Mick - absolutely true. I'd agree that the first enquiry was a bloody disgrace. And yes, if this was the result of some higher-level order instead of just a straight disastrous mistake by one person as per Keith's post, I for one would like to know.

Brendy, the other aim is finding a scapegoat. Inquiries can and do degenerate into that. If the families want to find what really happened, then that's what everyone wants. But if they just want a figurehead to stone publicly, as has happened several times the other way round (the British police arresting the wrong person and/or falsifying evidence), then count me out.

I'm not going to argue on the anti-British point - I'll just cite "3 sides to every story" and leave it.

War's certainly a terrible thing, but I'd draw a comparison between a scared soldier opening fire at random and a bombing campaign targetted cold-bloodedly at civilians. Hmm, guess a decent enquiry would be good, then we can see if it was a single scared soldier. I'll back that then.

Fiolar, as for your history, only one even happened this century! Come on! You may as well say that the Irish have a long history of killing each other after the Troubles of the 30s, or that the entire American army today is fundamentally evil by using No Gun Ri as an example. The fact is that every army is bad at crowd control - they're not trained to respond to aggression by backing away but by reacting with force. Ideally the Army wouldn't have been in NI in the first place, except that the Catholic-Protestant riots got out of control and the police either couldn't or wouldn't (being mainly Protestant) control them.

Grab.