I presume similar reports are available in the Australian press?
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/w...imes-rr5q658p0
Australian SAS inquiry: MP Andrew Hastie says military leadership complicit in alleged war crimes
Senior military leaders “sanitised” and “stage managed” information from the battlefield in Afghanistan, a senior Australian MP who served in the war there has said amid a scandal over alleged war crimes.
Andrew Hastie, who spent five years in the SAS including fighting in Afghanistan and now chairs parliament’s intelligence and security committee, said he believed “the very top” of the military should be accountable for any war crimes that may have been committed by Australian soldiers.
Both the chief of the Australian defence force and the chief of the
army have said they were unaware that some rogue platoon leaders and soldiers in Australia’s special forces had carried out dozens of alleged unlawful killings in Afghanistan including “blooding” junior SAS members by ordering them to shoot detained Afghans.
The report of an official inquiry into atrocities was published last week and identified 39 suspected unlawful killings by Australian special forces in Afghanistan. The report, by the judge Paul Brereton, is expected to result in criminal prosecutions and compensation payments to families of those who died.
Mr Hastie, 38, who was deployed to Afghanistan as a platoon commander in 2013, the year after many of the alleged unlawful killings in the report occurred, said that he had been aware of rumours of wrongdoing by Australian special forces before his deployment. Yet Australia’s most senior military commanders had been “very effective” at sanitising information about the country’s troops in Afghanistan through the use of “legions” of public affairs officers, Mr Hastie wrote in The Australian.
“We stage-managed Australia’s contribution to the Afghanistan war through a carefully crafted information operation. This approach stifled public-interest reporting. Perhaps with greater access for the Australian media, some of the events alleged by the Brereton report might never have happened,” he wrote, adding that the UK and the US took “a liberal approach, allowing reporters to see their soldiers at war”.
Mr Hastie was also scathing about parliament’s ability to scrutinise the activities of the military effectively. “There is no independent joint defence committee where tough questions can be asked in a classified, protected space. Parliamentary scrutiny these days is surface level. It amounts to senior defence leadership presenting a few Powerpoint slides and giving parliamentarians a pat on the head,” he wrote.
He added that when he was first deployed, politicians including Malcolm Turnbull, the former prime minister, and Julie Bishop, the former foreign minister, visited Afghanistan as opposition MPs and seemed not to know what questions to ask......