New defence minister Peter Dutton will not strip 3000 Australian soldiers of their SAS medals
* 3000 Australian soldiers who served in Afghanistan won't be stripped of medals
* New defence minister Peter Dutton said soldiers will retain their service awards
* Only soldiers found guilty of war crimes or dismissed from army will be stripped
* Army chief then said all SAS should lose citation as 'collective responsibility'
Australian soldiers who served in Afghanistan won't be stripped of their medals because of war crime allegations facing some special forces soldiers, defence minister Peter Dutton has announced.
Defence Force chief Angus Campbell recommended Meritorious Unit Citations be taken from three thousand soldiers from Special Operations Task Groups that served in Afghanistan from April 2007 to December 2013.
Described as 'collective responsibility' by Mr Campbell, the move was originally recommended by Justice Paul Brereton whose report alleged 39 murders were perpetrated by Australian soldiers serving in Afghanistan over eleven years.
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WNU Editor: Many good Australian soldiers died in Afghanistan. Stripping them of their medals because of the actions of a few is not right.
More News On The Australian Defence Minister Overturning The Decision To Strip 3000 Veterans Of Military Decorations Who Served In Afghanistan
Defence Minister Peter Dutton overturns decision to strip veterans of military decorations -- ABC News (Australia)
ADF Afghanistan veterans will keep 3000 war citations after all -- 9News
Australia reverses decision to withhold medals from veterans -- Seattle Times/AP
Thousands of special forces soldiers will not be stripped of Afghanistan honours -- Sydney Morning Herald
Peter Dutton blocks decision by ADF chief Angus Campbell to strip veterans of medals -- SBS News
4 comments:
Isn't this something! All would be stripped of their awards. There's a liberal pansy if ever one existed. I wonder if the biden admin is getting ideas?
1:35
Reread the title and home in on the word "overturning".
Angus is a di@@ head
Perhaps Defence chief Angus Campbell needs to be brought up on a capital offense?
1) Any soldier however brave has a chance to crack and flee. If the soldier has not fled on the 1st battle, 2ned battler or whatever, there is always a chance they will flee.
Corollary is that any soldier has a chance to commit a "war crime".
2) War crimes are more likely with the enemies repeatedly and over a prolonged period breaking the rules of war. You can and should prosecute people that are in the tail of a normal curve. When that tail starts getting fat, then maybe the problem is not the soldiers, but at the very tippy top.
There is going to be a reaction when civilians get people sniped, shelled, ambushed, or subject to IEDs, by acting as forward observers or worse or fighter dressing in civilian clothes.
When civilian policing rules apply to the enemy, but the rules of war apply to you, it is a not a good combination. It is an evil combination. I have never been a grunt patrolling, but I have been at the butt end of civilians openly giving Al Qaeda fire control.
Psychologists like to measure things. Could the brass go Dr. Mengele on US troops and conduct blind randomized on troops and apply different ROE to different units or different sectors with the response being the number or percentage of war crimes? There was talk on whether it was moral to retain knowledge that Dr. Mengele learned from hypothermia experiments and other experiments. We kept the data and we experiment on babies, so I guess doing a blind randomized experiment of war crimes as a function of ROE conducted on troops without their consent is considered copacetic by our untested betters.
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