"Now as far as the whys and wherefores go with regard to the events that took place in the South Atlantic thirty years ago"
Pompous eejit.
Once again one of Terry the Termite's military arguments take on the air of a pub discussion five minutes before closing time.
The fact is that we still know very little of the whys and wherefores of the sinking of the Belgrano, and probably never shall.
We only know what little we do of the incident because a heroic civil servant, Clive Ponting, passed on information to an opposition Member of Parliament, who then made it generally known that (a) The Belgrano had beeen sighted a day earlier than officially reported, (b) It was sailing away from the scene of battle and (c) It was outside the officially agreed exclusion zone.
Ponting risked his liberty by passing on this information, which, he argued, was "in the public interest"; Thatcher decided we had no right to to such information and had him charged with a criminal act and and then tightened up UK secrets legislation by introducing the Official Secrets Act 1989.
Despite the judge's ruling that "the public interest is what the government of the day says it is", Ponting was acquitted.
To put as 'evidence' the somewhat bombastic ramblings of a then involved combatant "or I can believe published accounts by those responsible for directing operations", is typical of Terrytoon's somewhat Colonel Blimpish, bar-room brigadeerism and his past defence of the indefencible.
The fact is that we don't know, and can only base our judgement on what little we have been told.
My attitude is that it would come as no great surprise to learn that a British prime minister who admired and supposted a fascist dictator who allowed and probably directed acts of mass murder, wholesale torture and illegal imprisonment, was capable of anything, including war crimes.
I still have fond memories of Thatcher taking part in a radio phone-in and being totally humiliated by schoolteacher Mrs Diana Gould, who exposed her dangerous ignorance and dishonesty on the Belgrano to the world. Thatcher committed one of the cardinal sins of politics, going public before she had got her story straight.
Jim Carroll