The front pages of all UK newspapers as well as the TV news, will no doubt be full of photos tomorrow showing -+again+ - just what it's like for a sadistic squaddie to punch a defenceless man in the head. It's appalling, lurid and good for media business. But what is the point of all this? It is a government / military exercise in deflecting responsibility for war crimes. It's called scapegoating. Who, in the Iraq quagmire, is responsible for British war crimes?

Sentencing one soldier to 18 months in a youth detention centre and ordering that he be disgracefully discharged from the Army, Judge Advocate Michael Hunter said the assault in question was a "very brutal and very cruel act" which had "undoubtedly tarnished the international reputation of the British Army and to some extent the British nation".

What facile rubbish. How sick are we all of seeing this epic miscarriage of justice, blaming war crimes on the rank and file when it was and is an act of state, of seeing the guilty but free Blair and his bloodsoaked mate Bush do the soft shoe shuffle around Brussels? Damned sick.