Roberts-Smith’s rabid band of supporters has an outspoken new member – Gina Rinehart

“What went on over there, stays over there.”

“You can’t judge combat from the comfort of an armchair.”

Ben Roberts-Smith arrives at the Federal Court in Sydney on Friday, May 2.Credit: Sam Mooy

“What right have you to tear down our heroes?”

“It’s war, for god’s sake.”

Since the first public challenges to Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith’s reputation in 2017, those words, this retaliatory refrain, has been unrelenting and unchanged. All in the face of profound evidence revealing Australia’s most decorated living soldier is a war criminal.

After last week’s 245-page rejection of Roberts-Smith’s Federal Court appeal and Justice Anthony Besanko’s 726-page ruling in 2023, the keen eyes of four judges have now found to a civil court standard that Roberts-Smith murdered four captives in Afghanistan.

Under the Geneva Convention and Australia’s own laws of armed conflict, executing detainees is unlawful. But there are rules and there are norms, and the norms according to the “it’s war” apologists are based on an insiders’ “take no prisoners” realpolitik.

Within the Defence diaspora, online debate runs hot and loud. The “I stand with Ben” brigade is undeterred by the court rulings.

Brigadier Adrian d’Hage, former head of Defence public relations who was awarded a Military Cross for his service in Vietnam, is taking them on. And he’s far from alone among soldiers with combat experience disavowing the so-called realists’ justification for murder.

“That is not the way we fight. We have a long and hard-won reputation as being feared fighters, but fighters who engage according to the Geneva Convention,” d’Hage says.

Given many critics’ apparent aversion to examining those pages, here is a distillation of key evidence.

On April 13, 2009, Ben Roberts-Smith kicked an old man to his knees and instructed a junior soldier, in an exercise of “blooding”, to shoot him in the head. Soon after, he frogmarched a second Afghan man fitted with a prosthetic leg, threw him to the ground, and killed him with a burst of machine gun fire.

On October 12, 2012, a third unarmed and detained man was executed by an Afghan partner force member upon Roberts-Smith’s instruction.

And on November 11, 2012, Ali Jan, a father of three with no established links to the Taliban, was handcuffed and kicked over a small cliff by Roberts-Smith, who then ordered two comrades to drag him to cover, where he was shot dead.

At numerous speaking events, Age investigative journalist Nick McKenzie and I have argued the following:

It is morally wrong to kill or order the execution of captives.

It is strategically wrong because it turns the population further against your mission. All those Australian soldiers bravely patrolling the fields of Uruzgan as a protective force against the Taliban were placed at greater risk.

And it is wrong to force an act upon a fellow soldier so destructive of conscience and self-respect.

Soldiers who have earned the Special Air Service Regiment’s sandy beret are rightly proud. When they returned to civilian life as psychological wrecks because of what they saw and did, as did occur, the damage was obvious.

From my own observation, the self-harm to the regiment was the main reason for a brave group of Special Air Service Regiment soldiers to speak up. Nick and I both know they did so with extreme reluctance, all under subpoena, because of a view within the ranks that dobbing in your mate was a worse sin than exposing a war crime.

That view was shared by members of the uber wealthy.

Billionaire Kerry Stokes has spent millions on Roberts-Smith’s case. Multi-millionaire John Singleton funded a full-page newspaper advertisement describing attacks on the war hero as “disgraceful”. And now Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, is quoted querying why this “brave and patriotic man” should be “under such attack”.

I can only wonder what is in their minds. Do they believe that in their real world, ruthlessness is a necessity that should be honoured?

Last December, my brother Roy and I spoke to a well-heeled audience of Aussie expats in Singapore. We were warned ahead of time that there would be a pro-Roberts-Smith sentiment and opposition expressed to our reporting.

The day before, Roy and I had walked the grounds of the Alexandra Hospital. We found a small plaque commemorating the massacre of 250 patients and staff by Japanese forces on February 14, 1942.

I spoke the next day of the shock that is still felt about those helpless victims being dragged into the garden and bayonetted to death. And I asked how we could condemn the Japanese while excusing our own.

There was no answer.

I am with Albert Camus, who said: “In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.”

Chris Masters is a Gold Walkley award-winning journalist and author. He was the first Australian journalist to be embedded with special forces in Afghanistan.

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