Source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090107.wblatch07/BNStory/Front

HRISTIE BLATCHFORD
From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail
January 7, 2009 at 3:38 AM EST

It was early on the morning of Saturday, July 8, 2006, that I saw my first dead and injured Talibs. There was one of each.

I was travelling with Charlie Company, 1st Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, in the Panjwai district west of Kandahar. This was Op Zahar, a significant battle group operation that involved all three companies. I was with Major Bill Fletcher, then the Officer Commanding of C Company.

The soldiers had been fighting throughout the night, practically, but now, early on another gorgeous morning, it was quiet, and they were doing a battle damage assessment.

The two Talibs were lying in a ditch by a little irrigation canal. Most of their clothes had been blown off, and for one man, most of his head too. He was dead. The other man was alive, but very seriously injured, with gunshot wounds to the chest; he had also lost a lot of blood.

A Canadian medic was on him like white on rice. The Talib was ferried to a nearby command post, hooked up to an intravenous and treated with all the marvels of modern battlefield medicine until a chopper arrived to evacuate him.

Last I checked, the man survived the trip and made it to hospital. I didn’t remember much of that morning – it was the next one, the Sunday, that has always stuck in my mind, the day Corporal Tony Boneca of Thunder Bay, was killed – until yesterday, when from Canadian Forces Base Petawawa, some of the background to the murder charge against Captain Robert Semrau was made public at a military hearing.

The 35-year-old was charged with second-degree murder earlier this month after a brief investigation by the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service. Capt. Semrau was the Officer Commanding of a small group of Canadian mentors, members of the Operational Mentor Liaison Team or OMLT, who had been training an Afghan National Army company.

According to information from the prosecutor yesterday, the Canadians had been in neighbouring Helmand province, an area under British control, since the beginning of October. On the day of the incident, Oct. 19, they had been on a 26-kilometre foot patrol when they were ambushed by a group of Taliban.

They called for air support and a U.S. Apache gunship arrived, brought the attack to an end and allowed the Canadians to “move forward.”

In layman’s language, this appears to mean the battle was, if only for the moment, over.

As they went, the ANA apparently discovered two Talibs.

As with my July, 2006, experience, one was dead, the other, armed with an assault rifle, was apparently seriously wounded. His injuries were deemed “too severe for in-situ treatment.”

The prosecutor said that Capt. Semrau was the only person standing near the wounded insurgent when two shots rang out and the Talib was found dead. A witness will apparently testify that he saw the young officer firing at the insurgent.

The allegation is that Capt. Semrau fired both those shots, which resulted in the Talib’s death. His body was left behind, and never recovered.

If the question is whether there is a lawful way that a soldier can shoot an injured enemy combatant, with one exception that I will explain in a bit, the answer is a resounding no.

The Geneva Conventions; the international Law of Armed Conflict, the Canadian bible on such matters – it is called Duty With Honour: The Profession of Arms in Canada, and is the central ethical touchstone for Canadian soldiers – make it perfectly plain that once injured and hors de combat, French for “out of the fight,” a soldier is considered a prisoner of war, deserving of all protections.

Unless a soldier is still posing an imminent threat – and wounded soldiers can still fire weapons or toss grenades – there are no legal grounds for shooting an injured man.

If the question is whether this could have been a mercy killing, the answer is also an unequivocal no.

For one thing, given the state of modern battlefield medicine, most injuries are treatable, at least, that is, if the soldiers are travelling with a Western-trained medic; Afghan medics have much less training, medical and ethical, and less skill and equipment. OMLT teams usually have one Canadian medic with them at all times.

Medics are obliged to treat the most seriously injured first, regardless of whether they are friends or enemy, and they take this as gospel. This is the concept of triage, and as someone told me yesterday, triage isn’t done on a “friend or foe” basis, but according to need. As someone else said, a wounded man “is not a frigging dog. You may shoot animals to put them out of their misery, but not people.”

There is another phenomenon which, in ancient times, was called “going berserker.” In essence, it would capture the soldier made temporarily mad by combat, who goes out of his mind and falls prey to battle rage. This most often happens in the height of the fighting, with all the intense emotions and physical responses of combat, which doesn’t appear to have been the case here.

The allegations made at Petawawa yesterday just hint at the evidence to come; they aren’t evidence, in and of themselves, but rather the prosecutor’s brief sketch of the evidence he expects to call. Capt. Semrau is entitled to the presumption of innocence, but it would seem he has a rough row to hoe. If there is a lawful explanation for what happened, it is not an obvious one. The brief outline of the background to the charge raises more questions than it answers.

In only one small way does the outline suggest an explanation for the two-month delay between the date of the incident and the date it was reported to senior commanders, Dec. 27.

As the OC, and though he would have reported to a more senior officer, Capt. Semrau may have been the ranking Canadian officer on the field that day. Anyone witnessing what happened was probably an underling, a subordinate, and may have needed time to work through in his or her own mind a difficult ethical dilemma – protect a superior, or follow the dictates of conscience.

The Canadians were the mentors that day. The soldiers of the ANA, while brave in battle, are not known for their charitable behaviour toward the enemy (nor the Taliban toward them, of course). What the mentors are supposed to teach are not only the mechanics of how to plan and carry out a fight, but also how to do it with more honour, and more moral authority, than the other guy.