Australia's 'brave war heroes' are being exposed as war criminals.
They are even accused of using the murder of detainees as an induction rite to incriminate new memebers to the war criminal cabal.
Australia had no right to be in Afghanistan and should pay huge reparations for the crimes it has committed.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/14/the-abuse-scandal-rocking-australias-specia... Quote:The Abuse Scandal Rocking Australia’s Special Operations Forces
How changing military strategy may have led to misconduct.
BY C. AUGUST ELLIOTT | AUGUST 14, 2018, 9:01 AM
Recently, a series of disturbing allegations about the conduct of the Australian Army’s special operations forces in Afghanistan have made for gruesome domestic headlines. Individually, each claim is staggering: apparent execution of detainees; reported use of so-called drop weapons, planted to cover up unlawful killings; confirmed reports of commandos flying a Nazi flag on a combat patrol; alleged “blooding” of rookies, initiation rites in which newcomers were pressured to execute unarmed men. In one particularly sadistic case, a prosthetic limb was allegedly pilfered from the corpse of a dead Afghan, only to be repatriated and repurposed as a novelty binge-drinking implement. Taken together, the allegations appear to reveal a devastating collapse of standards within Australia’s special operations forces.
This is not the first time Australia’s Special Operations Command has been the subject of intense scrutiny. In the last two years alone, the Australian Defence Force has commissioned no less than three internal inquiries into culture and behavior within the command, each with its own separate framework: cultural, legal, and institutional.
The first of these investigations, led by a sociologist named Samantha Crompvoets, began as a more innocuous cultural study, a research drive into the negative impacts of what many within the Defence Department had regarded as an overtasking of Australian special operations forces in the post-9/11 era. Rumors had been circulating for years that a noxious climate of leadership failures, unaccountability, and even of criminal misconduct had made the Special Operations Command a greenhouse for systemic dysfunction. In particular, the so-called beret wars—the internal rivalry between the army’s various commando units—had reached critical mass, poisoning the good relations between each outfit and spurring unsavory competitions based on metrics such as kill counts.
When the digging was done, Crompvoets’s report seemed to suggest that the problems within the Special Operations Command were deep; in particular, that some soldiers had used illegal violence on operations and that a systemic values shift among both troops and their commanders had occurred. Soldiers were observing the laws of war only situationally, it appeared, sometimes adapting them after the fact to fit the circumstances of a violent engagement.Soldiers were observing the laws of war only situationally, it appeared, sometimes adapting them after the fact to fit the circumstances of a violent engagement.
Presented with such alarming data, the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force, the military’s independent watchdog, began a second inquiry to examine any breaches of both Australian and international law. Since 2016, this quasi-judicial inquiry, led by Justice Paul Brereton, a New South Wales Supreme Court judge and Army Reserve major general, has been looking into credible evidence of what some within the Defence Department are quietly describing as war crimes.
Brereton’s findings are due to be released before the end of the year. In the meantime, however, and following a number of multiyear investigations by some of Australia’s finest reporters, details of some of the alleged incidents are beginning to see sunlight. Central to the most recent media reporting is one raid that took place on Sept. 11, 2012 in the village of Darwan, a remote farming community in northern Uruzgan province. During a manhunt for an Afghan soldier who was believed to have killed Australian troops, Australian forces arrived in UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and shot at least three (and possibly more) Afghan civilians at close range, one of them after being kicked off a paanch, a high agricultural embankment.
Retired Cpl. Ben Roberts-Smith, who is a Victoria Cross recipient and the most decorated soldier in the Commonwealth, is also apparently suspected of battlefield misconduct. Roberts-Smith, who in 2012 was awarded a commendation for distinguished service for his part in developing and applying “lateral tactical concepts” as a patrol commander during combat operations in the Char Chineh district (where the village of Darwan is located), has been at the center of Afghanistan-related controversy for some time now, with many allegations revolving around his suspected involvement in the abuse and execution of detainees.
Although none of these allegations against him have yet seen the inside of a courtroom, it would be easy to surmise that momentum is building for something big. Sweeping organizational changes within the Australian Army, perhaps. A high-profile courtroom drama, maybe. ...
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