The plot thickens. The chief of the defence force General Cosgrove has been caught misleading the people yet again. He told Senate Estimates this week that Australia had an agreement with the Americans that they would detain POWs in Iraq on our behalf so we could avoid our responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions to ensure they were not tortured. Today, �Defence Minister� Robert Hill � the bloke so desperate to avoid the truth coming out about our increasingly obvious complicity in American war crimes at Abu Ghraib that he banned the key witness, Major O�Kane, from telling his story – admitted there was no such agreement.
There was an agreement for Afghanistan, a vastly different war – which the ADF now can�t find, Hill says – but nothing for Iraq. That means there is no legal basis for us to palm off our responsibilities. That means, perhaps, that the agreement made for Iraq on March 23, 2003requiring detaining powers to meet their Geneva Convention obligations stands. And that would mean that we did have a duty to protect the 59 Iraqis even Hill admits Australians captured from American torture, and that we did have a duty to do what we could to stop the blatant American breaches of the Geneva Conventions once they came to our attention last November. (Although we do anyway according to most international lawyers – see Our ‘special responsibility’ betrayed at Abu Ghraib.)
Bloody hell!! Sometimes, just sometimes, politicians who want the people to believe the opposite of the truth get trapped by their own spin. Let�s hope it�s not too late for our proud and honourable military tradition to be saved. Come on, whistleblowers, now�s your best chance to clean out the yes men from defence ‘leadership’ and expose the political monsters who�ve misused and humiliated the force ever since �Tampa� and children overboard and relentlessly co-opted it to bolster their political fortunes.
For those of you who remember your ‘unthrown children’ history, the progress of this scandal is deja vu. Last time, Howard ordered an inquiry by his own department, which, of course, produced a cover-up of the cover-up. So the Senate called an inquiry, which found out lots, but couldn’t nail the real culprits – Reith and co – because the government banned staffers and key public service witnesses from giving evidence. We’re at the second stage now – the farce of a Defence force and department ‘Fact Finding’ inquiry into themselves. Why not an independent inquiry to get the bloody truth! Because truth hurts a government which ditched truth as a concept a long time ago. Revolting.
Tonight, long time Webdiarist Peter Funnell in Canberra, an ex soldier whose Dad was a POW in World War 11, lets fly.
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Peter Funnell
Look mate, I have written this while I am white hot. It may not be worth much, but I reckon I know what these buggers have been up to. Whenever I think it can’t get any worse with the Howard Government, they top their last effort. Where is all this taking our nation? You know, sometimes things get so bloody broken they don’t go back together. How much more of this crap is there to find.
I am not a lawyer, but I was soldier for a long time. My father was a POW of the Japanese and I met plenty of his POW mates over many years. I can’t imagine any of them supporting what has gone on in Iraq jails while we helped hold the keys to the doors. This is how I see it.
It begins with illegal arrangements at Guantanamo Bay, arrangements that are so unfathomable that the US courts have great difficulty working out the status of those inside and whether they have rights in the US legal process. The US does not call them prisoners of war, they are detainees. The “detainees” were out of sight if not out of mind and the practices that would follow in Iraq were established there, then exported as acceptable operational practice to operations in Iraq.
As participants in the Afghanistan war, we were a party to all of this process. Two of our citizens are detainees. The Australian Government has made no effort to challenge this grotesque distortion of the accepted intentions conventions for the handling of those enemy combatants captured during operations. Our Government has now most reluctantly acknowledged the plight of our citizens, concealing their real intentions behind the proposition that there is nothing they can do. They care to do nothing.
It is against this background that the framework for operations where POWs were concerned in Iraq was established. Bad, wrong and illegal was about to get worse.
The real operational problem for the Australian military is that some elements of the forces deployed in Iraq would be very likely to capture Iraqis in battle. It could happen tonight if the small protection element gets into a fire fight with militia or others who may try to attack the personnel they are there to protect. They will go straight to the US yet you can bet there will not be a US soldier in sight at the time of capture. The whole business is too cute by half. But I get ahead of myself.
Australian military commanders obviously did not want to have full responsibility for POWs. That is to say, they did not want to run POW holding camps, so they made arrangements to had them over to the US who were going to establish these facilities. All correct so far – someone had to do it. (Margo: It now seems they didn’t – why not?! Did they agree on something they didn’t want to put in writing?) As expert contributors to Webdiary clearly point out, Australia still had continuing obligations to those they captured and handed over. It is inconceivable to me that these obligations were not known to Australian military commanders and planners. The Minister’s hazy recollection of an arrangement indicates it was planned for and covered in briefings.
I would suggest that the Army legal corps officers in place with the coalition headquarters knew exactly what was required in these matters. The conventions with regard to handling of and obligations to POWs are not hard to read and comprehend. The handling arrangements for POWs is a standard component of battlefield orders down to the smallest infantry unit – the rifle section. It is that basic!
But things had changed. The operational framework for POWs and their subsequent handling and interrogation was now well established. That is not to say that any one individual would support the foul goings on in the Iraqi prisons, but it does mean that everyone had become accepting of the US led approach to the abandonment of those parts of the international conventions for the handling of POWs that no longer suited. This was a juggernaut in motion.
When I first heard that an Australian army officer from the legal corps had been to the prison and made comment up his chain of command and that the information had not got to Minister or government I thought � that poor bastard, he’ll be hung out to dry. He’s conveniently expendable.
This is a fit up! When Cosgrove did his usual arm-in-arm with the Minister and PM and damned the officer with faint praise by referring to him as a junior officer (not correct by any means), I just knew the fix was in. The mystery to me was why the defence department Secretary and the Chief of the Defence Force were prepared to let defence and the ADF take such a fierce hit, to be made to look so deceitful, unprofessional and untruthful. Why?
The idea that some misguided military officer stuck the crucial October Red Cross report delivered by O’Kane after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in the bottom draw of a filing cabinet and no one was the wiser is not believable.
Revelations about the army officers concerned did in Iraq plumbs darker possibilities. The fact that more than one officer visited Abu Ghraib many times can only be interpreted two ways. They were alarmed by what they saw and kept going back to verify the situation, or they understood the operational environment and were part of the wider process by which it all happened. It seems these officers were involved in preparing responses to the Red Cross, they were on the inside of this business.
It’s astonishing, for it clearly implies that this really was something to which we were a willing party.
This is where the credibility gap widens enormously. The likelihood that this aspect of the war in Iraq was confined to a few (like who by the way?) is just so much crap. It’s not the way the Army or the ADF works. People have to tell and do and they tell others that need to know.
If the CDF really didn’t know, he should leave the Service tomorrow. If the Secretary didn’t know, he should find other employment. If they knew and concealed it they have no excuse. If they knew and concealed it because they mistakenly thought they were acting in the nations or the ADF’s best interests, they were wrong and have no right to hold the offices they presently occupy.
The truth is probably as simple as it is dangerous for our democracy. It’s not unreasonable to conclude the worst. There has been too much spin, and it�s been too hard to get information out of these the flow accordingly, or that the same senior leadership is grossly incompetent. The lone incompetent is not a runner!
Nothing excuses the PM, his Minister for Defence and his Minister for Foreign Affairs. Nothing. But their fate can be settled at the next election, as it should be.
The Nuremberg defence is ever present. Our PM relies on his version of it – he was never told, so he is not to blame. It’s no excuse. It’s a rotten betrayal of everything that is good about our nation, but it does illustrate just how far down the slippery slope we have come in the Howard years. You see versions of this �going along to get along� in every Federal department.
Every time I hear the Minister(s) or the PM talk of this rotten business, they are so quick to say none of our troops were involved in the mistreatment of the POWs. That is probably true, but it was never the question. It makes me ill to hear the pathetic cowering and whining.
You see, we are responsible; because we callously or stupidly dismissed our obligations to those people we captured in battle, disarmed and had imprisoned. We are responsible! It is shameful.
The only good to come out of it all is that our Parliamentary system of accountability did work, because a few good Senators got stuck in and demanded answers. There is hope yet.