I trust that was a rhetorical question…..and I’m not suggesting for a second that this wasn’t an evil crime that deserved to be punished…

…but let me ask you directly, what punishment do you think Jon Venables and Robert Thompson deserved?

Well, maybe you could but it is different if it was one of your own children or ‘in the heat of the moment’ but it is interesting that James Bulger’s mother thought that Jon Venables and Robert Thompson should have been eligible for parole after serving only fifteen years.

I wonder how the forum really feels about ‘stringing them up’! (Jon Venables & Robert Thompson.)

Now I know that it is never going to happen but assuming that, as ten year olds, they were given a fair trial and condemned to death would the forum be happy to see such a sentence carried-out, or as some have suggested carry-it-out themselves?

It is easy to say yes but think about what you are asking, or asking others to do. I’m not really sure how a hanging would be carried out these days but I believe the hands of the condemned are usually bound behind their back. What if they struggle and resist? What if when you go into their cell they are lying on their bed clutching a teddy-bear and crying that they don’t want to die?

You see, at that point I couldn’t do it, irrespective of what they’ve done and I couldn’t ask anybody to do it for me, and I couldn’t stand by and watch it done either. In fact, even thinking about it and writing this makes me very uncomfortable.

Now I’m not in any way trying to suggest that Jon Venables & Robert Thompson didn’t commit an absolutely evil, premeditated crime but even James Bulger’s mother, Denise Fergus said recently that “He [Jon Venables] should really have served a sentence of something in the order of fifteen years and should be coming up for parole now.”

Personally I don’t think that fifteen years is a long enough sentence for such a crime, as the perpetrators would have been released at age twenty-five, having ‘paid their debt to society’ but then what rights do I have when compared to James Bulger’s mother?

I can’t say for certain about helmets or gas masks but many Iraqi tanks, armoured vehicles and other weapons were of Russian, Chinese or Warsaw Pact design although some were of local manufacture.

Jon Venables & Robert Thompson…..they’ll never have a normal life.

Imagine, never being able to go out with out the fear of being identified. Never being able to travel to other countries for a holiday. Hold down any important job. Have a wife and family and knowing your hiding a horrible secret. And finally the guilt, may be not for a few years, but as years go by the gnawing guilt will get worse.

Good! I don’t want them to have normal lives!

Imagine never being able to let your children go out without the fear of them being murdered. James Bulger is never going to travel to other countries for a holiday, or hold down any job and he’s never going to have a wife and children. What about the guilt suffered by James Bulger’s mother? I don’t suppose that will get any better as the years pass.

I think what annoys most people about this case (apart from the evil crime itself) is the ‘protection’ afforded the guilty and their families after their release.

Were the whole families of the murderers relocated and given new identities? If so, why? That level of protection is never given to the victims of violent crime and seldom to any witness brave enough to stand up and give evidence against violent criminals, so why then is it given to those so clearly guilty of such a crime?

Possibly so. But these are clearly of the wooden dummy variety.

Yes, no doubting your photograph is clearly of dummy aircraft and quite convincing they are too, even from this range and angle, complete with ‘fake’ tarpaulins over the cockpits, or was that to avoid building the complex glazing?

With the sun low down on the horizon the wooden supports for the wings would have been a dead-giveaway even on a higher altitude photograph but as you say a strafing P-51 hedge-hopping home would probably have been fooled, until it was too late. They should have camouflaged them and attempted to ‘hide’ them in a less obvious place. 😉

I’d like to see that photograph of a dummy Hurricane.

Decoys may seem crude but wooden Mig-29 decoys were still attracting laser-guided-bombs in Kosovo!