Today I watched the Chief of Army, Lieutenant General Rick Burr, AO, DSC, MVO, fail to answer questions about the stripping of SAS unit merit awards from all members past and present, dead or alive, who served in Afghanistan, before ending the shortest press conference I've witnessed in years.
In particular, he totally dodged the question about the Yamashita Standard, whereby culpability for war crimes goes to the top in the chain of command.
In no way am I excusing the guilty, but training young men to kill so efficiently, putting them into a totally unnecessary war over the past 20 years, with merciless rotations of 8 months i(thanks PM Kevin Rudd) in a situation where anyone may be your enemy, is a recipe for disaster, in terms of this type of incident and also in resultant PTSD and suicides of our best soldiers. Those responsible for misusing our SAS and military are all culpable.
Australians for War Powers Reform aims to make the Australian Parliament the final arbiter of any future engagement of Australian forces in combat, not the Prime Minister of the day. They deserve our support to avoid such enormous waste of lives and resources in future.
