Australia’s military leaders need to be held to account for command failures in Afghanistan. It’s no surprise that calls of a cover-up are growing louder, writes defence whistleblower David McBride.
When The Australian’s Greg Sheridan agrees with Jacqui Lambie you know you are witnessing a seismic shift. Or, at very least, something that’s been hiding in plain sight and is finally being fully revealed.
What I’m talking about is Afghanistan, war crimes and the need to come to grips with – and punish – the massive failings of the Australian Defence Force’s leadership.
Over the past five years, since I turned defence whistleblower, I have met a lot of people around this country: some are dyed in the wool anarchists; some are prim and proper conservatives.
I can’t remember any of them saying to me, ‘I’m satisfied the defence leadership covered themselves in glory in Afghanistan.’ Why shouldn’t they have their actions properly examined?
Can we trust the generals?
If we are soon going to war with China – and again both extremes agree on that, albeit for different reasons – wouldn’t it be a good investment to spend the cost of a nuclear-powered toilet seat to find out whether they can be trusted?
I assume the arguments against a more thorough investigation of defence leadership fall into a number of categories, and I’ll go through each of them.
Why the Brereton Inquiry was flawed
The first is that ‘Brereton’ already gave them a clean bill of health. However, this is not actually so, neither literally or in any way that would survive serious scrutiny.
‘Literally’ because Justice Paul Brereton could only decide what he was asked to decide, with the information he was allowed to have to decide it. A close reading of his report into what happened in Afghanistan would reveal such phrases as ‘answering the Terms of Reference’.
So prescriptive are the defence inquiry regulations that an inquiry officer, like Brereton, is only permitted to answer questions set by those above him. In Federal parliament this week, Jacqui Lambie referred to a ‘cover-up”. This is what she is talking about.
What are the chances then, that the questions asked of Brereton did not include ‘locate and publicise evidence that suggests the senior commanders knew of war crimes, and when they knew’?
Under the regulations controlling his inquiry, Brereton was not even allowed to make adverse findings against those who commissioned him to write the report. Nor can he just ‘do it anyway’, because it’s not really “the Brereton Report’: it was always the ‘IGADF report’ which the inquiry officer simply drafts.
The office of the Inspector General of the Australian Defence Force (IGADF) publishes it, and has the power to amend it. It also appoints a legal officer, of their choosing of course, to ‘legally review it. So again, does that sound like a true ‘clean bill of health’?
Brereton simply did not have the power to investigate anyone but soldiers and ranks up to lieutenant colonels, nor did he even have any of the information that may have enabled him to do that adequately: email trails between MINDEF (the ministry of defence) and CDF (chief of defence) offices in the 2012 period.
No one from either office was called as a witness. While I like and respect ‘Brereton’ the man, those who say he actually had two purposes: ‘blame the soldiers, clear the generals’ are not completely crazy.
The International Criminal Court would be different
The thing about the International Criminal Court, as called in by Lambie, is they don’t care so much about individuals on the ground, rather they care about who was calling the shots. Who would doubt, for example, that Radovan Karadjic was a more appropriate target of their focus that a corporal running a camp?
In the same vein, it would be generals Hurley and Campbell who would be of most interest if they came to look at what was known as Operation Slipper.
While it is easy for armchair warriors like Greg Sheridan to say “it’ll never happen”, I imagine General Hurley might want something a little more certain to stop Interpol calling in at Government House and interrupting the latest family songfest.
If that ‘something’ was also within the powers of his ‘friendship circle’, you’d imagine he’d do more than just hope for the best. The reality of Brereton, accidental or otherwise, is that it protects the leadership from responsibility. Just a coincidence of course.
Australia, and rightly so, always wants to be ‘model world citizen’. We covet a position on the UN Security Council like it’s an Olympic Gold medal.
Our relationship with the US, the world’s least ‘legal’ nation, is an aberration, a necessity for our survival, we claim. If this is so, wouldn’t we want to take this chance to show the world just how ‘good’ we are?
The chances are our generals will come out looking great, and if they don’t, well, we can just cut them lose as we did the corporal. Or one private. ‘I’m shocked, shocked’ former Minister Stephen Smith can say, in a speech that is probably already sitting in an electronic file under ‘Plan C’.
To those across the issues enough to know that ‘command knowledge and cover-up’ is the central issue in my own upcoming trial, and who argue ‘let’s look at it then’, I say this: It is often said that a criminal trial is not a good way to find out exactly what happened.
Limitations of my trial
Like an IGADF Inquiry, a criminal trial can only answer specific questions set to it: does the evidence presented (only) establish the likelihood a specific offence occurred at a particular time and date.
While I will try to establish I was justified to leak the documents because of the magnitude of wrongdoing and bad faith in the ADF senior leadership at the time, it is guaranteed that defence will play ‘interference’ by constant squeals of ‘objection, relevance!’ and, if that fails, the cover all of ‘national security!’
One thing both defence and I agree on, ironically, is: what I have to say affects our ‘national security’. The difference is they say I’m damaging it by revealing ‘secrets’, whereas I say the ‘secret’ is how corrupt and political they are, even in fighting a war, and as such we have no ‘national security’ anymore, simply a political advertising team disguised as a military.
The fact, for one small example, that Ben Roberts-Smith was given a VC when he may not have even deserved it, and an MG (medal for gallantry) when he actually committed a war crime (shooting dead a shepherd boy without any evidence to suggest he was involved in the insurgency), seems to support this.
You can bet the defence PR chiefs behind the huge BRS publicity juggernaut will be running for cover during my trial.
Call in the comics
Finally, there’s the excuse that ‘it’s too expensive and time consuming’ to have a proper inquiry. I’ll simply leave that one in the comedy department, as, in present circumstances, if that phrase alone doesn’t bring a wry smile to your lips, you haven’t been paying too much attention to the defence portfolio.
As many of us who like to poke fun at defence know, it’s getting harder and harder to make jokes about them that are better than their own press releases.
To put my money where my mouth is, I’m happy to face trial and even jail as long as the issue of leadership accountability, ‘politicisation’, and competence are also looked at by an independent parliamentary inquiry, and then, if called for, a Royal Commission.
I may have some information for them to consider. I’m backing myself. Let them back themselves.
After all, isn’t the defence of Australia worth it?
They didn’t know, really? Pursue top brass over alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, says veteran
