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War Hero or Political Scapegoat?

Nation First looks into the prosecution of a decorated soldier amid mounting questions over evidence, media conduct, and political accountability.

Dear friend,

It happened in broad daylight. Cameras rolling. A war hero marched off like a common criminal. And you’re supposed to just accept it.

Ben Roberts-Smith a man awarded our nation’s highest honour for bravery has been arrested over alleged war crimes in Afghanistan. I want to stress that word: Alleged. Alleged means that it has not been proven. That has not been tested in a criminal court. Given he has only been arrested, that’s obvious.

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• A decorated Australian war hero has been arrested despite never being convicted in a criminal court.
• The case against him lacks fundamental evidence, such as a body, forensic proof, or access to a crime scene.
• Major media outlets pushed a war criminal narrative while paying a key witness in a secret settlement.
• Political leaders and veterans warn that soldiers are being judged unfairly by civilian standards years after combat.
• The real accountability, many argue, lies with those who sent troops to war, not those who fought it.

And yet, for years now, outlets like Nine Entertainment and its newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, have run a relentless campaign branding him a war criminal. They pushed it. Repeated it. Normalised it. Until, disgracefully, a defamation loss handed them the green light to say it without consequence. No conviction. No jury. No “beyond reasonable doubt”. Just headlines.

And here is something they would rather you didn’t dwell on. The same media empire, positioning itself as judge, jury and executioner, quietly paid $700,000 to a key witness in the case to keep her quiet in a secret settlement they tried to suppress for 50 years.

Think about that: A media company that claims to stand for truth is paying hush money to silence a witness connected to its own star reporter. A company that fought to keep that hidden from you. This is the outfit Australians are expected to trust when it declares a decorated soldier a war criminal? It seems the Australian Federal Police trusted Nine enough to tip them off about their arrest of Ben Roberts-Smith, as they got the exclusive footage and photographs of him being frog-marched off a plane and out of the airport.

And now you’re meant to believe justice is being served?

What kind of justice proceeds without a body, without a post mortem, without a weapon, without even a crime scene? Because that is exactly what we are dealing with. AFP lead investigator Ross Barnett said it plainly:

“We don’t have access to the crime scenes. We don’t have photographs, site plans, measurements, the recovery of projectiles, blood spatter. We don’t have access to the deceased. There’s no post mortem report, there’s no official cause of death, there’s no recovery of projectiles to link to weapons that might have been carried by members of the ADF. There are a lot of practical challenges that confront the investigators.”

So what are we doing here? Seriously, what are we doing?

We are watching a man be dragged through the courts on what even investigators admit is a case without the most basic evidence. Fifty-three investigations launched. Thirty-nine abandoned. Ten are still ongoing. One other soldier has been charged.

Ten years. Three hundred million dollars. And this is what they have got? If this is the standard now, then none of our soldiers are safe. None.

And I have seen this up close. When I was in Parliament, I spoke up in his defence. You know what I was told? Keep quiet. Do not touch it. Even those on the conservative side of the ledger had already made up their minds. Guilty without trial.

But if Ben Roberts-Smith is guilty, then who else is? Are we really going to pretend that the politicians and military brass who sent these men into Afghanistan bear no responsibility? That they can sit comfortably in Canberra, collecting pensions, while the men they deployed are hunted down years later? They trained him. They sent him. They gave the orders. And now they wash their hands of it?

Come on.

You do not train men for war, real war, brutal war, chaotic war, and then judge them later as if they were sitting in a courtroom sipping tea. War is not clean. It is not neat. It is not governed by hindsight. It is kill or be killed. And if you do not understand that, you have no business judging those who lived it.

Citizen journalist and activist Drew Pavlou took to social media today to give us a taste of what the war was actually like. On August 29, 2012, three Australian soldiers, Private Robert Poate, Sapper James Martin and Lance Corporal Rick Milosevic, were slaughtered in their sleep by a Taliban infiltrator inside the Afghan National Army. A supposed ally. A sleeper agent. The attacker, Hekmatullah, carried out what is widely understood as an act of perfidy under international law. He gained trust by wearing the uniform of an ally and then betrayed that trust to murder Australian soldiers.

Where is he now? Free. Celebrated by the Taliban. Ben Roberts-Smith was sent to hunt him down.

According to Pavlou’s account, Roberts-Smith was led to the village of Darwan, a known Taliban stronghold with confirmed armed presence. The man at the centre of the allegation, Ali Jan, so Roberts-Smith has always maintained, was a Taliban spotter. The father of one of the murdered soldiers defended Roberts-Smith, saying villagers could be civilians one day and fighters the next.

That was the battlefield. That was the enemy. They did not wear uniforms. They blended in. They deceived. They betrayed. And we are judging split-second decisions made in that environment from the comfort of suburbia? It is absurd.

Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott put it best when he said “…it’s wrong to judge the actions of men in mortal combat by the standards of ordinary civilian life.”

That was a sentiment shared by former Deputy Prime Michael McCormack who said “…nobody who hasn’t worn a uniform, nobody who hasn’t been sent to war probably really understands what he has gone through.”

And he warned: “…we should hold judgement until proper authorities have their say.”

Senator Pauline Hanson didn’t mince her words either:

“I remain steadfast in my support of Ben Roberts-Smith despite news of his arrest today. Ben, his immediate and border defence family need the Australian people’s support right now and I will not abandon him like so many other politicians. Ben was disgracefully arrested in front of his twin 15 year old girls. He will be held in jail for 7 days. He gets just one bail application. If that application fails, they can hold him for 2 years. AFP and OSI have spent $300 million dollars over 10 years to get to this point.”

North Queensland MP Bob Katter put it bluntly as well:

“HOW DARE YOU, CANBERRA… HOW DARE YOU, SPEND $300 MILLION TAXPAYER DOLLARS ON SOME WITCH-HUNT.”

He wrote it all in caps just so you could imagine him going off in typical Katter fashion about it. And so he should.

Tony Abbott asked a pertinent question: “If Ben Roberts-Smith transgressed, why wasn’t this picked up prior to his gallantry awards and why wasn’t any culture of brutality towards prisoners detected by his more senior officers, and dealt with quickly, rather than being allowed to fester, as has been alleged, for over a decade?”

And that is the question you should be asking, too.

How dare they drag a decorated soldier through this process while the real architects of the war face no scrutiny? How dare they allow media outlets with their own credibility issues to convict a man in the court of public opinion before he has had his day in court? How dare they pretend this is justice? Because it is not. It looks like something else entirely. It looks like a nation turning on its own.

If we allow this precedent to stand, if we sit quietly while one of our most decorated soldiers is treated this way, then we are sending a clear message that service means nothing. Sacrifice means nothing. Loyalty is a one-way street. And once that message is embedded, good luck asking the next generation to put their lives on the line.

So what do you do? You speak up. You refuse to be intimidated. You question the narrative. You stand with those who stood for you. Because if you do not, if we do not, then we are not just failing one man. We are failing the very idea of what it means to serve this country.

Stand up. Speak out. And do not let them rewrite this story without a fight.

Until next time, God bless you, your family and nation.

Take care,

George Christensen

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Nation First, by George Christensen is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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George Christensen is a former Australian politician, a Christian, freedom lover, conservative, blogger, podcaster, journalist and theologian. He has been feted by the Epoch Times as a “champion of human rights” and his writings have been praised by Infowars’ Alex Jones as “excellent and informative”.

George believes Nation First will be an essential part of the ongoing fight for freedom:

“The time is now for every proud patriot to step to the fore and fight for our freedom, sovereignty and way of life. Information is a key tool in any battle and the Nation First newsletter will be a valuable tool in the battle for the future of the West.”

— George Christensen.

Find more about George at his www.georgechristensen.com.au website.

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