Ben Roberts-Smith

[alexjones]

Prisoner's must be fed, guarded and sheltered. They take up a lot of resources.

Do what you gotta do is all I am gonna say. If you can manage it then good, if you can't then that is good too.

[Tinker]

Prisoner's must be fed, guarded and sheltered. They take up a lot of resources.

Do what you gotta do is all I am gonna say. If you can manage it then good, if you can't then that is good too.

Possibly the most fu##ed up comment I've ever seen on this forum. And from a bloke who's never served.

[alexjones]

Prisoner's must be fed, guarded and sheltered. They take up a lot of resources.

Do what you gotta do is all I am gonna say. If you can manage it then good, if you can't then that is good too.

Possibly the most fu##ed up comment I've ever seen on this forum. And from a bloke who's never served.

What does, or doesn't being a public servant have to do with having an opinion? Nothing.

I don't judge the actions of others from the comfort of my home.

[straightshooter]

This affair is starting to have a whiff of Breaker Morant.
He will be the scapegoat, not his superiors nor those that actually pulled the trigger.
Other than one media network trying to prevent another media network from getting a leg up with a highly decorated war hero star performer on the payroll, I can't see who might benefit from this level of fiasco other than the ambulance chasers.

[cadet]

I want to stay agnostic on this one.

And I'm really struggling to articulate my discomfort around it.

Some of it is around the fact that a prominent media proprietor has a deeply personal, vested interest in shaping public opinion on this. He also happens to be a serious medal collector. That deserves more scrutiny than it's had.

Some of it is the blind, unquestioning, headlong rush to defend BRS and any other soldier who's ever served. Trouble is, while some of the finest people I've ever met were soldiers I served with, some of the worst humans I ever met - violent thugs, pedophiles, rapists and murderers - I also served with. At the same time as BRS was capable of the highest valour, it's completely possible that he was and is an awful human. Both things, many things, can be true at the same time, and be difficult to resolve or reconcile. Service doesn't automatically confer a halo or deserve a free pass.

I remember being party to a conversation about war crimes rumours years before any of this publicly broke. Even in my obscure corner of the ADF we were hearing this stuff. The upshot of that conversation was "they'd be war crimes. If there's even a hint of truth to it, if it ever goes public, there'll be trials."

It's galling, because I and everyone I ever served with knew the RoEs on our colourful little cards inside out and back to front for whichever ex or op we were on, and we knew that if we stepped outside them we could go a row of ******. We knew that as early as Padres' day at Kapooka, reinforced during PW/PUC training in IETs, and rehearsed extensively prior to going live operationally. Some of my training in that was even delivered by these mythical sandy bereted characters. They, too, were and are bound by the Laws of Armed Conflict. We all knew, and the vast majority tried to serve honourably and lawfully.

So to hear that there were people stepping outside of RoEs, not heat-of-the-moment stuff, but premeditated, cold-blooded, psychopathic and sadistic stuff perpetrated against people who didn't deserve it, or who at least hadn't been afforded due process, was and is deeply discomforting to me, and to people who had been there, who had seen it. And it took integrity and courage to blow the whistle on it.

But when all is said and done, BRS was a mere CPL. Multiple layers higher up - much higher up - to the highest levels - by their command failures let this unfold and mishandled it such that it became the ongoing ****** it now is.

And it besmirches us all.

[No1_49er]

cadet, I applaud your stance.
To paraphrase what Bolt said in a Skynews commentary, I'll repeat what I said earlier; Don't let patriotism cloud your vision.