{"id":174196,"date":"2020-12-07T12:00:59","date_gmt":"2020-12-07T12:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=174196"},"modified":"2020-12-03T07:04:26","modified_gmt":"2020-12-03T07:04:26","slug":"australian-war-crimes-report-a-damning-indictment-of-the-barbarity-in-afghanistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/12\/australian-war-crimes-report-a-damning-indictment-of-the-barbarity-in-afghanistan\/","title":{"rendered":"Australian War Crimes Report: A Damning Indictment of the Barbarity in Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"

2 Dec 2020 – <\/em>Despite six volumes of redactions\u2014blacking out the specific and gruesome details\u2014the official report released last week on the atrocities committed by Australian Special Forces in Afghanistan is a devastating indictment of all the governments and ruling establishments, from Washington to London and Canberra, involved in this criminal war conducted by US imperialism.<\/p>\n

Everyone responsible for the military\u2019s crimes in Afghanistan, and the war of aggression itself\u2014including successive Liberal-National Coalition and Labor prime ministers, governments and the military high command, should be placed on trial for crimes against humanity, just as the Nazi leaders were after World War II.<\/p>\n

By seeking to whitewash the war crimes as much as possible, and blame low-ranking troopers\u2014not their commanders and governments\u2014the report must also serve as a warning. More than four years in the making, behind closed doors, this report is a part of a calculated operation to cosmetically \u201cclean up\u201d the now severely tarnished reputation of the Special Forces and the military as a whole for even worse and greater wars, as well as repression of dissent at home.<\/p>\n

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An Australian special forces soldier murdering an Afghan civilian (Screenshot from footage leaked to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation earlier this year)<\/p><\/div>\n

Even by the heavily-censored account<\/a> published by the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force, there is \u201ccredible evidence\u201d that Special Forces units murdered at least 39 prisoners of war or innocent civilians in cold blood and committed many other abuses, including \u201ccruel\u201d treatment (i.e. torture), the use of illegal weapons and the desecration of victims\u2019 bodies. Statements from Afghan families and organisations declare there were many more killed.<\/p>\n

So systemic were the killings that Special Forces recruits were \u201cblooded\u201d by being ordered to assassinate captured detainees. This level of depravity, confirmed by the report\u2019s author, Paul Brereton, a judge and Army Reserve Major General, cannot be explained as the actions of isolated individuals at the lowest ranks of the armed forces. It points to the brutalisation of the military itself in preparation for criminal new wars.<\/p>\n

According to the report, victims included two teenagers whose throats were slit. In this \u201cincident,\u201d the report states, \u201cmembers from the \u2018SASR\u2019 were driving along a road and saw two 14-year-old boys whom they decided might be Taliban sympathisers. They stopped, searched the boys and slit their throats. The rest of the Troop then had to \u2018clean up the mess\u2019, which involved bagging the bodies and throwing them into a nearby river.\u201d<\/p>\n

Without any detail, another redacted incident is described as \u201cpossibly the most disgraceful episode in Australia\u2019s military history.\u201d That underscores the depth of criminality of this war. As the report outlines, there is a long record of Australian war crimes\u2014such as massacres and village burning\u2014from the Second Anglo Boer War of 1899-1901 to the horrors of the Vietnam War that ended in US defeat in 1975.<\/p>\n

Brereton\u2019s report provides scant information about 39 other incidents of alleged breaches of law, which he declared \u201cunsubstantiated\u201d or \u201cdiscontinued.\u201d They include reports of waterboarding and soldiers holding a knife to a man\u2019s testicles. Many more abuses remain covered up, shielded by a continuing \u201ccode of silence\u201d that Brereton concedes created \u201cenormous challenges in eliciting truthful disclosures.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is obviously implausible to claim, as the report does, that the Special Forces atrocities were simply the work of a \u201csmall number of patrol commanders, and their prot\u00e9g\u00e9es\u201d or a \u201cwarrior culture\u201d that remained totally unknown above the level of corporals and sergeants. By the report\u2019s own admission, this \u201cculture\u201d began domestically, in military training and indoctrination, not in Afghanistan. \u201cIt was in their parent units and sub-units that the cultures and attitudes that enabled misconduct were bred,\u201d the report states.<\/p>\n

Special Forces troopers were deployed to Afghanistan as many as 16 times, despite the resulting mental health and addiction problems, precisely because their task, as trained killers, was to terrorise the population. Their conduct flowed inevitably from the nature of the war itself\u2014a ruthless operation to terrorise the population and crush all resistance to the imposition of US control over the country. It is no coincidence that US presidents, including Barack Obama, have singled out the Special Forces for praise.<\/p>\n

Special Forces units were sent back, time after time, also because Coalition and Labor governments alike feared that if regular troops were dispatched they would suffer casualties that would fuel anti-war sentiment, as emerged especially after the televised atrocities of the Vietnam War and the more openly illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq, which triggered huge anti-war protests across Australia and internationally.<\/p>\n

Far from the \u201cgood war\u201d for \u201cfreedom\u201d and to eradicate terrorism, as claimed by the Bush and Howard governments\u2014backed by the Labor Party and the Greens\u2014the Afghanistan invasion of 2001 and subsequent military occupation was, and remains, a filthy neo-colonial war. It was launched to secure hegemony over a resource-rich and geo-strategically located country in the heart of the Eurasian landmass, bordering China and former Soviet republics.<\/p>\n

As in the Vietnam War, governments in Canberra and Washington, as well as the complicit corporate media, relied upon the fabricated \u201ckill counts\u201d reported by the Special Forces and issued by the military chiefs as proof of the supposed \u201csuccess\u201d of what is now a near 20 year-long war in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

By this September, the war had directly claimed the lives of at least 175,000 Afghans, leaving many more maimed and displacing millions in the impoverished country of 32 million people. The war has featured indiscriminate US bombings, drone assassinations, death squad night raids and the operations by the US Army\u2019s 5th Stryker Brigade, which systematically murdered civilians and mutilated their bodies.<\/p>\n

Extraordinary moves are being stepped up internationally to bury these crimes. In September, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced<\/a> new sanctions, personally targeting the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for proposing an investigation into war crimes committed by US military forces and intelligence agents in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the \u201cwar on terror.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given the nature of the war, it is no accident that nearly every government in the US-led coalition\u2014those of the US, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, the Netherlands and Denmark\u2014has faced war crimes allegations. Few, if any, prosecutions have resulted from the official inquiries in these countries and \u201cit is predictable that Australian prosecutions could encounter similar obstacles.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, the only Australian prosecution is against ex-military lawyer David McBride<\/a>, who faces a closed-door trial for allegedly leaking documents to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in 2017, exposing a litany of war crimes. The Australian Federal Police also raided the ABC headquarters<\/a>, and two ABC journalists, Dan Oakes and Sam Clarke, were threatened with prosecution<\/p>\n

WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who was responsible for the greatest exposure of US and allied war crimes in Afghanistan\u2014the 2010 release of 75,000 documents from US \u201carmy war logs\u201d\u2014remains incarcerated in a COVID-infected British prison facing extradition to be imprisoned for life, or executed, in the US on trumped-up espionage charges.<\/p>\n

As Brereton acknowledges, his report was prepared in close collaboration with the US and its allies. He travelled to their capitals for consultations. The purpose of the resulting whitewash is not just to ensure that war crimes investigations, and any eventual prosecutions, protect all the military generals and governments from being held to account.<\/p>\n