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War Crimes Scandal: Did The Army Cover Up Torture And Murder In The Middle East?

Whilst I can go along with many of the points you eloquently make, AlchoPwn, I cannot concur that anything goes, just because war is anarchy.
Let's face it, there is a huge range of alleged "war crimes". I doubt anyone here would try to defend rape and murder, as quoted by Frideswide above.
I like and agree with most of what you have put here. I have recently been chatting with a number of survivors of the Balkans Wars after the break-up of Yugoslavia. There were some truly unspeakable things that happened then, largely because the troops were often secretly dosed with PCP. The fact is, while a number of officers have been charged with atrocities, the bulk of the rank and file soldiers who committed the atrocities were not. Given what they did, it is not possible to call them victims, or can we blame their behavior on the psychosis that the drugs induced? It is a bit like the whole diminished capacity argument for a drunkard who commits a crime, or is it? If a person is not aware they are drugged, are they responsible for their actions? While I am not exactly going to cry about it, the fact is that many of the survivors of these acts have committed suicide subsequently. BTW, their acts made rape and murder look like misdemeanours. War is all too often a horrible journey into the nature of human evil, and the morally responsible thing is not to decry the deplorable, but to understand what happened from the perspective of the monster, not to justify or glorify, but to know the face of those demons when they come for you, so to speak.
 
A summary of the war crimes scandal facing the Australian SAS Regiment:

Australia's special forces problem: why the SAS is facing a crisis

An inquiry into allegations of war crimes committed by a small number of elite troops in Afghanistan is expected to report imminently. Can the regiments survive the fallout?

And incredibly, a former police commissioner tipped off the subject of several of the war crimes allegations:

Covert War Crimes Inquiry Compromised by Former AFP Chief
 
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