And apparently Australia had already released their report and investigation of their own behavior: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-55088230
But only the whistleblower and one other were tried and convicted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brereton_Report
> the person that felt bad enough to reveal the crime
is considerably arse backwards.
To scratch the surface of that:
McBride had previously raised concerns within the Australian Defence Force about the dangers of increasingly restrictive rules of engagement and the nature of investigations into members of the special forces.
The ABC found evidence of war crimes and published the information in their 2017 publication The Afghan Files.
McBride was allegedly unhappy with ABC's reporting of his documents.
During the case, McBride's lawyers stated he acted out of concern about the nature of the Defence Force's “excessive investigation of soldiers” in Afghanistan.
McBride believed the investigations were a "PR exercise" to compensate for earlier public allegations of war crimes.
Justice David Mossop stated "the way you've explained it is that the higher-ups might have been acting illegally by investigating these people too much, and that that was the source of the illegality that was being exposed."
However his story changed and wandered over the course of time his initial motivation on record wasn't at all that he felt bad about the rules of engagement being disregarded, he felt that such things were being chased down too hard.
Persecute the murderous fuckers hard and fast, but not publicly. This affair cooking up smells to much like another russian anti colonial sentiment cooking op.
> This included a practice of "blooding" where junior soldiers were told to get their first kill by shooting a prisoner.
Same playbook since forever. Those anti-gaza protest are going to give birth to radicalized cells too. Its free fighters, the wests open discussions just another self radicalisation recruitment platform.
Beats paying gig workers: https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/russias-new-weapon-child-s...
Im all for dragging the whole shebang through all the mud. The politicians who parked the war aimlessly , against a non existing country. The officers and media who went along, the soldiers that filtered through and the psychopaths that situation called for. But im against providing the anti western coalition (quatar/teheran/moscow/bejing) ressources.
From the Wikipedia page, it does indeed appear that the “whistleblower“ is no hero. He was whistleblowing over-scrutiny-of-military-personnel. He wasn’t whistleblowing the _murders_, but almost the opposite! Horrible.
Of course, what did you expect? Murder is legal if it's for the government, and, exposing your government's secret dirty laundry is a crime against the law. Business as usual everywhere.
I'm not aware of any government that rewards you when you exposed it as fool/criminal in front of their voters and the world. Hence why whistleblowers get the book thrown at them, as there's one set of rules for the plebs and another for the super wealthy and powerful.
And do you know what's most ironic? We're rewarding our own soldiers for the same crimes we hanged the Nazi soldiers for. Another proof that the legality of right VS wrong, good VS evil, has less to do with morals and more to do with whether you're on the victorious side of history.
I'd say more that "legality" and "morals" are not necessarily related. Morality cannot be imposed by laws, and laws aren't usually driven by morality. This applies to both secular and religious laws.
Doing your homework and having powerful people behind you are orthogonal. You can do all the homework you want but powerful people got in power and staid in power for playing for those in power, they're not gonna throw away all that to die on your hill with you.
You might think you can get away by playing one political side against the other for your protection and rally support, but when it comes to national security, military industrial complex, the ultra wealthy elites, etc, those tend to be part of and fund both sides so it won't work out in your favor as you might expect.
>They just want to dump things out there and hope for the best.
What's the alternative? Once you start "doing your homework" those in power will already find out you're rocking the boat and will lock you up under the usual $ESPIONAGE, $TERRORISM, $PATRIOT laws before you manage to send a text, so your safest bet is to release all info quickly to the public/press while you're still able to.
Time works against you here. The longer you're in possession of dirt that can get those at the top in trouble, the more you risk finding yourself "Epsteined".
In the way sifting flour and beating eggs are orthogonal steps in cake making. You need to do both, and not necessarily in any order.
> You might think you can get away by playing one political side against the other for your protection and rally support
“Sides” are an abstraction. The first rule of power is its quantum are people. You need people on your side to have power. Not abstractions.
> Once you start "doing your homework" those in power will already find out you're rocking the boat and will lock you up
No they won’t. Even these whistleblowers were publicly tried to scandalous effect for the impacted agencies.
The step most whistleblowers fail to take is the simplest one when confronting a powerful entity: consulting a lawyer.
> longer you're in possession of dirt that can get those at the top in trouble, the more you risk finding yourself "Epsteined"
This is nonsense and worse, a self-defeating argument. You think the people Epstein had dirt on didn’t know it until he was jailed?
How do you do that?
>You need people on your side to have power.
How do you get them?
>The step most whistleblowers fail to take is the simplest one when confronting a powerful entity: consulting a lawyer.
If only Snowden would have talked to a lawyer, I'm sure he'd be safe in the US right now.
This is highly situation dependent.
If you’re blowing the whistle on the British special forces, you’d want to have copious contemporaneous notes referencing where official documents may corroborate your claims.
You’d also want to introduce your claims into the Parliamentary record; first step would be finding an MP who wants to reform (not unmake) the special forces. In this way you can play into ambitious underlings’ promotion dreams while dangling transformation resources for the agency you’re criticising.
> How do you get them?
If you can’t manage the basics of politics, don’t launch a political endeavour. (This is true for whistleblowing and entrepreneurship, commercial and political.)
> If only Snowden would have talked to a lawyer, I'm sure he'd be safe in the US right now
Chelsea Manning is out of jail. And Manning went about her business in about the stupidest way possible.
Wars are horrible enough as-is; we have laws of armed conflict to try the best we can to keep a lid on the utter barbarity of it all, and to help our warfighters be able to live with themselves after.
This is not a new concept; one of the first people to expound on the proper laws of war in the West was Saint Augustine, and his work is still the philosophical foundation of the subject.
In comparison, the French put a general in the dock when his soldiers in the Ivory Coast, at his implicit orders, extrajudicially killed Firmin Mahé, a bandit himself responsible for many murders, and I believe other European countries have done similar prosecutions of senior officers.
Impunity is a choice.
I'll buy that all of the above were disgraces to the US, and I'll buy that the IDF is a little too cavalier with the rules of engagement. But come on. It's easy to pontificate from an armchair about who's "whitewashing" things when it isn't your friends getting shot. In wars, these things will happen and the best a government can do is put measures in place to stop it and then punish it severely when it occurs.
Compare this with the US during the Philippines War in the 19th century, an exceedingly dirty colonial conflict with no meaningful press involvement to blow the whistle, yet a major was court-martialled for waterboarding a prisoner:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding#During_the_Phili...
Ultimately these practices are either a sign of rotten leadership, or poor discipline. Once you let the rot fester, it's only a matter of time before the entire army is gangrened.
So let's take that bigoted "veterans are broken people" narrative and stuff it where the sun don't shine alongside "women are hysterical" and so forth.
I know far to much army men (mostly airforce, some Marsouins) to say "veterans are broken people", i know it isn't the case.
The news colported these past few years should already have opened some eyes normally. Alas...
Said otherwise, if you're a thief accusing someone else of stealing, I can legitimately wonder if you're making accusations in good faith... That simple.
Isn't there a saying for this even? The pot that calls the kettle black?
This seems like a systemic problem with war fighting and requires system improvements. The Heinlein in me is uneasy with a prosecutorial focus. Improve the culture, make it easier to take a couple of weeks off, whistleblow, whatever--but telling someone who volunteered to fight for their country to go get shot at and dodge bombs for a few hours, watch their friends get their faces blown off, and then flip a switch, seems unreasonable.
What does this mean, and why is it relevant? Some animals eat their weaker young. Would you include this in an argument defending a child cannibal? Did he eat fewer or more children than others?
I think this is how you reason when you have no values. "I know it's probably bad or whatever, but it's 5% fewer than the French!"
"Who are the French?"
"An excuse to kill 4% more kids. If we need to kill even more kids, I'll find another country that at some point in the past could justify a few more basis points."
"You know, some invaders in the past killed all the kids as a matter of policy. Who are we to say they weren't great or moral? It's culturally insensitive."
"Lets consult Heinlein. I know he has a lot about sleeping with your children, but he's got to have something about killing them."
It depends on the question you are asking, and what you want to learn. If you want to know if you should lock up an individual child cannibal, it doesn't.
If you want to know if the government is doing a good job at catching and preventing child cannibalism, then the trends and comparators matter.
Are there more child cannibals than 10 years ago? Are there more or less than in other countries like France?
I like to think I'm a good person, but these people probably do, too. It sounds like there's something rotten in the culture of the special forces that encouraged or at least overlooked these actions. What would I have done if I had been there? Would I have stood up against people I saw as my brothers in arms?
Before anyone gets this twisted, this is not an excuse of their behavior or saying that it should be discounted.
I suspect it's the price of having the best killers on Earth. They necessarily have to compromise on something else.
Even with appropriate training and when investigating crimes that do not target themselves, police are often guilty of abuses. In an occupation, the sheer numbers involved would guarantee abuses even if it were police operating under ideal conditions.
It is usually not feasible to conduct military operations with a huge force of trained police officers. However, even with people of the wrong background investigating without detachment, there should be an expectation for a culture of conscientiousness. That's the truly shocking thing about this article. Soldiers were put into a situation where things were expected to go wrong, but the attitude from command was to let it go wrong gleefully and to help cover it up afterwards. There was a complete surrender to inhumanity, on the part of command, before the conflict even started. That's what is truly reprehensible. Perhaps we must forgive people for doing bad things in the moment and under duress, but there should be no forgiveness for those who do it happily, daily, and without complaint.
This was a failure of command even more than it was a failure of the soldiers who committed crimes.
It was normal and expected.
Murdering defeated enemies, and their children was equally normal and expected.
We live in such a wonderful age that we can easily forget many “unthinkable” things are the default of humanity.
Also in this case it wasn't expected of these special forces to behave this way, they take the liberty to commit atrocities out of pure pleasure.
It starts it training, warning soldiers they will be tempted to commit war crimes. Looking at case studies where the “norm” has been averted.
When it comes to punishing offenders, you have to be very careful not to punish only those who speak out.
Not even special forces?
There are also Military Police trained in law enforcement. They tend to deal more with force protection and internal investigations. Some US MPs were responsible for the notorious Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal but there have been some reforms since then.
Then again the whole ordeal lacked in ... many things.
If you can’t think of anything that you could blow the whistle on, then chances are you were the one who did wrong and were found out about it.
If neither is the case, then you are either oblivious or you are a snitch who didn’t let anything slide.
Come up with a list of reasons why you did not come forward. Don’t belittle your crimes either.
The general public never payed much attention to GWOT as it was, but one of the consequences of it was that the special operations forces as a community were "rode hard and put away wet" as they say for 20+ years. Take someone, put them through a grueling selection process to become "the best of the best," which can cultivate a corresponding ego. Then pound the hell out of them over a full career with combat deployment after combat deployment, raid after raid.
It doesn't excuse what happened by any means, but is there legitimately a limit that needs to be known about how much violence someone can take before they give in to the beast within? Military aviators have crew rest limitations because it was discovered that beyond a certain level of fatigue, you are literally killing people. The experience of Vietnam POWs forced changes to military training for being taken captive, because they found out that if you torture anyone enough, they will eventually break.
So is the solution here that the SOF communities are attracting too many psychopaths and screening needs to be changed, or is it that people were being broken by war, which is a totally different problem?
I will never forget the footage of Serbians chaining Dutch officers to lampposts to act as living shields against NATO airstrikes. The poor bastards were time machined into the dark ages.
How is it that US special forces haven’t been implicated in similar war crimes?
Does the US have a genuinely better culture, or are they just less accountable?
People like Chris Kyle are treated as heroes, but it seems unlikely that he got so many kills by following the rules of engagement properly.
Allegations from the Vietnam war affected Bob Kerrey's political ambitions many years later, as I recall. The US does bring people to trial, now and then, but may come away with misdemeanor convictions.
They absolutely have been.
https://theintercept.com/2017/01/10/the-crimes-of-seal-team-...
And, in many instances back home, he also see many fellow americans as worthless.
sys32768•9mo ago