It appears that people do not go to the blogs if there are no comments to read...
If one is looking for a scandal on the Ministry of defence, the ADF and the Department of Defence or the whatever that serves as our line of attack, one does not have to go much further than the little war games held in Queensland with the Australian and US forces using depleted uranium shells...

A doco has been made on this subject I believe by David Bradbury and he should get all the support he deserves... Brave stuff to expose the dark little secrets of game-warfare, the result of whicih can get washed away in creeks and the sea to contaminate fishes or be simply ingested as airborne particle in windy conditions.

Radio-activity is low (concentration of two dangerous isotopes in depleted uranium is around 0,7 per cent and about 1 per cent respectively) but can induce aggressive cancers if just one very small particle comes into contact with our internal organs by ingestion or on our skin.

The half-life of these isotopes left out in the war-games fields is about 250,000 years... Welcome to the nookular free Orstralya...

The Prime Minister,                                                                      

The Hon John Howard MP,                                                   

Parliament House,

CANBERRA.   ACT.   2600.                                                    November 1, 2005. 

Sir, 

On July 16, 2005, in response to allegations that David Hicks had been subjected to torture whilst a ‘detainee’ of the United States, you said: 

“I can inform you - & we’ll provide you with a letter later – that we have received written advice from the Defense Department (US) that after a very thorough investigation of the allegations of Hicks & Habib about mistreatments whilst they were in American custody, no evidence has been found to support those allegations.

Overtaken by all the sound and fury which erupted around the report into the sex Skype scandal, a little-remarked announcement slipped out of the office of Minister for Defence, Stephen Smith, last month.

It revealed that Australia had deployed a team of trained army interrogators to Afghanistan - the first such team to be sent overseas since the Timor conflict in 1999.

Why now? Australian troops have detained and questioned more than 1000 suspects in Oruzgan province since taking that function over from the Dutch in August 2010. Mostly, this has been what Defence calls ''initial screening'' before detainees are either let go, or handed to US or Afghan forces for more intensive grilling. But now, it seems, we are to do some of the more protracted and complex interrogations ourselves.

Significantly, the new arrangements will allow the beefed-up Australian interrogation team to hold suspects for up to 10 days, more than double the four days previously allowed. Internees will be kept as before at a specially built facility at Tarin Kot, which is supposedly under 24 hour CCTV surveillance (though more than once the surveillance system has been out of action).

Smith says the new arrangements will allow Defence to play a ''greater role in the collection of vital intelligence'' bearing on ''insurgent networks, weapons caches and the location of … explosive devices''.

No doubt defence chiefs will hope that stronger leads might help stem Australian troop losses, which reached their worst level last year. (Eleven deaths in 2011 alone out of 32 over the whole length of the conflict.)

There will be a temptation to ratchet up pressure on locals who attract suspicion.

Nevertheless, Smith insists there will be no place in the interrogation team's repertoire for ''physical or mental mistreatment'' and that the team of nine ''highly -trained and ethical professionals'' will only work according to ''stringent guidelines'' and ''approved methods'. But methods approved by whom?

According to a departmental spokesperson, the role of scrutinising interrogation doctrine currently falls to ''several government agencies''. But previously secret Defence Department documents show that in 2004 and 2005, in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq, the army was so concerned about how the public viewed the business of interrogating prisoners that it wanted qualified people outside government to oversee its methods.

The plan has only now come to light in documents obtained under freedom of information by the Public Interest Advocacy Centre in Sydney and made available to the Herald. The documents date from the height of the coalition occupation of Iraq and the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal. The Iraqi prison had become a byword for brutality after photos surfaced in early 2004 showing naked Iraqi prisoners being terrorised and sexually humiliated by US military guards.

Australia, as part of the occupying coalition in Iraq, was tainted by association - especially as it had military lawyers going in and out of the prison at the time the abuse occurred, though none admitted to having specific awareness of it.

''Can easily see, in hindsight, how the strategy of harsher interrogations could lead to the depravity since exposed to the world'' a record of interview with one Australian officer states.

The documents show army chiefs were so worried about how the Abu Ghraib revelations would rebound on Defence's image that they wanted a new level of transparency around interrogation practices.

''The most recent intense scrutiny of allied and ADF standards of interrogation procedures indicate a shift in community expectations for handling detainees and conducting interrogations'' says a brief from mid 2004, prepared for then chief of the Defence Force General Peter Cosgrove.

''To ensure the public continues to support the ADF, particularly when deployed on operations, it may be appropriate to instigate a system of external review for Interrogation doctrine and training.''

Through a top-level body known as COSC (chiefs of service committee), the heads of army, navy and airforce agreed that the purpose of external review would be to ''advertise our compliance with Australian and International laws and obligations.''

Interrogation training was suspended in May of that year while the army checked whether its existing record was clean.

On September 30, 2004, the then head of army Lieutenant General Peter Leahy informed Cosgrove that the army had identified ''deficiencies … in the handling of prisoners on recent operations'' but that ''we are now fully compliant with both the letter and intent'' of laws designed to protect prisoners taken in war.

The hunt then began in earnest for someone or some organisation to take on the external review role.

The then head of army training, Major General Maurie McNarn, wanted Parliament's foreign affairs and defence committee to do the job because he thought this would minimise the risk of compromising operational security. Other options included a defence-appointed panel, or handing the task to an international authority such as the Red Cross or Amnesty International.

An internal 2004 brief for Cosgrove says ''approval by [Red Cross or Amnesty] would provide significant support to community acceptance of ADF practices''. But it warned that ''such agencies would seek to significantly 'water down' ADF practices, regardless of their technical compliance with international treaties''. In the end, the defence hierarchy agreed on a panel of ''eminent persons'' to monitor army's interrogation methods.

A former insider says he can recall names being drawn up and letters being drafted to potential appointees. But the initiative died. Why? So far, the only explanation Defence has offered is that after 2004 there was a ''substantially reduced'' emphasis on interrogation training because of a ''shift to other intelligence collection capabilities''.

''In short, there was little to validate'' a spokesperson told the Herald.

But the Public Interest Advocacy Centre says that it's time for the plan to be revived. And there's support for this from one of the architects of the earlier idea, former army head Lieutenant General Peter Leahy, who recently told the Herald it would be ''prudent to reconsider external methods of assurance and verification''.

There is no shortage of examples in recent military history of how both interrogations - and interrogation training - can go wrong.

Smith said last month that the ADF interrogators would be ''explicitly prohibited from the use of techniques such as sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, hooding, physical mistreatment or stress positions''.

Yet at least some of these techniques, particularly sleep deprivation, were used on pro-Indonesian militia suspects rounded up by Australian troops in East Timor in 1999.

One senior army officer told me at the time prisoners were not meant to be in a ''pleasant environment, this is about capitalising on the shock of captivity and getting information''.

The Abu Ghraib saga was a classic illustration of how poor doctrine loosely interpreted and badly supervised could degenerate into profound abuse.

And as recently as last year in Afghanistan, Australia had to temporarily suspend the transfer of captives to Afghan national forces after a UN team found there had been widespread torture and abuse of prisoners inside Afghan facilities.

So-called ''resistance to interrogation'' training (RTI) for soldiers in Australia has also run awry in the past. Defence has now shed the term RTI and prefers to talk instead of ''conduct after capture'', or CAC training. But it still has the same aim - to ''train selected ADF personnel to resist interrogation conducted by a hostile enemy captor''.

Drawing and policing boundaries around state-sanctioned practices which are designed to inflict discomfort will always be difficult, and contentious.

All the more reason, perhaps, for Canberra to revisit the idea of outside eyes as an additional safeguard against misjudgment, being overzealous or abuse.

Drawing the line on torture

Perhaps Cosgrove, Leahy & their political masters weren’t worried about the behaviour of our glorious ‘diggers’ in Iraq at all …. maybe they were concerned about events closer to home …. in East Timor?

To quote from my blog, his name was yani ndun, written in October, 2005, the ADF held a press conference in April, 2003, “announcing that it had concluded a 31/2 year investigation into unspecified allegations, involving the torture & execution of Indonesian militia prisoners by Australian troops in East Timor in 1999, & that the allegations had not been substantiated. The ADF investigation had apparently been carried-out in response to persistent reports coming out of Indonesia at the time, as well as to stories circulating within the British, New Zealand & Australian armies.”

The above allegations were publicised by Dateline, the SBS Television current affairs program, & Mark Davis ran with the issue for quite a long time, in spite of the government’s best efforts to stifle public interest in the matter.

In October, 2006, coincidental to Peter Cosgrove’s retirement as head of Australia’s defence forces & the publication of his memoirs (promoted at the time by none other than ‘rattus’), I wrote later blogs - muddy boots, yet another 'core' promise & same old muddy boots - reprising the earlier allegations & highlighting the fact that the Howard Government, the then Minister for Defence, Robert Hill, the Defence establishment & the Australian Army had all failed to effectively address the allegations.

To the everlasting shame of this country, our government & our defence forces, Yani Ndun has never been found & his disappearance never explained.

Of course, Saddam Hussein was murdered by George Bush & his criminal accessories, whilst one of the world’s oldest civilizations, was reduced to rubble in the name of ‘yankee democracy’.

Australia “rescued” East Timor, freed it of its oil & forgot about Yani Ndun.

“Rattus”, Cosgrove, Hill, Bush, Blair & the rest of the war criminals responsible for the war crimes of Iraq & East Timor, as well as Afghanistan, still strut the world stage, enriched by their obscene crimes & apparently immune to any action that would bring them to account.

Shame Australia, Shame.