The Albanese government stripped distinguished service medals from some commanding officers who held senior roles during the war in Afghanistan in which Australian soldiers killed Afghani citizens but the most notorious, former SAS corporal Ben Roberts-Smith, keeps his tarnished Victoria Cross.
Ben Roberts-Smith: sued for defamation and lost.Credit: Stan
The VC winner was feted last week at a Special Air Services function in Perth attended by Kerry Stokes, his biggest patron, enabler and chairman of the Seven Network. It was Stokes who bankrolled Roberts-Smith’s delusional and self-destructive defamation court action against this masthead that led to damning adverse findings against him. An appeal against that defamation judgment is under way.
It’s that kind of hubris that undermines public belief that the army has learnt from what Defence Minister Richard Marles described on Thursday as “arguably the most serious allegations of Australian war crimes in our history”.
These are hard days to be a soldier. Civilians are being killed in the Middle East and the royal commission into veterans’ suicide found 3000 personnel have probably died unnecessarily and vets were 20 times more likely to die by suicide than in combat.
Now Marles, on the recommendation of the Brereton inquiry, has belatedly stripped distinguished service medals from some officers who served in Afghanistan.
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In 2016, Major General Paul Brereton began his investigation into the conduct of Australian forces in Afghanistan during the 13 years of Operation Slipper. Four years later, he concluded there was credible information of unlawful conduct involving 25 Australian personnel relating to the killing of 39 Afghanis.
Marles said the Brereton recommendations and the Privacy Act prohibited him from disclosing the officers’ identities. But the Herald‘s Matthew Knott revealed government sources claimed fewer than 10 people had had their awards cancelled.
The issue of medals revocation has been hanging around since the Coalition government rejected Campbell’s offer to hand back the medal awarded for his command of troops in the Middle East after the Brereton report. The issue flared last year when Roberts-Smith lost his defamation case against the Herald, Age and Canberra Times. The Federal Court found the publications had proven on the balance of probabilities Roberts-Smith had murdered four unarmed civilians in Afghanistan.
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