Monday, April 11, 2022



More Australian war crimes

Last week, Australia's ABC broke a major story about Australian SAS troops committing war crimes in Timor-Leste, murdering wounded people and brutalising their corpses. This week, they've got more, about an Australian-run torture centre:

During the widely celebrated peace-making mission in East Timor, Australian soldiers held 14 men and boys in a secret interrogation facility.

The detainees, suspected of being pro-Indonesian militia, say they were stripped, assaulted, deprived of food, water and sleep and forcibly shown the mangled bodies of two dead militiamen.

Their ordeal led to Australian military investigators recommending charges of torture.

Of course, the Australian military refused to prosecute its own. And of course, it refuses to say why. Meanwhile, the rest of us are left wondering why Australia lets its soldiers violate Australian and international law, and whether the failure to prosecute in Timor allowed and encouraged Australian soldiers to commit further crimes in Afghanistan.