When I look at the Ben Roberts-Smith court case, I can’t help thinking that the root lies in the US-style fetishisation of the armed forces that’s crept into Australian life in recent years. Where any criticism of any aspect of the Armed forces is treated as treason. Not healthy at all, we haven’t reached the point of the ‘thank you for your service’ stuff yet, but it’s coming.
The case itself is a study in arrogance and hubris, BRS and Kerry Stokes wanted to silence detractors and whitewash his history with the SAS, instead it’s blowing up in their faces like an IED under a dead goat by the roadside.
BRS will be lucky to stay out of jail in the end given the new evidence and Stokes will have to pay a fortune for those lawyers AND will still have to fire BRS.
While I understand that difficult decisions have to be made in the field, the witnesses at the trial paint a picture of a sociopathic, arrogant, bloodthirsty bastard who saw every Afghani as an enemy and didn’t give a shit about their lives. Also he’s 100% a compulsive liar who created this hero myth around himself and absolutely lost the plot when it was questioned.
It’s incredibly hard to reconcile that with the same man who willingly risked his life time and time again in the name of this country.
Also, it’s pretty fucking obvious that he either lied to or failed to come clean to both Stokes and his lawyers, no lawyer would ever let a client go to court knowing this might happen.
I don’t think he can be called a hero - but i don’t doubt he did incredibly heroic things that only a few could even contemplate
however, it seems, fairly obviously, that his bastard, war crime side heavily outweighs the positives of his career. He comes across as an arrogant, self obsessed cunt.
Anyone who has an ex-cop private detective on their books to “run errands” is dodgy as fuck. I’m deeply uncomfortable with the idea that it’s unpatriotic to put a bloke like BRS to the sword.
“When the defence calls your former PI, what’s he going to tell the court?”
former PI, former colleagues, former wife, former girlfriend…
There seems to be an orderly queue of people lining up to take massive dumps on BRS’s credibility, united by little other than having got to know the prick.
And that’s the thing right - what grand conspiracy could he claim there is to destroy him? He’s an arsehole and everyone who knows him knows it. End of story, it seems.
Have I missed something or has BRS brought this on himself? There were some unflattering articles written about him but no investigation being conducted (rightly or wrongly), all this evidence is now coming to light because he wanted to take the press to court?
If I am correct, which is always a stretch, then his arrogance has got him into a pretty deep fucking hole
This is a suit that HE brought to say that coverage from three newspapers was damaging to his reputation.
So here’s the bit I don’t get - the trial itself has done more damage than the printed allegations by far. And put a bunch of things on the record that may be useful in printing future articles critical of him - “witnesses in the defamation trial testified that”, “witness testimony that was found to be compelling and reliable, in contrast to BRS who was found to be unimpressive and unreliable” etc.
People smarter than me suggest that our defo law is so fucked that he might win - it’ll be some pyrrhic victory.
If he fancied he was going to be tapped up to run for the Senate or a Vice-Regal position or something I think he can kiss that goodbye.
The defence has managed to call sufficient witnesses with sufficiently devastating testimony to entirely fuck his reputation. If he does win it’s going to come at enormous cost to him. There’s a conveyor belt of people from his former colleagues to his ex to his ex-lover to a Federal MP all lining up to basically say under oath that he’s a fucking arsehole, and possibly a war criminal.
I call this the “we’re going to pay you out, but not before we shit on every banknote and make you eat it” approach.
Given all that has been dug up during a bloody defamation trial how have there been no prosecutions (that I’m aware of) out of the ADF’s investigations? Other than the obvious coverup answer that is.
Hasn’t there been commentary that all this info now being in the public domain may make it harder to bring criminal charges against him at a future date? Tainted jury etc
I’ve heard that too, it’s a hell of a gamble though, and the idea that a murderer, with multiple witnesses willing to give evidence, walks free because they can’t find a jury to give him a fair trial isn’t going to be an easy sell.
I think he’s an arrogant cunt who is so used to people licking his arse and treating him as a hero that he genuinely thought nobody would shop him in, and if one or two did he’d be able to blag his way through it as a war hero.
War crimes investigations are still ongoing, and whilst I don’t think the commonwealth DPP has yet been briefed that doesn’t mean they won’t still be. Person 66 seemed clearly concerned that a brief may yet be incoming as he declined to answer for fear of self-incrimination.
They’ve managed to try Eddie Obeid (multiple times) in front of a jury, and popular opinion of him was hardly neutral.