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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

Accusations that Australian soldiers in Afghanistan committed war crimes have drawn widespread condemnation, here and around the world.

The governor-general and former chief of the defence force described the allegations as “unforgivable atrocities”.

But who is ultimately responsible for the actions of Australian armed forces?

Today, chief political correspondent for The Saturday Paper, Karen Middleton, on the allegations involving Australia’s most elite military unit, and our collective shame.

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RUBY:

Karen, Australian forces have been in Afghanistan since 2001, and during that time, the SAS, the Special Air Service, have been the primary force, the first choice of the Australian government to go into that war. So why is that? Why the SAS?

KAREN:

Well, it goes right back to 2001, as you say. And the Australian government wanted to show support for the United States after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Archival Tape -- George W. Bush:

“On my orders, The United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.”

KAREN:

Australia wanted to join with the United States in the coalition that was going into Afghanistan.

Archival Tape -- George W. Bush:

“Other close friends including Canada, Australia, Germany, and France, have pledged forces as the operation unfolds.”

KAREN:

But the prime minister, then John Howard, his foreign minister, his defence minister, were all keen to make sure that they minimise the risk to Australian forces.

Archival Tape -- John Howard:

“Australian Special Forces detachment to go to selected locations as decided by the chief of the Defence Force in conjunction with coalition force commanders…”

KAREN:

It was the case of being able to send a smaller force and therefore have a smaller risk of casualties than if you had sent a large ground force.

Archival Tape -- John Howard:

“They will go with our best wishes, our prayers, for a safe return.”

KAREN:

The SAS was that force because they're very resilient, they can operate in small groups, they're very agile, they're the elite soldiers of the Australian Defence Force. They're seen as the top status, and they certainly see themselves that way. But of course, governments in times of conflict are wanting to pull the country together. And then gradually politicians can see some value in the khaki and the flag, and I think what we saw with Afghanistan gradually was a using of the reputation and status of the special forces, in particular for political reasons, I think.

RUBY:

So, Karen, when did it first start to emerge that there had been problems with the way that some SAS soldiers were behaving in Afghanistan?

KAREN:

There had been allegations about things that had happened on the battlefield which were investigated, and ultimately that was what they were found to have been, heat of battle incidents.

Archival Tape -- News reporter #1:

“Investigators later said that that soldier did that in self defence, and he did it within the rules of engagement…”

KAREN:

But it wasn't until really in the last few years that the much more serious incidents had started to come to light. Media reporting did have a lot to do with that.

Archival Tape -- News reporter #2:

“Tonight, you'll hear damning allegations from their fellow soldiers about men taking the law into their own hands…”

KAREN:

And there were also rumours starting to float up to the command of the special forces. And so Commander Geoff Singleman, who then headed the Special Forces, commissioned a culture review by sociologist Dr Samantha Crompvoet from the Australian National University. So she went about interviewing members of the Special Forces back in 2016 to try and nail down what this problem really was.

Archival Tape -- Dr Samantha Crompvoet:

“We’re not talking about a couple of, you know, ‘fog of war’ events that were perhaps confusing to understand or to have happened. This is deliberate, repeated patterns of behaviour that happened over time…”

KAREN:

And in the course of that, she was told shocking things about things that had happened in Afghanistan, things involving some members of the special forces - and we must remember, not all.

And she reported those back when Commander Singleman got this report, he took it to the chief of army, and together they decided they needed to have them investigated further.
And that led to them approaching the inspector general of the ADF who commissioned Justice Paul Brereton from the New South Wales Supreme Court to lead an investigation and enquiry into the allegations that had started to emerge.

RUBY:

And so on Thursday, the chief of the Defence Force released the Brereton report into accusations that Australian Special Forces committed war crimes in Afghanistan. And he gave a pretty extraordinary press conference to talk about those allegations. You were there. Can you tell me what it was like?

Archival Tape -- General Angus Campbell:

“Today marks an important but difficult step forward for the Australian Defence Force and our people.”

KAREN:

Yes. Well, this has been four years in the making, because it's been since 2016 that the examination investigation's been underway.

Archival Tape -- General Angus Campbell:

“The report finds that some special Air Service regiment commanders in Australia fostered within the SAS what Justice Brereton terms a self-centred warrior culture.”

KAREN:

But we wanted to know what had been investigated, how extensive the problem was.

Archival Tape -- General Angus Campbell:

“A misplaced focus on prestige, status, and power. Turning away from the regiment's heritage of military excellence fused with the quiet humility of service.”

KAREN:

The detail that we do have in the report, and a lot of it is redacted and there aren't any names in it either, is very shocking. They found credible evidence that there were 39 Afghans murdered, that 25 Australian Defence Force personnel were involved.

Archival Tape -- General Angus Campbell:

“Those alleged to have been unlawfully killed were all people under control - in lay terms, prisoners, farmers, or other civilians.”

KAREN:

It basically confirms that there was this culture of killing that had emerged

Archival Tape -- General Angus Campbell:

“This shameful record includes alleged instances in which new patrol members were coerced to shoot a prisoner in order to achieve that soldier's first kill in an appalling practise known as 'blooding'.”

KAREN:

There was competition between units as to who could tally up the most dead, and there were some descriptions of some very brutal attempts to get the tally higher.

And there was this culture that had emerged that involved fabricating reports from the battlefield or embellishing them. Some of the allegations about the practises that were engaged in involved what they call ‘throw down’ weapons and radios, which are firearms and grenades and radios that the soldiers carried with them and planted them on people, other people they had captured who were alive or people they had killed in order to justify having done what they'd done, in order to suggest that they had been armed at the time or had been about to engage in some form of attack.

The report said those practises had been going for some time, in some cases with the knowledge of some more senior officers. But they had become then part of this terrible practice that emerged of actually killing people in cold blood.

RUBY:

We’ll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Karen, as you were listening to the Chief of the Defence Force, Angus Campbell, outlining these alleged war crimes that occured in the SAS, what is going through your mind, what are the questions you’re considering?

KAREN:

There were a huge number of questions that everybody had, unsurprisingly.

Archival Tape -- Journalist #1:

“...do you feel any sort of personal regret, anything that in hindsight you go, jeez, I wish I had done something about that back then or anything like that?”

Archival Tape -- General Angus Campbell:

“With regard to that…”

KAREN:

We wanted to know why this happened, how this could have come about.

Archival Tape -- Karen Middleton:

“Karen Middleton from the Saturday Paper. General, the report details practices of embellishing information, sometimes fabricating information…”

KAREN:

I was wanting to know whether the chief of the Defence Force was concerned about the practise of fabricating or embellishing reports beyond the Special Forces, because a number of us journalists have read incident reports and then spoken to people who witnessed events and find differing versions in the two, and there's long been concern that there is a habit of glossing over some details or embellishing or maybe even fabricating in order to justify things that happened and to cover them up.

Archival Tape -- Karen Middleton:

“...I wonder whether how concerned you are that that practise goes beyond the special forces to the wider Defence Force on operation…”

KAREN:

And I wanted to know whether the chief of the Defence Force was looking at the whole Defence Force and the culture that this might have involved and not just the Special Forces, because it struck me that there's a risk that this could just be seen as only being related to the special forces. And his response was very firm.

Archival Tape -- General Angus Campbell:

“If the entire Australian Defence Force does not learn from it and strengthen all of the aspects of areas of our operational capability that I have described, we're not preparing ourselves to make sure this doesn't happen again.”

RUBY:

Karen, what does the report tell us about how this happened, especially over such a long period of time? Because the report covers 11 years of deployments. So how is it that this was able to keep occurring?

KAREN:

Well, that's the big question, and I'm not sure that there's one single answer to that. There are a lot of things that contributed to this being the case. The report talks about a warrior culture that grew up inside the special forces, and that goes to this idea about them being special. You know, it was interesting when I spoke to Neil James from the Australia Defence Association, he made the point that it was the role that was special, the function, not the people. But they ended up thinking that it was them who were special.

They got special privileges. They lived in separate quarters, they ran to their own rules, they were allowed to grow beards when others weren't, there were things in the report about operating a pub within their accommodation which was banned, of course, because alcohol is not supposed to be there on the base, and just the sense of impunity that grew up around them, that this godlike warrior-like culture that became corrosive.

But of course, in the end, there were individuals who did the wrong thing and they were protected. Nothing was said about it. And the more secrecy that covered this, the more the secrecy continued. It just became self-perpetuating, that everyone looked after everyone else. And even the people who were disturbed by what had happened were keeping the confidences. And so it just didn't come to light.

RUBY:

Who then is ultimately responsible for the actions that the enquiry has laid out?

KAREN:

Well, the interesting thing, and I think the important thing is that it does make it very clear in the pages of this report that ignorance is not a defence. That even though people higher up the chain may not have known, they should have known, and why did they not know? And that's the big question that still hangs over all of this, that it is not explained how it is that this culture developed so dramatically over such a long period and people didn't realise and didn't do anything about it.

So I think that's a really big thing that has to still be explored and addressed. And that's why the Defence Force is now taking steps to make cultural change, to ensure that that sort of thing never happens again.

Archival Tape -- General Angus Campbell:

“I think there are many, many people at all sorts of levels across the Defence Force involved in operations in Afghanistan or in support of those operations who do wonder what didn't they see, what did they walk past, what did they not appreciate they could have done to prevent this.”

KAREN:

But the major next step is a criminal investigation. This was an investigation under administrative law. The inquiry had the powers of a royal commission, it was able to compel witnesses, but it doesn't have the same rules of evidence as a court or a criminal prosecution would have. The bar is higher when you are seeking to prove offences under criminal law. And so evidence has to be regathered that meets that test, that evidentiary burden for a criminal prosecution. There’ll have to be people go to Afghanistan and talk to the eyewitnesses there and people who are affected. It's a massive task. It could take years. And the enquiry report warns that no prosecutions may ever be achieved, no convictions may be achieved because of the difficulty of doing that, but that that's not a reason not to try.

RUBY:

Karen, it is ultimately a political decision to go to war, and it was politicians who deployed troops to Afghanistan, who sent in the SAS. So what is their culpability in all of this?

KAREN:

Well, I guess that's a matter of opinion. My opinion is that politicians should reflect on the decisions that they made - and, going forward that they make in future - in the context of the human dimension. I know political leaders are very conscious when they send anybody to war, they know the consequences, so I'm not suggesting that they do that lightly in any sense. But I don't think that there was necessarily a focus on the particular impact on the special forces of boosting them up so that they became untouchable, which really meant that there was this extra protection around them that people didn't question what they were doing.

So there was a pressure in terms of the tempo and the rotations and the number of times the same people went back and back and back, which added to a perhaps a normalising of some behaviour that really was not normal, but also that they put extra pressure for everyone to be seen as shiny and great and godlike, and while I don't say that in any respect that it's the reason these things happened, I think it might have contributed to the culture of silence and impunity that grew up around the special forces, and so I suggest that there's a degree of moral responsibility.
But my personal view on top of that is that the moral responsibility goes beyond just those special forces. It goes up the leadership of the military, which the report says. And I think there is also a degree of moral responsibility with our political leaders who, in the end, do make the decision for forces to go to war.

We often think of going to war as a military decision. It's not. They are actually following orders from politicians. It's them who decide whether we go into a conflict and what kind of deployment we will make. They take advice from the military chiefs, but they make the ultimate decision.

And so I do think they all need to reflect on the consequences. And we as a nation need to reflect on them.

RUBY:

Karen, thank you so much for talking to me today.

KAREN:

Thanks, Ruby.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

The border between Victoria and NSW has re-opened today after over four months of closure. It comes as Victoria further eased restrictions overnight. Face masks will no longer be required outdoors and caps on public gatherings and indoor venues have also been increased.

And the Australian Defence Force chief Angus Campbell has flagged that soldiers may be required to wear body cameras in the future, as the army grapples with the fallout of the Brereton Report into war crimes.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See ya tomorrow.

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