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david cameron
'Lots of Psychotic Murderers': Ex-Elite UK Troops Break Silence on Iraq, Afghanistan War Crimes
"They handcuffed a young boy and shot him," said one Special Air Service veteran.
May 12, 2025
Dozens of former United Kingdom Special Forces troops or those who served with them have broken their silence to describe alleged war crimes they witnessed—including the execution of children—during the U.S.-led wars on Afghanistan and Iraq.
BBC's "Panorama"—which has repeatedly aired episodes focused on war crimes committed by British soldiers during the so-called War on Terror—on Monday featured testimonies from 30 former U.K. Special Forces (UKSF) members, including Special Air Service (SAS), Special Boat Service (SBS), and supporting troops who served in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"They handcuffed a young boy and shot him," recalled one SAS veteran who fought in Afghanistan. "He was clearly a child, not even close to fighting age."
"It's not justified, killing people in their sleep."
Another veteran who served with the SAS said that killing was "intoxicating" for some soldiers and became "an addictive thing to do," adding that there were "lots of psychotic murderers" among the ranks.
"On some operations, the troop would go into guesthouse-type buildings and kill everyone there," he said. "They'd go in and shoot everyone sleeping there, on entry. It's not justified, killing people in their sleep."
One SBS veteran described executions of wounded people who posed no threat, including one man who was being treated by a medic when "one of our blokes came up to him."
"There was a bang. He'd been shot in the head at point-blank range," the veteran recalled, describing the killing and other like it as "completely unnecessary."
"These are not mercy killings," he said. "It's murder."
Another veteran recounted a fellow SAS commando who kept track of the dozens of Afghans he'd killed during his six-month deployment.
"It seemed like he was trying to get a kill on every operation, every night someone got killed," the former soldier said, adding that his colleague was "notorious in the squadron; he genuinely seemed like a psychopath."
The soldier allegedly slit the throat of an injured Afghan man after telling an officer not to shoot him again, "because he wanted to go and finish the wounded guy off with his knife."
Another veteran said "everyone knew" what was happening and that to avoid scrutiny for executions, British troops would plant "drop weapons" on victims' bodies to make it appear as if they were militants. U.S. troops—who widely engaged in this war crime—called it "dead-checking."
One veteran said that "there was implicit approval for what was happening" from commanders.
"We understood how to write up serious incident reviews so they wouldn't trigger a referral to the military police," he explained. "If it looked like a shooting could represent a breach of the rules of conflict, you'd get a phone call from the legal adviser or one of the staff officers in HQ. They'd pick you up on it and help you to clarify the language. 'Do you remember someone making a sudden move?' 'Oh yeah, I do now.' That sort of thing. It was built into the way we operated."
"Panorama" also confirmed for the first time that former Conservative U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, who was in office from 2010-16, was repeatedly warned that British troops were committing war crimes.
Gen. Douglas Lute, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, told "Panorama" that then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai—who repeatedly condemned American war crimes in his country—was "so consistent with his complaints about night raids, civilian casualties, and detentions that there was no senior Western diplomat or military leader who would have missed the fact that this was a major irritant for him."
In 2020, the International Criminal Court determined that British troops committed war crimes in Iraq but declined to prosecute any alleged perpetrators.
Documented war crimes committed by U.S. troops, mercenaries, and other private contractors in nations including Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Syria during the ongoing War on Terror include but are not limited to murder of civilians and detainees, extraordinary rendition, torture, rape, and jailing and sexual abuse of women and girls held as bargaining chips.
Whistleblowers who exposed these and other illegalities—including WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, former NSA operative Edward Snowden, former Army analyst Chelsea Manning, former CIA intelligence officer John Kiriakou, and others—were almost always the only ones ever punished in connection with the crimes they exposed.
Other coalition troops—including Afghans, Iraqis, Australians, Germans, Poles, and Canadians—have allegedly committed atrocities during the War on Terror, as have Taliban, al-Qaeda, Islamic State, and other militants.
According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, "at least 940,000 people have died due to direct war violence, including civilians, armed forces on all sides, contractors, journalists, and humanitarian workers" in U.S.-led wars since 9/11. This figure includes at least 408,000 civilians.
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Let's Not Stop With the Russian Oligarchy
Why is oligarchy, which means rule (arche) by the few (oligoi), considered an exclusively Russian phenomenon?
Mar 23, 2022
No sooner had Roman Abramovich, newly targeted by the United Kingdom's sanctions on Russian oligarchs, announced that he was selling Chelsea Football Club than the feeding frenzy began. An athletics icon, City grandees, and even a respected Times columnist, each representing different American multi-billionaires, descended on London in a race to buy the club. Meanwhile, a host of London properties belonging to Russian oligarchs entered a long-overdue process of liquidation. What took so long?
In terms of magnitude, American plutocrats match every dollar that Russian plutocrats stash abroad to escape scrutiny with $10 of their own.
To put it bluntly: the West's legal foundations.
True, Western leaders encouraged the inflows. David Cameron, then UK Prime Minister, appealed in 2011 to a Moscow audience to "invest" in Britain. But it wasn't hard to convince the oligarchs to flood London with their money. Western countries' legislation prevents governments and the public not only from disturbing wealth stored in their jurisdictions but also from even knowing where and how much of it there is. Why else would countless corporations register in the US state of Delaware, using post office box addresses that guarantee their owners anonymity?
In fact, Western democracies grant foreign wealth even more protection from scrutiny. In a 2021 report aptly titled "The UK's Kleptocracy Problem," the London-based think tank Chatham House revealed that the golden visas for sale to oligarchs from all over the world were granted after "checks ... [that] were the sole responsibility of the law firms and wealth managers representing them." In my country, Greece, following our state's effective bankruptcy in 2010, an oligarch could buy a no-questions-asked golden visa, which also came with a Schengen visa (and the opportunity to live and travel anywhere in the European Union), for a measly EUR250,000 ($276,000). Similar visas are sold by other fiscally stressed eurozone countries, fueling a race to the bottom that the world's oligarchs greatly appreciate.
While there is good reason to focus on Russian money, now that Russian bombs are destroying Ukrainian cities, it is puzzling that only Russian billionaires are called oligarchs. Why is oligarchy, which means rule (arche) by the few (oligoi), considered an exclusively Russian phenomenon? Are the Saudi or Emirati princes not oligarchic? Do American billionaires, like those now flocking to buy Chelsea FC, smuggle less money out of their country than their Russian counterparts do, or have less political clout? Do they use such power better than the Russians?
Russia's wealthiest 0.01% (the top 1% of the top 1%) have taken about half their wealth, around $200 billion, out of Russia and stashed it in the UK and other havens. At the same time, America's wealthiest 0.01% have taken around $1.2 trillion out of the United States, principally to avoid paying taxes. So, in terms of magnitude, American plutocrats match every dollar that Russian plutocrats stash abroad to escape scrutiny with $10 of their own.
As for the relative political clout of Russian and American billionaires, it is not at all clear who has more. While there is no doubt that a number of Russian oligarchs have President Vladimir Putin's ear, he has more control over them than the American government has over its billionaires. Since the US Supreme Court's 2010 decision affording corporations the right to donate to politicians as if they were persons, America's richest 0.01% accounted for 40% of all campaign contributions. It has proved to be an excellent investment in wealth preservation.
Is it by chance that in the years since the "deregulation" of campaign financing, American billionaires have obtained the lowest tax rate in over a generation, and the lowest among all wealthy countries? Is it an accident that the US Internal Revenue Service is starved of resources? According to an authoritative empirical study of the US legislative record, none of this is an accident: the correlation between what Congress enacts and what most Americans prefer is not significantly greater than zero.
So, if non-Russian billionaires are also oligarchs, does the exclusive emphasis in the West on Russians mean that "our" oligarchs, and those nurtured by our allies, are in some sense better? Here we are treading on treacherous ethical ground.
To argue that the Saudi billionaires behind the decade-long devastation of Yemen are "better" than Abramovich is to invite mockery. Putin would feel vindicated if we dared claim that the American oilmen who reaped a windfall from the illegal US-UK invasion of Iraq were morally superior to the owners of Rosneft and Gazprom. To be sure, Putin's oligarchs turn a blind eye whenever a brave journalist is snuffed out in Russia. But, meanwhile, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange withers in a high-security UK prison, under conditions bordering on torture, for having exposed Western countries' war crimes following their illegal invasion of Iraq. And how did Western oligarchs and governments respond when their Saudi business partners dismembered the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi?
Following Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the UK government declared its determination to rip away the veil of secrecy and deception shrouding the money parked in Britain to escape the scrutiny of law enforcement and tax authorities. Whether the reality matches the rhetoric remains to be seen. Already, there are signs of tension between the ambition to seize oligarchs' money and the imperative of keeping Britain "open for business."
Perhaps the only silver lining in the Ukrainian tragedy is that it has created an opportunity to scrutinize oligarchs not only with Russian passports but also their American, Saudi, Chinese, Indian, Nigerian, and, yes, Greek counterparts. An excellent place to start would be with the London mansions that Transparency International tells us sit empty. How about turning them over to refugees from Ukraine and Yemen? And, while we're at it, why not turn over Chelsea FC to its fans.
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Larry Sanders, Bernie's Brother, to Fight for David Cameron's MP Seat
"We need to show that we don't want Britain to be the most unequal country in Europe"
Sep 23, 2016
Larry Sanders, the older brother of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who lives in the U.K., is taking a page from his brother's book and running for the parliamentary seat left empty by former Prime Minister David Cameron.
And in keeping with family tradition, he will campaign on a platform to end social inequality and neoliberalism. The elder Sanders, who was chosen by the Green Party, opposes privatization of healthcare and, as a retired social worker, wants to highlight the impacts of austerity on public services.
"In Britain, as in the U.S., we have had an increase in inequality in the last 30 years, and that's having all sorts of consequences," he told the Guardian on Friday--comments that probably seemed familiar to some American readers. "Many people can't afford houses who you would have expected to not long ago."
"We need to show that we don't want Britain to be the most unequal country in Europe. We don't want unmet health needs to increase when we already have too few doctors, nurses, and hospital beds," he said in a separate statement. "We don't want the government to impose unworkable contracts on 50,000 precious doctors, when it is clear that the supposed reason for the contract, a seven day hospital service, can't be done at present funding."
"This is a rich, capable, and decent country," he said. "We can do better."
Cameron resigned as prime minister following the Brexit referendum but only stepped down as a minister of parliament this month, triggering a by-election for his seat in Witney of Oxfordshire.
Left-leaning candidates do not do well in the area, the Guardian notes, with the last Green to run there winning just 5.1 percent of the vote, but Sanders believes his name recognition will go a long way.
"Because of Bernard, I've become famous, and I will get more attention from the media, and that's to be used to get the Green Party's policies across," he said. "Bernard's campaign in America was a very successful shifting point."
"Our similarities in terms of policies are astonishing, partly because we talk all the time," he added.
Sanders will face off with Conservative candidate Robert Courts, Liberal Democrat Liz Leffman, and Labour's Duncan Enright. The election will take place on Thursday, October 20.
Sanders moved to Britain in the 1960s after studying at Harvard Law School.
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