This one...

Bothers me a lot...

Australian authorities have arrested and charged the country’s most decorated living soldier, Ben Roberts-Smith, 47, with five war crime murders allegedly committed during the war in Afghanistan.

Roberts-Smith, a former member of the Australian Defence Force, was arrested at Sydney Airport on Tuesday. His arrest has sparked outcry from a former Australian prime minister, who argued its unfair to judge the actions of “men in mortal combat by the standards of ordinary civilian life.” X owner Elon Musk also weighed in on the arrest, calling it “insane.”

The Australian Federal Police and the Office of the Special Investigator said Roberts-Smith is being charged in connection with the killings of five unarmed Afghans in three separate incidents between 2009 and 2012. AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett alleged that Roberts-Smith either killed the unarmed Afghans himself or instructed a subordinate to kill them. If convicted, Roberts-Smith faces life imprisonment on each charge.

Full article, HERE from Fox News.

It’s enough to make one wonder ‘what’ is the real point? Is this somebody out to ‘get’ Roberts-Smith, or something else? Supposedly, the investigation was started in 2017, so 8 years after the fact???

By lawyers who weren’t there, and who made the original complaint and why 8 years later, rather than at the time???

Of interest is the comment from the investigator that “We don’t have access to the crime scenes, we don’t have photographs, site plans, measurements, the recovery of projectiles, blood spatter analysis, all of those things we would normally get at a crime scene.”

What are they basing the investigation on then? The recall of people that were there? What was the ROE at the time, the specific orders given to Roberts-Smith and/or his bosses?

This kinda reminds me of the BS ROE our folks had to put up with where if the bad guys didn’t have guns in their hands, they couldn’t be shot, even after they had been observed shooting at our folks. And the lawyers wanting to know if any ‘children’ had been harmed.

Not that I ever saw anything defining what a child was... In a part of the world where children were routinely used as lookouts, trigger people, suicide bombers, etc.

Thankfully, I was not there and never had to make one of those decisions, but I knew folks that were and did.

And where does this leave Roberts-Smith? Even if he’s found not guilty, he is ‘tainted’ with the accusations, VC or not.

Sigh...