicial killings represents a perversion of justice. His recent piece on the Clonoe inquest performs a familiar ideological manoeuvre: present state assassination as reluctant necessity, frame legal scrutiny as persecution, position immunity from prosecution as operational requirement rather than political choice. The argument collapses under minimal pressure. What he defends is not soldiers operating within impossible constraints but a systematic policy of killing rather than arresting, of execution rather than prosecution, of state terror masquerading as security operations.

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Assassination as Policy

The facts he provides undermine his case. At Coalisland on 16 February 1992, British intelligence knew an IRA attack was coming. They had time to prepare, to position forces, to plan intervention. Multiple opportunities existed to intercept: the lorry could have been stopped en route, the ASU arrested before reaching the police station, the getaway prevented without firing a shot. Instead, security forces waited until after the attack, then killed all four men at St. Patrick’s Church car park in what Webb-Carter himself describes as immediate, concentrated fire. Not a firefight. Not a tactical engagement. An ambush resulting in four deaths, one soldier with a facial wound possibly from friendly fire, and retrieved Kalashnikovs suggesting minimal return fire. This was an execution operation, not law enforcement.

Gibraltar makes the pattern explicit. Three unarmed IRA members shot dead in a public space. The bomb discovered later in Marbella gets deployed retrospectively to justify the killings, but the operational logic was killing rather than arrest from the start. They could have been stopped at the border. They could have been arrested at their hotel. They could have been intercepted before reaching the supposed bomb location. The state chose execution. Then claimed necessity.

Orders and Accountability

Webb-Carter frames this choice as operational constraint: soldiers following orders, security forces responding to armed insurgency, necessary violence in impossible circumstances. But the orders are precisely the issue. These operations were not emergency responses to immediate threats. They were planned interventions where the decision had already been made to kill rather than capture. The existence of orders does not provide legal or moral cover. It confirms that extra-judicial killing was policy, not aberration.

His argument relies on a fundamental category confusion between policing and counter-insurgency. Policing operates within legal constraints: proportionate force, attempt to arrest, lethal force only when necessary to prevent immediate threat to life. Counter-insurgency operates outside those constraints, treating internal populations as military targets, substituting assassination for prosecution. What Webb-Carter defends without quite naming it is the application of counter-insurgency doctrine to British citizens on British soil, the suspension of legal frameworks governing state violence, the normalisation of killing as first rather than last resort.

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False Comparisons

The comparison to judicial scrutiny of Second World War operations is particularly dishonest. Examining attacks on German military positions decades later would be questionable not because time has passed but because those were military operations against military targets in declared war between states. Coalisland and Gibraltar were operations against British and Irish civilians, however heavily armed or politically motivated. The legal and moral frameworks are categorically different. Webb-Carter knows this. The comparison functions to naturalise extra-judicial killing by aligning it with legitimate military action rather than acknowledging it as state terror.

His concern about asymmetric accountability deserves engagement because the underlying observation is accurate. Republicans hold letters of comfort providing immunity from prosecution whilst soldiers face potential murder charges decades later. This represents institutional failure and political cowardice. But the solution is not retrospective immunity for state killings. The letters of comfort were part of a negotiated settlement including prisoner releases, decommissioning, political integration. Deeply problematic, certainly, representing a failure to deliver justice for victims of republican violence. But they exist within a framework of conflict resolution, however compromised.

What Webb-Carter demands is categorically different: permanent immunity for state agents, prosecutorial discretion frozen in favour of institutional power, the principle established that orders provide absolute protection regardless of the nature of the action ordered. This is not equivalence or fairness. It is the claim that state violence should exist outside legal accountability entirely, that the decision to kill rather than arrest should never face scrutiny, that soldiers following orders to execute should face no consequences.

What the Verdict Actually Says

The institutional dynamics matter here. Judge Humphreys found unlawful killing after examining the operational details. He determined the soldiers’ claims of a gun battle were demonstrably untrue, that state agencies perpetuated these falsehoods, and that the physical evidence contradicted the soldiers’ accounts. Some soldiers refused to testify. Webb-Carter reads this as the judge structuring questions to protect soldiers from self-incrimination whilst favouring the paramilitaries’ version. This inverts what occurred. The issue was not evidentiary procedure but established fact: the soldiers lied about what happened, and those lies were repeated by the Ministry of Defence and other state agencies for three decades. The question before the court was whether the state had alternatives to killing and chose not to pursue them.

Accordingly, the Coroner’s Court determined that each of the deceased men died of gunshot wounds and that in each case, the use of lethal force was not justified in circumstances where the soldiers did not have an honest belief that same was necessary in order to prevent loss of life and where the use of force was, in the circumstances they believed them to be, not reasonable.

The court also concluded that the operation was not planned and controlled in such a way as to minimise to the greatest extent possible the need for recourse to lethal force.

This is what makes the Clonoe verdict significant. Not that it persecutes soldiers but that it names what occurred: unlawful killing. The state killed four people when it had the capacity to arrest them. That reality does not change because those killed were heavily armed IRA members responsible for previous attacks. Their guilt or danger does not retrospectively legitimise execution outside legal process. This is the foundational principle distinguishing law from violence, policing from assassination, state authority from state terror.

The Effectiveness Argument

Webb-Carter invokes operational effectiveness: the nine four-star generals warning that fear of prosecution will paralyse decision-making, distort rules of engagement, deter initiative. This argument appears regularly in defences of state violence. It amounts to claiming that legal constraints on killing make security forces less effective, therefore those constraints should be removed. But effectiveness at what? Killing people the state deems threatening? That is not the metric by which security forces in a democratic society should be judged. The constraint is the point. The requirement to attempt arrest before using lethal force is not bureaucratic interference but the minimum standard separating legitimate authority from armed force operating without legal limitation.

His comparison to France and the United States is revealing precisely because it is accurate. Neither country would pursue these prosecutions. But this is not because they have superior reconciliation mechanisms or more coherent legal frameworks. It is because both states have long histories of extra-judicial killing as routine policy. France in Algeria. The United States across Latin America, the Middle East, in its own streets. What Webb-Carter proposes without quite stating it is that Britain should openly embrace that model, abandon the pretence that its security forces operate within legal constraints, accept assassination as legitimate state function.

The Media Panic

The institutional resistance manifested immediately in mainstream media. The Spectator devoted its 1 March 2025 cover to “The great betrayal of the SAS,” with Mary Wakefield calling Judge Humphreys “delusional” and claiming his verdict produces “terrible injustice” that “punishes the very people we rely on most.” Her piece imagined a fantasy scenario where the SAS could have arrested “all 20 IRA men caught unawares and unable to shoot because their hands are full of spanners,” treating the prospect of attempting arrest rather than immediate execution as absurd theatre. The Telegraph amplified similar arguments, providing platforms for David Davis MP to claim the verdict represented “the IRA’s attempt to rewrite the history of Northern Ireland” and warning that soldiers faced “a vindictive, vengeful pursuit.” Conservative politicians lined up to demand statutory protections preventing any future prosecutions, with Davis insisting this was necessary “even if they win” the judicial review. The narrative settled quickly: legal accountability equals persecution, questioning extra-judicial killing threatens operational effectiveness, demanding that soldiers attempt arrest before opening fire amounts to requiring “collective suicide.” Reports emerged that the SAS might refuse deployment to Ukraine “for fear of future prosecution for lethal force.” The verdict was not analysed as establishing that the state killed when it could have arrested. It was presented as an existential threat to national security, evidence that legal constraints on state violence had become intolerable, proof that the very concept of accountability for extra-judicial execution represented betrayal of the armed forces. This is how normalisation functions. Not through explicit defence of assassination as policy but through framing any limit on state killing as unconscionable restriction, any demand for legal process as persecution, any insistence that soldiers operating under orders still face consequences for choosing execution over arrest as abandonment of those who serve. The panic was not about the verdict’s accuracy but about its implications: that state agents who kill when alternatives exist should face prosecution, that orders do not provide immunity, that the distinction between policing and assassination still matters.

Institutional Decomposition

This connects to broader patterns of institutional decomposition. The erosion of legal constraints on state violence, the normalisation of executive action outside democratic or judicial oversight, the claim that security requirements permanently trump institutional accountability – these are not separate from the economic and social dismantling that began with Thatcher. They are its necessary precondition and ongoing consequence. You cannot systematically destroy the social contract, hollow out public institutions, treat entire populations as surplus or threatening without also removing the legal and institutional frameworks that constrain state power. The security state and the neoliberal state are not in tension. They are mutually constitutive.

The timing of these prosecutions matters. They are occurring now not because republicans are gaming the system but because the Good Friday Agreement’s reconciliation mechanisms have comprehensively failed. Those mechanisms could incorporate republican paramilitaries into constitutional politics because they were non-state actors operating outside legal frameworks. They cannot incorporate state killings because that would require the British state to acknowledge its systematic violation of the legal order it claims to represent. The institutional architecture of 1998 presumed that state violence had been aberrational, excessive perhaps but fundamentally legitimate. The evidence increasingly suggests otherwise: that extra-judicial killing was policy, that assassination was routine, that the state operated outside its own legal constraints as a matter of course.

Peace Through Assassination

Webb-Carter’s final move is to position SAS operations as contributing to the peace process, applying pressure on the IRA to push them towards negotiation. This may be tactically accurate. Killing enough members of an organisation eventually forces recalculation. But this is an argument for assassination as political strategy, for state killing as negotiating tactic, for extra-judicial execution as policy tool. He wants this acknowledged as contribution to peace without facing the implication: that the British state used systematic killing outside legal process to achieve political objectives. This is not security. This is state terror.

The absence of easy answers does not mean all positions are equivalent. Webb-Carter is correct that no legislation will satisfy every group, that reconciliation may be impossible, that institutional mechanisms have failed. But the response to that failure cannot be abandoning accountability entirely, granting permanent immunity to state agents, accepting that soldiers following orders to kill should never face legal consequences. The difficulty of achieving justice does not make injustice acceptable. The impossibility of perfect reconciliation does not justify protecting extra-judicial killing from scrutiny.

Naming What Occurred

What Judge Humphreys found at Clonoe was unlawful killing. Four men were killed when the state had capacity and opportunity to arrest them. That finding does not erase their involvement in political violence or the danger they represented. It establishes that the state chose killing over arrest, execution over prosecution, assassination over law enforcement. Webb-Carter wants that choice protected from legal examination. He wants orders to provide absolute immunity. He wants state violence to exist outside accountability.

This is not about protecting soldiers operating under impossible pressure. It is about protecting the institutional prerogative to kill without constraint, to choose assassination over arrest as routine practice, to operate outside the legal frameworks that supposedly distinguish democratic states from authoritarian ones. The argument is ideological work disguised as institutional analysis: making the case that state security permanently trumps legal accountability, that operational effectiveness requires immunity from prosecution, that the interests of state power override individual rights or institutional constraints.

The Normalisation of Impunity

The Clonoe verdict does not represent persecution of veterans or asymmetric justice or the weaponisation of legal processes against the state. It represents the minimum threshold of accountability in a society claiming to operate under law rather than force. The discomfort this produces, the institutional resistance it generates, the arguments mounted against it – these reveal how far the normality of state violence has been naturalised, how deeply the assumption that certain people can be killed with impunity has been embedded, how completely the distinction between policing and assassination has been eroded.

Webb-Carter writes as a historian. But his piece is not historical analysis. It is advocacy for impunity, argument for immunity, defence of state killing as legitimate practice requiring protection from legal scrutiny. The fact this argument can be made seriously, can be published and debated, can be presented as reasonable concern about institutional function rather than apologia for extra-judicial execution – this is the measure of how thoroughly the constraints on state violence have been dismantled, how completely the frameworks of accountability have been destroyed, how deeply we have internalised the logic that some people can be killed by the state without consequence.

That normalisation is the victory. Not of reconciliation or justice or institutional effectiveness. Of impunity. Of the principle that state agents following orders to kill should never face prosecution, that the decision to assassinate rather than arrest should never be questioned, that extra-judicial killing should be understood as unfortunate necessity rather than named as state terror. Webb-Carter’s piece is one more iteration of that normalisation, one more attempt to frame accountability as persecution, one more defence of the indefensible dressed up as concern for operational effectiveness and institutional fairness.

Against All of It

The answer is not difficult even if implementation is impossible. State agents who kill when they have capacity to arrest should face prosecution. Orders do not provide immunity. Political authority does not legitimise assassination. Operational effectiveness is not measured by capacity to kill without constraint. These principles are not novel or radical. They are the minimum standards distinguishing law from violence, authority from force, democracy from despotism. That they appear controversial, that defending them requires argument, that their application produces institutional resistance and political backlash – this is the measure of how far institutional decomposition has progressed, how thoroughly legal constraints have been eroded, how completely the ground has shifted beneath claims to legitimate authority.

Against impunity. Against immunity. Against the normalisation of state killing. Against the claim that orders justify assassination. Against the argument that accountability paralyses effectiveness. Against the defence of extra-judicial execution as necessary violence. Against the erasure of the distinction between policing and terror. Against the protection of state agents who killed when they could have arrested. Against all of it.

Who Cares Who Wins

Webb-Carter titles his piece “Who Cares Who Wins” as though the question at stake is partisan allegiance rather than institutional principle. The framing is deliberate. By positioning accountability as a contest between British forces and the IRA, between those who defend the state and those who attack it, he obscures what the Clonoe verdict actually addresses: whether the state can kill when it has capacity to arrest.

This is not a question about who wins. The four men killed at Clonoe were members of an armed organisation engaged in political violence. They had just attacked a police station with a heavy machine gun. Their involvement in the IRA, their participation in that attack, their willingness to use lethal force against state targets – none of this is contested. The verdict does not exonerate them, does not minimise their actions, does not transform them into innocent victims. It establishes one fact: the state chose to kill them when it had alternatives.

That fact remains regardless of what one thinks about the IRA, about the Troubles, about political violence, about the legitimacy of the British state in Northern Ireland. The question is not whether these four men deserved to live. The question is whether the state can execute people it has the capacity to arrest, whether orders provide immunity for that choice, whether the decision to kill rather than capture should face legal consequences. These are questions about state power, not about sympathy for those killed by that power.

Webb-Carter wants the focus on outcomes. The operation succeeded: four IRA members dead, a heavy machine gun recovered, no soldiers killed, the East Tyrone Brigade weakened. Measured purely by results, Clonoe was effective. But effectiveness is not the metric by which democratic states should judge extra-judicial killing. The question is not whether assassination works as a tactic. The question is whether states claiming to operate under law can employ assassination as routine practice, then demand immunity from prosecution for those who carry it out.

The answer matters regardless of who the targets were. If state agents can kill when they have capacity to arrest, if orders provide absolute immunity for that choice, if operational effectiveness permanently trumps legal constraint, then the distinction between state authority and state terror collapses. Not because all state violence is illegitimate but because legitimate state violence operates within legal frameworks that include the requirement to attempt arrest before using lethal force, the principle that force must be proportionate and necessary, the insistence that even those engaged in political violence have a right not to be executed when capture is possible.

This is why the constant invocation of IRA violence functions as misdirection. Yes, the East Tyrone Brigade killed soldiers and police officers. Yes, they posed a genuine threat. Yes, those confronting them faced real danger. None of this changes whether the state had alternatives to killing at Clonoe. None of this determines whether soldiers who chose execution over arrest should face prosecution. None of this addresses whether orders provide immunity for extra-judicial killing. The IRA’s guilt does not establish the state’s innocence. The danger IRA members represented does not legitimise assassination when arrest was possible.

Webb-Carter treats accountability as persecution because acknowledging it as legitimate would require accepting that the state killed unlawfully, that this was policy rather than aberration, that the institutional machinery defending these killings has spent decades protecting impunity rather than enforcing constraints. Easier to frame it as a contest, as choosing sides, as caring who wins. Easier to position the verdict as republican victory rather than minimal legal accountability. Easier to defend state killing by invoking the violence of those killed than to address whether the killing was necessary.

But this was never about who wins. This is about whether states can kill with impunity, whether orders justify assassination, whether legal constraints on state violence remain operative or have been abandoned entirely. These questions apply regardless of who gets killed. They matter as much when the state kills armed insurgents as when it kills anyone else. Perhaps more, because it is precisely when state agents face genuine threats, when those they confront have committed acts of violence, when the operational pressure is greatest – it is precisely then that the insistence on legal constraint matters most. Otherwise constraint only applies when it is not needed, when compliance is easy, when the decision would have been the same anyway.

The Clonoe verdict does not determine who wins the Troubles. That conflict ended, however incompletely, decades ago. The verdict determines whether the state must operate within legal constraints when it kills, whether alternatives to lethal force must be pursued when they exist, whether agents following orders to assassinate can be held accountable. It establishes that at Clonoe, the state killed when it could have arrested. That finding stands regardless of what one thinks about Irish republicanism, British state policy, the strategic value of targeted killing, or the guilt of those killed.

Who cares who wins? Anyone concerned with whether state violence operates within law or outside it. Anyone who understands that legitimate authority requires constraint, that effectiveness without accountability is tyranny, that the right not to be executed when arrest is possible applies even to those engaged in political violence. Anyone who recognises that defending extra-judicial killing because the victims were IRA members concedes the principle that some people can be killed by the state without consequence, which means accepting that the state decides who deserves legal protection and who can be executed at will.

That principle cannot be defended. Not for the IRA. Not for anyone. The question is not who wins. The question is whether killing when arrest is possible constitutes unlawful use of force. Judge Humphreys answered that question. The institutional resistance to his answer, the media panic, the political demands for immunity, the arguments from effectiveness and operational necessity – all of it confirms that the answer is unacceptable not because it is wrong but because accepting it would require acknowledging systematic state killing outside legal constraints as policy, not aberration.

Webb-Carter’s title reveals his argument’s weakness. He frames accountability as choosing sides because he cannot defend extra-judicial killing as principle. No one can. So instead: make it about who wins, about which side you support, about whether you back British forces or sympathise with terrorists. Make it about loyalty rather than law. Make it partisan rather than institutional. Make it about outcomes rather than process. Make it about anything except the question the verdict actually addresses: whether the state killed when it had alternatives, and whether that killing was therefore unlawful.

The Clonoe verdict says it was. Everything else is distraction.