Tonight, Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson launched Hit & Run: The New Zealand SAS in Afghanistan and the meaning of honour, about the SAS's "revenge" raid in Afghanistan. At the time, the NZDF said that the raid killed only "insurgents". They lied. In fact, the raid killed and injured only civilians; the insurgents they were targeting were nowhere near the area.
It gets worse. The SAS deliberately demolished civilian houses as revenge for the death of one of their comrades. That's a war crime. They refused to provide medical care to the wounded, resulting in some of them dying a slow, lingering, and completely unnecessary death. That's a war crime too. And when they finally captured one of the people they were looking for, they turned him over to the Afghans to be tortured. That's a war crime as well, not to mention straight out conspiracy to torture.
So who's responsible for these crimes? According to Hager and Stephenson's Q&A:
Most of all, people in the SAS. They gathered the intelligence, planned the raid and commanded and led the operation. The authors believe that the deaths and injuries of 21 civilians, the destruction of homes, and the beating and torture of a detainee were due in large part to their actions and inactions, and that they led the efforts to keep it quiet afterwards. Next there are officers in the defence force who were responsible for overseeing the SAS and who should have investigated more responsibly when news of civilian casualties emerged. This includes the then-chief of defence force Lieutenant-General Jerry Mateparae, who was in Afghanistan at the time, and who watched on the screens at the SAS operations room in Kabul as the operation unfolded. Then there are the political leaders. Most government decisions are made by individual ministers or by Cabinet as a whole. However in this case, as Chapter 2 describes, the prime minister John Key was briefed by phone from the SAS compound in Kabul and personally gave his approval for the raid.
Yes, John Key is a fucking war criminal. And he made one of his co-conspirators in those war crimes Governor-General.
These people need to go to jail. All of them. We should not tolerate war crimes by our defence forces, and we should not tolerate the authorisation of war crimes by our politicians. And the solution to it is to charge them, try them, and if convicted, jail them for a very long time, so that there will be some justice for the dead and so that all future soldiers and politicians will know that we will not tolerate that. Anything less - resignations, excuses - is just bullshit. We need prosecutions, and (if the evidence supports them), convictions.
And as a general comment: this is what happens when we involve ourselves in American wars. If we don't wage war, our soldiers don't commit war crimes. So don't wage war, except in immediate self-defence. Duh.
