The Guardian, among other mainstream outlets, have reported the revelation of senior British military officers covering up the war crimes of the Special Air Service (SAS) units while deployed in Afghanistan during the Global War on Terror. The whistleblower, an experienced member of the special forces, alleges a failure in the chain of command to address or stop the extrajudicial killing of civilians, including the murder of two Afghan children.
Alarm was first raised in 2011, but nothing was done. The unit continued to act in such a manner until 2013. In the current allegations, eighty victims were executed by three different British units who were operating in Afghanistan around that time.
“We could have stopped it in February 2011. Those people who died unnecessarily from that point onwards, there were two toddlers shot in their bed next to their parents…all that would not necessarily have come to pass if that had been stopped,” It was said by the officer who gave evidence.
In reference to one raid involving an SAS unit, involving reckless shooting into a mosquito tent, “When the net was uncovered it was women and children. The incident was covered up and the individual who did the shooting was given some form of award to make it look legitimate.”
The whistleblower admitted he had lost faith in the chain of command and their procedures, stating that a lot of people wanted these incidents and any information surrounding them to be suppressed. The witness, known as N1466, said he was alarmed to notice the increase in the ratio of killings to weapons recovered in the SAS raids. For example, in one raid nine Afghans were killed while three weapons were recovered. There were also numerous examples of those previously captured taken on raids, to be executed:
“We are talking about war crimes…taking detainees back on target and executing them, with the pretence being that they conducted violence against the forces…As detainees, UKSF owed a duty of care to them under the Geneva conventions. To have repeated breaches of the Geneva conventions was clearly not acceptable.”
He mentioned it was likely weapons were planted on the dead to give legitimacy to the killings during raids. The photographic evidence showed several of the dead were shot at close range while they slept. In one night time raid in 2012, in the Nimruz province a family, including young children, were shot.
The British government and elements of the military knowingly covered up these actions, rewarding those involved in some instances to further legitimize the operations and remove any doubt or suspicion surrounding the incidences. The war has left a legacy which has further tarnished all credibility of Western values, the rule of law, and civilized codes of conduct, with most of those nations involved in the Global War on Terror exhibiting callous conduct, with degrees of cover up or omission of facts.
The International Criminal Court is unlikely to ever prosecute a government like the United Kingdom, Australia, or the United States for any of the war crimes exposed or leaked over the years. It is also unlikely there will be any repercussions for those SAS members involved or the chain of command who covered it up.
Australia has had its own series of revelations related to its Special Air Service Regiment (SASR). The Brereton Report, released in November 2020, uncovered a series of killings between 2007 and 2013 similar to those recently coming out relating to the United Kingdom’s special forces. The journalists who uncovered the findings and Australian military lawyer David McBride experienced backlash. McBride is currently in jail for his involvement in releasing information about the Australian war crimes to the public.
In the McBride case, the court ruled he was not bound by a public interest defense under his oath of service, and the government has a public-interest immunity. The peculiar thing about all governments is their ability to derive legitimacy and power from the belief of order, arbitrary honesty, and the rule of law. But time and time again war reveals a hypocrisy which individuals are unable to challenge because of the above mentioned immunity. The horrors of war should be the most severe indictment against any government, let alone the concept of government; instead, it only seems to enrich and empower it all the more.
Around the time of the above mentioned incidents, Wikileaks shared to the wider world other acts of war crimes from the Global War on Terror. The most graphic and symbolic of the period was the “collateral murder” footage of journalists and first responders being killed, along with the callous audio of the U.S. military killers. At the time it was understood to be bad; the government responded with acknowledgement to this fact. Julian Assange and other journalists involved would become pariahs for sharing the truth to the public. But many fellow journalists considered Wikileaks a necessity.
The Iraq War logs leaked by Wikileaks in 2010 showed cover-ups of the murder, torture, and abuse of Iraqi civilians at the hands of U.S. forces. The released documents detailed over 15,000 previously unreported civilian deaths and covered more than 66,000 non-combatant fatalities between 2004 and 2009. The documents also confirmed U.S. troop knowledge of what occurred when prisoners were handed over to certain Iraqi forces. This included a classified order known as “Frago 242,” instructing U.S. soldiers not to investigate any abuse conducted by allied Iraqi forces.
The war logs recorded hundreds of civilian deaths at military checkpoints, including the death of a pregnant woman. Between 2004 and 2010, 680 civilians were killed in these “escalation of force” incidents at checkpoints along with a further two thousand wounded. Despite widespread media coverage and the evidence at hand, it did little to prevent the escalation of these wars. It certainly did little to de-legitimize the governments in question; perhaps the revealtions embarrassed some officials or caused professional inconvenience to others, all of which are insignificant to the pain and loss suffered by the civilians.
The current British military releases will help to color the history of the period with further detail. Unfortunately, with the inevitable sense of national pride and strong degree of self-righteousness, those events and the victims will be lost beneath a higher sense of purpose and the vilification of the enemy.
Even though the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may mostly be understood as flawed failures—as far as the foreign policy ambitions of the nations involved—they have had little real impact in comparison to past wars that became unpopular; for example, the Vietnam War in the United States. Despite greater media coverage from all kinds of outlets using raw imagery, not to mention organized groups of antiwar veterans, an amnesia or a fog of obligation has befallen the nations who waged these wars.
Inside these Western nations exists a sacred status for the military, especially those who have fought abroad. It’s impossible for many in the public to see them as anything other than heroes. Every war is World War II, in so far as there exists a cultural need to elevate those fighting to a status of reluctant heroism. Though, in those incidents described above and those revealed in the Nick Turse book Kill Anything That Moves, the abuse and murder are from the bottom up. These are actions conducted by the common soldier, whether through an expeditionary desire for adventure, base vulgarity, hatred, frustration, or the love of death. As one soldier stated, “We are trained to kill, why waste that training?”
It’s unlikely any high level officer or politician explicitly ordered their soldiers to specifically commit these actions. Whether it was implied, or understood to happen, is another thing. These soldiers acted as moral agents in each and every situation. It’s for other soldiers and their officers to punish these actions. Sometimes that occurs, but other times revelation only comes from whistleblowers going around the system.
The future brings with it greater online censorship, hand in hand with an inability to verify what is real and what is AI slop. Political power will be less challenged, we’ll have less discourse, and less transparency. This will be doubly true in the case of war. The official narrative will drown out any alternatives and be the only one “verified” and “fact-checked.” It’ll become a more dangerous world for both journalists and whistleblowers. Then again, their investigations and sacrifices have done little more than give confirmation to those already wise to the true nature of government and its wars.
