What topsy-turvy morality when our old soldiers are treated as criminals while cold-blooded IRA terrorists go free

Any young person going to war should know this. your fellow soldiers and your immediate superiors will stand by you. They may even die for you. But don’t count on a future government showing you loyalty.

Again and again we have seen how the State ends up treating former soldiers who have risked their lives on the same basis as the people they were fighting.

We saw it after the end of the Iraq War. A unit called the Iraq Historic Allegations Team was set up to investigate opportunistic allegations of murder, torture and wrongdoing by British troops.

Over seven years, 3,668 claims were made, costing the taxpayer £60 million. not one resulted in prosecution. The plug was finally pulled on this farce in 2016 after the collapse of the ambulance- chasing law firm Public Interest Lawyers, and the disgrace of its leading solicitor, Phil Shiner.

The bogus charges may have led nowhere. But think of the mental turmoil and bewilderment of men who only a few years previously had fought for their country — I believe in an ill- conceived war — in appalling conditions that the rest of us, not least politicians, can barely imagine.

Something similar has been going on in relation to the Troubles in northern Ireland, where 302 killings by troops are being reviewed. As a result, former soldiers now in their 60s or 70s, who have often been earlier cleared once if not twice, are facing the threat of prosecution.

Of course it goes without saying that if there is clear evidence of members of the Armed Forces unlawfully killing anyone, including even an unarmed terrorist, in cold blood, it is right that there should be court proceedings.

But none of the reported cases falls into this category. Rather, they concern young soldiers, sometimes inexperienced, who were thrown into highly dangerous situations for which they were frequently ill-prepared. They may have pardonably reacted with a degree of panic, but they were not callous murderers.

Look at the case of Dennis Hutchings, now 77, who served 26 years in the Life Guards. He has been charged with attempted murder over the death of a man with learning difficulties in northern Ireland in 1974.

Hutchings was with another soldier (now dead) when the victim was shot. Very likely they thought he was a terrorist because he ran away. The other soldier may have discharged the fatal bullet. Hutchings was investigated at the time and cleared, and told again in 2011 the case was closed.

He has kidney failure, and been given two years to live. nonetheless, he was interrogated by police last year on 25 separate occasions, 11 of them on one day. What a way to treat a man who fought for Queen and country.

Another case involves two unidentified former paratroopers who are being prosecuted over the death of an IRA terrorist commander in 1972. Despite each of them being told twice that they would not face prosecution, they both face trial. Then there is ‘Sergeant O’, who arrived in Londonderry in January 1972, on the day of the civil rights march that turned into ‘Bloody Sunday’ during which 14 civilians died.

He remains under investigation for the attempted murder of two unarmed protesters who were injured by falling masonry that may have been dislodged by bullets fired from his rifle.

now 76, and the recipient of the Military Medal for bravery in northern Ireland, Sergeant O has also been subjected to lengthy and gruelling interrogation by police. He is partially paralysed by a stroke eight years ago that left him needing a stick and a chairlift to get about his house.

Surely the point about these and other similar cases is that if the soldiers were at fault (and I have no idea whether those I have mentioned were) they were acting in the heat of the moment without any prior intention of causing harm.

Contrast this with the mindset of terrorists (responsible for 90 per cent of the killings in northern Ireland) who in almost every instance deliberately planned their murders in a deliberate and calculating way.

In truth, there is no moral equivalence — although the IRA, anxious to portray itself as an ethically aware combatant in a just war, claims there is. In a sane world, former soldiers would be treated with much more leniency and understanding than ex-terrorists.

But, utterly preposterously, the reverse is the case. While veterans who served their country are being hounded, many erstwhile terrorists are spared prosecution, and have nothing to fear from any police investigation.

This is partly because, following the Good Friday Agreement, Tony Blair covertly authorised ‘letters of comfort’ which were sent to more than 200 suspected terrorists guaranteeing them that they would not face prosecution.

Most egregiously, this led in 2013 to the collapse of the trial of John Downey, a suspect in the 1982 IRA bombing in Hyde Park which killed four soldiers, after it emerged that he had been sent one of these comfort letters.

But other former suspected terrorists who have never received such letters can also confidently walk the streets in the knowledge that the police have no desire to unearth old atrocities.

How can the Government have embraced a topsy-turvy morality whereby former soldiers are grilled by the police and sometimes end up in the courts — and cold-blooded killers are given a wide berth?

Somehow the debt of gratitude we owe to those who have fought for their country is forgotten, while all kinds of expedient compromises are made to let alleged murderers off the hook.

Unfortunately, Theresa May has been slow to grasp this shameful contradiction. Admittedly, she has partly been constrained by the Democratic Unionist Party, on whose parliamentary support she relies. It has opposed any statute of limitation on crimes committed in northern Ireland for fear it might benefit the IRA.

now, however, there are reports that the DUP may approve special protection for veterans which would prevent them from being interrogated for alleged crimes over which they had already been cleared.

Meanwhile, more than 150 Tory MPs have written an open letter to Mrs May saying that the current investigation of former soldiers ‘simply cannot be allowed to continue’. Former Army top brass and ex-senior ministers have lined up to make the same point.

Will Theresa May now listen? Let’s hope so. Perhaps she will also cock an ear at former U.S. military chief David Petraeus, who warned last week that Britain’s military alliance with America could be ‘greatly diminished’ if human rights laws are not balanced against the laws of warfare.

In other words, no one will relish fighting with a British Army whose personnel ‘could end up in the dock for years for actions and decisions they have taken in the heat of battle’.

That’s how it is right now. The persecution of soldiers who served in Iraq may have largely ended, but many who risked their lives 40 and more years ago fighting terrorists in northern Ireland remain trapped by the Government in a legal nightmare.