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As I wrote recently, the institutional left aren’t even waiting for the trial to commence before they’ve got Ben Roberts-Smith convicted and condemned. When it’s pointed out that they are violating the most fundamental principle of our legal system, the presumption of innocence, they airily point to the judgement in Roberts-Smith’s defamation trial.
The first obvious problem with that gambit is that a civil trial has a far, far lower standard of evidence than a criminal trial. Instead of a jury of his peers reaching a verdict beyond reasonable doubt, Roberts-Smith was condemned in that instance by a single judge’s ‘I Just Reckon’, oops, ‘the balance of probabilities’.
What’s worse, though, is that this ‘I Just Reckon’ was based on testimony that should never have been allowed in an Australian court.
Unlike the smug left, independent journalist Drew Pavlou has actually bothered reading the court documents from that civil trial. What he found is simply mind-boggling.
TLDR: Previous court cases addressing Ben Roberts-Smith war crime allegations relied on the testimony of illiterate Afghan villagers who called him an infidel.
Part of the war crimes claims made against Ben Roberts-Smith relied upon the testimony of Afghan villagers who openly told Australian courts that they viewed Roberts-Smith and Australian soldiers as infidels.
Nine Media relied upon the testimony of three key Afghan witnesses in order to support the claim that Roberts-Smith executed a farmer named Ali Jan who he claimed was a Taliban spotter.
These men were illiterate subsistence villagers who expressed hatred for “infidels” including Australian soldiers during the trial.
The ‘witnesses’ repeatedly made clear their hatred of Australian soldiers and their loyalty to the Taliban terrorists.
Hanifa, pictured in court drawings wearing a green shawl, acknowledged directly that foreign soldiers were called “infidels” or “kafir” and that he did not like them.
He also confirmed that persons killed by soldiers were called “martyrs”.
Hanifa made clear that he hated non-Muslims. He also admitted to trying to deceive the soldiers investigating the murder of three Australians by a fellow ‘martyr’. He posed, he said, with a borrowed donkey, to try and pretend they were ‘nomads’. Why would they do that?
Perhaps because it’s a matter of record that there were armed Taliban in the village concerned, that day. In fact, Roberts-Smith had already killed a confirmed armed Taliban fighter. It’s almost as if these villagers had something to hide.
Yet, these were the men the judge chose to believe.
It gets worse. Much worse. The testimony the judge chose to believe was so garbled that not even Afghan interpreters could clearly understand it.
The only available court-certified Pashto interpreter lived in Ontario, Canada. When hearings commenced at 10:15am in Sydney, it was 8:15pm in Ontario and 4:45am in Kabul.
The Afghan witnesses therefore gave evidence about murders in a Taliban stronghold through a three-way international audiovisual link at dawn, interpreted by someone in a different hemisphere.
The court-certified Pashto interpreter conceded that he had difficulty translating from classical Pashto to the rural Pashto dialect the men spoke.
But what comes next ought to make every Australian’s blood boil.
Hanifa told the Federal Court that a man named “Dr Sharif” paid for his accommodation, food and transport for up to a year in support of his ability to testify against Roberts-Smith.
Dr Sharif worked for representatives of Nine newspapers as a fixer in Afghanistan.
Each Afghan key witness said that a local representative for Nine Media paid their family’s living expenses since moving to Kandahar, then Kabul, earlier in the year.
According to Daily Mail court reporting, one key witness was accompanied by his wife and five children, another by his wife and six children and a third had 14 relatives with him.
How this ever passed muster in an Australian court simply beggars belief. While it is legal to reimburse witnesses for their expenses incurred while attending court, such as travel and meals, direct payments for testimony that could influence their evidence may be considered unethical or illegal. How can paying for accommodation, food and transport for a year, for 30 people, when just three were actual ‘witnesses’ (who all admitted that they did not see the alleged ‘shooting execution’, while two claimed to see Roberts-Smith kick Ali Jan off the cliff) be in any way considered legal, let alone ethical?
Nine Media have also, by the way, been caught out secretly paying an Australian witness nearly three-quarters of a million dollars to keep quiet about their (alleged!) unethical conduct.
Then there is the well-documented fact of Islamically sanctioned lying.
Roberts-Smith’s barristers directly put it to Mangul that his religion permitted lying to infidels in some circumstances.
Mangul rejected the suggestion.
Except that it’s very, very true. As scholar Raymond Ibrahim writes, Sunni Muslims… have, whenever capability allowed, waged jihad against the realm of unbelief; and it is here that they have deployed taqiyya – not as dissimulation but as active deceit.
Sami Makaram, former Islamic studies professor at the American University of Beirut and author of some 25 books on Islam, also writes: Taqiyya is of fundamental importance in Islam. Practically every Islamic sect agrees to it and practices it … We can go so far as to say that the practice of taqiyya is mainstream in Islam.
Yet Judge Anthony ‘I Just Reckon’ Besanko chose to airily hand-wave all this away.
Judge Besanko ultimately dismissed the infidel/kafir argument in a single paragraph for each witness, bracketed with the Dr Sharif financial support argument, writing:
“However, I do not consider (the infidel argument), or indeed the other general motive to lie advanced by the applicant of the sustenance (food and transportation) provided by the respondents through Dr Sharif, to be strong motives for Mohammed Hanifa to lie.”
I wonder what his opinion on the aerodynamics of pigs might be? Or perhaps he might be interested in some shares in the Sydney Harbour Bridge?
