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The SAS Culture
MARCH 8, 2018 Greg Rolles
The SAS Culture 8 March 2018 When I was younger I dreamed of being in the army. I wanted to be the guy who saved the innocent child by shooting the crazy bad guy. I wanted to help people by doing the hard work no one else wanted; to serve my country, protect the innocent, be the good guy. Anzac, G.I. Joe – you name it. I wanted the adventure, the excitement and, as I saw it at the time, to spend my life doing the best I could to do the right thing.
I spent most of my childhood wanting to be a fighter pilot, but I was never committed enough at school to get the required marks, and getting my pilot’s license was something well beyond my working class family’s comprehension and/or means. So I started dreaming about intelligence: being a spy like James Bond, cool, sophisticated, confidently killing the bad guys one martini at a time.
Once I was in the army, doing officer training, the biggest conversation amongst cadets was what we wanted to do when we finished training. A lot of cadets wanted to join the Special Forces. I had mucked around, failed uni and worked at Woolworths for a few years between school and going to ADFA (university and the army), so I was a little more realistic about what being in the Special Forces meant. Trying to join the SAS would require hard work and determination. I had felt completely unmotivated. Yet, when a guy came and gave a talk at ADFA about the SAS and Special Forces; it triggered something in my mind. Maybe I should try and join?
The message was that these guys not only get the excitement, they do the greatest good and kill the hardest to reach bad guys. It was the culmination of all of the action movies I had ever watched. More than that, maybe I would be missing on truly living if I wasn’t doing secretive missions, sniping bad guys who were trying to hurt innocent Australians. The SAS were the best of the best, the epitome of the good guy, moral, upright defenders of all that is just in the world. What a way to spend my life.
Around the same time as the SAS presentation, I was doing some training near Canberra. I was enjoying myself immensely. We pushed ourselves physically, learnt a lot and were living life to its fullest. After walking up a particularly steep hill at the end of a navigation exercise, I caught my breath and we rested for a bit. I felt so happy to be there, so alive.
I looked down at my rifle and realised, not for the first time, the irony that I was enjoying life so much and here I was training to take someone else’s.
Usually I could tell myself that they were the bad guys and I was the good guy, but sitting there, staring at my rifle, that line held no truth for me anymore. It was the first time that I seriously doubted the morality of killing anyone for any reason. Something about it just seemed wrong.
It was on the same exercise I learnt to use a claymore mine. My feelings were confirmed as I realised that I didn’t ever want to use that weapon on anyone; not even if they were planning on killing me.
In the following ten years of university, teaching and living in Christian Community I learned that the Australian Military was never, in my life time, involved in defending Australia. We were an attacking army that invaded and killed people for their resources.
Throughout that decade, I still thought of the SAS as the good guys, although I don’t know why. Perhaps there was some residual hope in my head that those who I had perceived to be the ‘best of the best’ were decent people.
I had read a lot of stories and allegations of the SAS in Afghanistan and Iraq, but on 2 October 2014, I learnt a brutal truth.
I knew SAS 4 Squadron that trains on Swan Island was intimately connected to US Special Forces through the Joint Special Operations Command, even being ordered around by and taking part in US missions. I knew JSOC had committed water torture, illegal imprisonment and illegal battlefield executions. I knew they hooded and cuffed people for no reason. But in my heart of hearts, I believed Australian SAS soldiers couldn’t be involved in these horrendous crimes.
While I was peacefully protesting the killing of innocent people, an SAS soldier crashed tackled me to the ground and my last illusion was shattered.
I was bound, hooded and tortured by an SAS soldier.
I had read a lot about these things, but not until that point could I understand that generating feelings of fear, terror and hopelessness was at the apex of Australian military training. This is what we were doing to people in other countries, just because we could take what we wanted. There was no honour here, no glory, no justice and no righteousness. There was just power and pain.
On 12 August 2018, Maurice Blackburn will be representing myself and two others at a civil case to sue the Commonwealth for the way we were treated that morning. I am luckier than most of the victims of the Australian SAS. I have a chance to hold my captors to account.
Along with other members of the Swan Island Peace Convergence, I will speak the truth of the bloody fruits of the SAS before a court and the Australian public. Most of us believe the lie that we need a military, or that, even if our leaders are misleading, the troops are just doing the best job they can. Because of this lie I have faced ridicule, with people close to me saying I copped what I deserved and should even have been shot for the crime of trespass.
But the truth is as clear to me now as that day 13 years ago, staring at my rifle: Killing and hurting people is wrong.
Ignoring that basic truth has created a culture in the SAS of impunity, torture and violence against people who never did anything to us. I will speak that truth for many others who have wrongfully found themselves at the receiving end of an SAS weapon or boot.
I will speak for the humanity in all of us who know, deep down, that things can be different.
See the original on Greg’s blog
https://gregsrole.com/2018/03/08/the-sas-culture/
Submission to the #ADFInquiry
Graeme Dunstan
August 2017
To the Inspector General of the Australian Defence Force
Dear Sir,
As a deeply concerned Australian citizen, I want to contribute to the inquiry into rumours of possible breaches of the Laws of Armed Conflict by members of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) in Afghanistan, between 2005 and 2016.
Let me introduce myself.
I am a 75 year old Duntroon drop out who subsequently devoted his life to advocacy for peace and social justice, a nomad who travels around Australia in a van equipped with banner rigs and PA.
In many different public places and on many occasions i have been vocal in my opposition to the engagement of the ADF in US wars, first in Indo China and now the US wars without end in the Greater Middle East.
In particular I have been vocal about the corrupting influence on the Australian Special Air Service of extended service in Afghanistan (17 years!) under the command of US Joint Special Operations Command (SOCOM).
Service without accountability!
But while the Australian government has been successful in keeping the murderous business of the SAS secret from the Australian people and its media, enough information has come out from US and UK reporting to give us an understanding of what the Australian SAS have been doing.
In short this so called networked warfare has been murder and mayhem on a more or less daily basis for 17 years.
The best that can be said of the SOCOM strategy of systematic violence against Muslims and their indigenous communities in far away foreign lands is that it had some temporary success in reducing armed resistance to the US led invasion of their country. But it also produced ghastly blow-back, namely the rise of the Islamic State.
Then there is the human cost to consider. It is fantasy and delusion to believe that daily murder and mayhem comes without cost to the minds and spirits of those who perpetrate it.
In some these scars become overt as in PTSD, in others they may remain hidden in a persona of super efficient business as usual, either as commanders in the ADF or as corporate mercenaries and security personnel. Either way the benefit to civil society is negative.
In 2015 I was part of a peaceful protest against the SAS and it’s US war service at the gates of the SAS/ASIS base at Swan Island.
Eight of the protesters entered the base pre-dawn on Friday 10 October. Four were arrested by Victoria Police officers. Four others were apprehended by two ADF personnel in plain clothes (likely SAS) who hooded them, cable tied their wrists, cut off their clothes, assaulted and verbally abused them. See 7.30 Report here.
Raised at Senate Estimates the incident was later the subject of an inconsequential ADF internal inquiry. The assailants were not named. To the contrary they were deemed Protected Persons and as such declared immune from the processes of criminal law. A civil action against the ADF for damages is in train.
In the same way as a single litmus test shows a general acidity, I suggest that this abuse was not freak or abhorrent behaviour but rather an indicator of a general contempt – a SAS culture of contempt – for civilians and their civil law.
This is the war that the SAS has brought home from their long and irresponsible service to the failed US war in Afghanistan.
This violent form of policing has been referred to as “rendition”. It’s a CIA derived descriptor for what happened to Australian David Hicks when he was arrested, tortured and held without trial in Guantanama Bay 2001-07.
Worse I have reason to believe that at the time of the attack on the peace protesters, the Swan Island SAS was training State police counter terrorism units, plus counter terrorism police units from our Pacific neighbours, in just such policing techniques.
From a war of state terror in Afghanistan to training for state terror in Australia, it’s a pernicious consequence.
For this reason I want to address your inquiry.
The Swan Island assault is not a rumour. It actually happened though the perpetrators were protected. But isn’t that the way with the SAS and its cult of secrecy and why your inquiry is in progress?
At core what I want is to inquire of your inquiry what actions might be recommended to re-civilise the SAS into Australian civil society after its extended corruption under the command of US Special Operations Command.
Best we can.
For peace.
Swan Island Peace activists will have their day in court – in the news
You can support the Swan Island Peace activists in August…
Anti-war protesters sue the defence force. | Herald Sun
Oct 2, 2017 – According to separate writs filed in the County Court the protectors intended to engage in a nonviolent protest and after hanging and taking photos of an anti-war banner on buildings separated into two pairs before being caught by plain clothes defence force personnel. Swan Island protester Greg Rolles … read more …
Swan Island protesters claim they were hooded and stripped at … – ABC
Oct 9, 2014 – Swan Island, 90 minutes from Melbourne, is used for training by the Australian Secret Intelligence Agency (ASIS), the overseas arm of the country’s spy network. It is not open to the public without Defence or ASIS approval. Early last Thursday, eight protesters from the Swan Island Peace Convergence …
Defence Force Report into the Swan Island Trespass on 2 Oct 2014 (pdf)
Swan Island Peace Convergence
Website swanislandpeace.org
Facebook group Swan Island Peace Convergence
Peace Convergence
STOP THE EXERCISES | CLOSE THE BASES | END THE WARS
Wage Peace supports Peace Convergence – gatherings of peace activists from all around Australia who come together in a celebration of resistance to the biennial Talisman Saber US-Australian War Rehearsals.
Every two years, Australia hosts some of the world’s largest military operations, Exercise Talisman Saber, joint US-AUS combined force training which sees thousands of personnel engaging in land, sea and air manoeuvres: live firing, bombing practice, the use of sonar, on shore landings – and nuclear powered and nuclear-weapons-capable vessels. With support locations in cities around the country, the majority of the action takes place in Queensland, on and around the Great Barrier Reef, in the Northern Territory and in the Coral, Arafura and Timor Seas. Talisman Saber is expected to take place again in mid 2019.