"a bombing campaign targetted cold-bloodedly at civilians."

For example in Belgrade or Baghdad; or at secondhand in Lebanon. All bombing campaigns are horrible, and most of the time they're bungled as well. But the suggestion that there is something about delivering the bombs by air that makes it less horrible than delivering them by hand is something I could never make sense of.

All I've heard on this tells me that what the relatives of the dead, and the survivors of the shooting, want is to have the truth brought into the open. No more lies, no more evasions, no more scapegoating

"A frightened confused young man unprepared by experience or training for the situation he found himself in." Possibly, but I'd need some convincing on that. That'd be a convenient little scapegopat. These were tough experienced troops, who'd been up against civilians before, Arab civilians in Aden.

It still could be true, though I'd say that a much more likely explanation is that they did what they were expected to do, by someone who took a decision to turn them loose. That someone might well have been at a fairly low level, probably not Ted Heath up in Downing Street, who I imagine was very irritated by the whole episode.

But the enquiry could find out the truth about all that, though its task isn't made easier by the fat that a lot of the evidence has gone missing. And maybe, in a way more important, it could identify exactly who was involved in making sure that the Widgery Report was a lying whitewash, and colluded in keeping the lid on twentieth all these years. And whatever may have been the case about the shooting itself, the cover-up was a conspiracy, and a criminal one.

Making scapegoats of the soldiers at the bottom end - that's really a waste of time. But identifying the people higher up who were involved in that conspiracy - that needs to be done. And probably won't be done.

The irony is that, as atrocities go, Bloody Sunday isn't really in the big league. So far as numbers go, or colp-blooded brutality, it hardly compares with Amritsar, or My Lai, of Tienanmen Square. Hell, out in Israel they are on the point of electing a Prime Minister who's guilty of far worse things, to replace another Prime Minister of whom the same is true.

What is special about Bloody Sunday is that it gave rise to decades of continuing war, and until and unless it can be opened up and accepted for what it was, it will continue to fester.