When French president Emmanuel Macron was pilloried in some quarters for defending freedom of expression as a French value, Australian prime minister Scott Morrison backed his European counterpart: “We share values. We stand for the same things.” This professed French/Australian value for freedom of expression has now come back to bite the backside of the Australian prime minister. When it[Read More...]
A Chinese official has used a cartoon showing an Australian soldier threatening a child with a knife to rightly castigate US lackey and serial war criminal Australia over horrendous Australian war crimes in Occupied Afghanistan. Australian politicians, journalists, academics and commentators have indignantly responded by falsely describing the cartoon as a doctored image or fake image, and ignoring passive mass[Read More...]
If one were to get into the head of Australian government MP Andrew Hastie, a security tangle of woe would no doubt await. Having been a captain with the Special Air Services and having also served in Afghanistan, he has been none too thrilled by the publicity soldiers he served with have received. The report by New South Wales Court[Read More...]
Much complaint can be had of the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry Report. It exempts political actors of responsibility for alleged atrocities and war crimes. It suggests that those in the highest echelons of the Australian Defence Forces are ignorant in incompetent innocence. It spares the desk warriors and flays the field operatives. Heavily redacted, this document[Read More...]
Every time you start to believe that West is your model of morality, you get a jolt. Recent revelations of horrific war crimes committed by the Australian soldiers in Afghanistan where innocent men, women and children were deliberately and gruesomely killed are a rude reminder that West’s claim to morality is not just outright falsehood, their colonial habits of abuse[Read More...]
Australia has been rocked by the release of a heavily redacted report about the killing of 39 unarmed Afghan civilians or prisoners by some 25 elite Australian Special Air Services (SAS) soldiers. Any prosecutions will take years and will violate the scientific principle of truth and systemic change rather than knee-jerk blame and shame. There is already huge Australian[Read More...]
In 2016, Australian Major General Jeff Sengelman approached the then chief of the Australian army Lieutenant General Angus Campbell with a nagging worry. The concern lay in allegations that Australian special forces had committed various war crimes in Afghanistan. Sengelman was then special forces commander; Campbell was chief of the army. Sociologist Samantha Crompvoets was duly commissioned to write a[Read More...]
