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The most astonishing and infuriating thing about the Ben Roberts-Smith witch-hunt is that the elite class have been allowed to get away with it at all.
Remember that it was the same top-heavy ADF brass, who awarded Roberts-Smith the Victoria Cross, that then proceeded to pursue him with a vindictiveness that threw away all the rules of natural justice. Either the brass got it wrong when they awarded Roberts-Smith the VC, or it’s got it wrong now, when it accuses him – on the flimsiest ‘evidence’ – of being a war criminal.
Given that the brass specifically excluded themselves from scrutiny when they turned the attack dog that was the Brereton Report on the rank-and-file, it’s not hard to guess which.
The legacy media hasn’t covered itself in glory, either. In 2013, Chris Masters, whose own blurb touts himself as “the country’s foremost investigative journalist”, uncritically lauded the rank-and-file in Afghanistan as among the world’s elite. In that book, Masters specifically singled out Ben Roberts-Smith, as “exemplif[ying] the extraordinary strengths found among the other ranks of the Australian Army”. Just a few years later, Masters was leading the media pack-hunt against Roberts-Smiths.
So, when did this “foremost investigative journalist” get it wrong? Applying the logic of Gell-Mann Amnesia, if Masters could be so catastrophically wrong once, why should we take his word for it any other time?
The behaviour of both the Canberra bureaucracy and the media pack since inspires confidence in neither.
If I can read anything from the incredibly strong response I’ve had from readers and viewers following the highly staged arrest of the former SAS corporal last week, it’s that Australians do not trust the official establishment to get it right from here.
Roberts-Smith’s lawyers had reportedly undertaken on several occasions to have him attend a police station if required. Yet the Australian Federal Police, the Office of the Special Investigator for these alleged war crimes cases, plus the federal Attorney-General decided instead to arrest him at Sydney airport in front of a planeload of bystanders and his own daughters. This was a deliberate and entirely unnecessary humiliation.
What’s more, in what seemed more theatre than justice, the AFP filmed the arrest and distributed the footage to the media […] it was plainly meant to be intimidatory and could hardly fail to have prejudiced potential jurors.
Further, Nine media, which has been running stories targeting Roberts-Smith for years, received a tip-off about the arrest so its cameras could be on the scene to get its own exclusive footage. And Nick McKenzie, the Nine print journalist who has long been hounding Roberts-Smith, reportedly had his story announcing the arrest written and filed hours before it actually took place.
As we’ve seen all too often, from the Chamberlain case to the deplorable media hysteria over child HIV victim Eve van Grafhorst, the Australian media are pack-hunters without mercy, conscience or capacity for critical thought.
And Canberra is a cesspool to rank with the Washington swamp.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that “one well-placed source suggested that investigators might have waited to arrest Roberts-Smith in NSW because they wanted access to a wider and more diverse jury pool”. Not Perth, where Roberts-Smith was domiciled when the alleged offences took place; not Brisbane, where he has been living for many years; but Sydney where, it seems, prosecutors believe it would be easier to get a jury to convict.
By which they mean, of course, Muslims. Islamic hatred of the ‘infidel’ has been the background noise to this whole sordid affair. The Afghans whom Nine media paid handsomely to testify, in a dialect that even professional translators struggled to understand, made clear that they hated Australian soldiers and lauded the Taliban. More Australian Muslims rushed to join the Islamic State death cult than ever volunteered to serve in the ADF.
On my Sky News show this week, former AFP detective superintendent David Craig described the whole arrest circus as a “publicity stunt” and “close to perverting the course of justice”. Craig himself spent 12 months in Afghanistan as deputy commander of the AFP mission there. The AFP veteran, who says he “still bleeds blue”, is so angry about the way his former colleagues have handled the Roberts-Smith case that he accused the AFP of becoming “a puppet for the Albanese government” and “wanting to grandstand against anything that may be against the Muslim vote”.
Leaving aside the blatant venality of the forces arrayed against him, the simple fact is that the case against Roberts-Smith strains the concept of procedural fairness to breaking-point. As the deputy director of the Sydney Institute, Anne Henderson rightly notes, “That it is taking so long to establish the facts says much for the limits of the available evidence.”
That evidentiary burden will be extreme in this case given there are no bodies, no post-mortem reports and no ballistics, plus the not-so-insignificant issue of how to deal with national security matters in an open court jury trial.
A trial that faces a much higher standard than the “I Just Reckon” of a single judge, as in Roberts-Smith’s failed defamation action. As we saw in the Higgins-Lehrmann case, a judge who readily admits that the rape complainant is a serial, strategic liar and that there is simply no other evidence than her word for it, nonetheless sees fit to Just Reckon that, in one instance only, the serial liar is telling the truth. The judicial “I Just Reckon” against Roberts-Smith was every bit as baffling.
In finding against Roberts-Smith on the balance of probabilities in a defamation case, a Federal Court judge believed the former soldiers testifying against their one-time comrade – and not those supporting him – because of the “integrity” needed to testify against their own. And yes, that does take moral courage. Now, a jury will have to weigh all this again to determine whether war crimes have been established beyond reasonable doubt. And to lock him up in prison for life, that verdict must be unanimous […]
Given the conflict of testimony, the effluxion of time, the possible contamination of evidence, the failures of leadership and the slim chances of a conviction, this case should never have been brought.
And unlike the soldiers they so cavalierly threw into battle, those at the top have made sure they will never, ever, be held responsible for their reprehensible behaviour.
Not only did I commemorate Anzac Day this year, I did so wearing a khaki ribbon.
