Operation Burnham Inquiry Can Now Blame Civilian Deaths On “The Fog of War”.

Impaired Vision: Judging from the invaluable testimony obtained from two Taliban commanders by Jon  Stephenson, video evidence may exist of a US gunship firing at fleeing insurgents, as well as the Tirgiran villagers fleeing with them. Such a sequence would lend credence to the accounts of both the NZDF and the claims of the book Hit and Run. We may not get to see the video, but it is reasonable to anticipate such evidence playing a major role in shaping the official inquiry's final judgement of the tragedy that was Operation Burnham.

THIS MORNING [20/6/19] the Operation Burnham Inquiry (OBI) faced an oncoming avalanche of criticism which seemed certain to bury its final report in public disfavour. From the very beginning, the conduct of the Inquiry has been called into question, and the Inquiry heads, Sir Terrance Arnold and Sir Geoffrey Palmer, dismissed as the Crown’s diligent defenders.

In both journalistic and satirical mode, I, too, have joined in this blackguarding of the OBI. Like so many others on the Left, I was convinced that its secrecy-shrouded deliberations could not possibly be trusted to deliver a truthful rendering of Operation Burnham and its consequences.

That changed this morning, when one of the authors of Hit & Run, Jon Stephenson, in an article for Stuff, and again on RNZ’s Morning Report, informed New Zealand that he and his co-author, Nicky Hager, had erred in declaring that no Taliban insurgents were present in Naik, the village attacked by New Zealand SAS troopers, supported by US helicopter gunships, during Operation Burnham.

Two years of painstaking and highly dangerous research on the ground in Afghanistan had led Stephenson to at least two Taliban insurgents who had been taking refuge in one of the mountain villages targeted by the NZSAS. These fighters freely admitted that they had, as the NZ Defence Force always insisted, participated in the attack that killed the New Zealand infantry officer, Lieutenant Tim O’Connell, three weeks earlier.

This new information has the potential to dramatically shift the public’s perceptions of Operation Burnham. In essence, it admits into what has been a highly polarised public debate concerning the events of the night of 21-22 October 2010, a measure of the confusion and uncertainty that inevitably accompany all such military operations.

Those who insist that the raid killed 6 civilians and injured 15 more will not be moved; nor will those who are adamant that the NZDF killed 9 Taliban insurgents. But, for the vast majority of New Zealanders, who fall somewhere between these two extremes, Stephenson’s correction of his own, and Hager’s, original story will transform the whole event into something much more opaque. As of this morning, the black and white certainty of Hager, and the villagers’ lawyer, Deborah Manning, will be overwhelmed by fifty different shades of sceptical grey.

Stephenson’s refusal to condemn the OBI, its chiefs, Arnold and Palmer, or the investigative work its staff have undertaken, will also give a great many hitherto critical observers, like myself, serious pause. If a journalist of Stephenson’s standing feels comfortable in talking about the “mana” of the Inquiry, then perhaps there is hope that it will not present New Zealanders with the highly redacted “whitewash” its critics have consistently predicted.

Certainly, Stephenson’s latest revelations offer the OBI the opportunity to take up a position midway between the claims of the NZDF, and the account of the operation represented on the pages of Hit & Run. Clearly, the intelligence supplied to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in which the killers of Lieutenant O’Connell were said to be hiding in the Tirgiran Valley, was correct. It is also clear, from the testimony gathered by Stephenson, that these fighters were being sheltered in the village of Naik. On the other hand, it is equally clear that ISAF’s American helicopter gunships, in attempting to kill the Taliban insurgents, inadvertently killed and injured a number of Afghan civilians.

In answering the obvious question: Why didn’t the NZDF admit that these civilian deaths had occurred?; it seems highly probable that Arnold and Palmer will be obliged to deliver a judgement highly critical of the NZDF’s conduct subsequent to the Operation Burnham raid.

Even more uncomfortably, if the NZDF’s obfuscation turns out to have been inspired by American sensitivities regarding the part played by their helicopter gunship/s (and its/their supposedly defective gunsight/s) in killing Tirgiran villagers, then the painfully restored relationship between New Zealand and its “very, very, good” American friends will come under strain. If any sections of the OBI report end up being heavily redacted, it will be those relating to the interactions between the NZ forces on the ground in the Tirgiran Valley, and the US forces hovering above it.

Included in that redaction will, almost certainly, be the US helicopter’s on-board video recording of the action. Judging from the invaluable testimony obtained from the Taliban insurgents by Stephenson, that video may well include a sequence showing the gunship’s pursuit of the fleeing fighters, along with the gunning-down of the Tirgiran villagers fleeing with them. That sequence, by proving both sides correct, is crucial. We may not get to see it, but it is reasonable to anticipate that the withheld video will play a major part in shaping Arnold’s and Palmer’s final judgement of the tragedy that was Operation Burnham.

What they will have observed in the video is know as “the fog of war”: a phenomenon as old as human conflict itself. Its depiction of the confusion and lack of information that almost immediately overwhelms any military operation will communicate all that anyone can, or should, know about the NZDF’s honourable, but botched, attempt to avenge a fallen comrade; and the unintended civilian deaths and injuries for which some unknown NZSAS trooper/s, and airborne American machine-gunner/s, are responsible.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 21 June 2019.

Operation Burnham Inquiry To Proceed Under Cover Of Darkness.

Hit & Miss: The Coalition Government should have done everything in its power – up to and including the passing of special enabling legislation – to ensure that the military was prevented from hiding behind the smoke-screen of “national security”. To preserve public confidence in the decency and honesty of the NZ Defence Force it is imperative that everything the military knows about Operation Burnham, the people of New Zealand should know also.

THAT MOST OF the Operation Burnham Inquiry will be closed to the public is deeply troubling but hardly surprising. From the moment of its announcement by Attorney General David Parker, the inquiry had about it an air of reluctance and limitation. As if the entire exercise was in some way illegitimate: the product of forces which had usurped the natural order of things and were being placated only because failing to do so would undoubtedly make matters worse. The heavily armed guardians of our society neither encourage nor welcome scrutiny. On the contrary, they expect the state to keep them safe from citizens’ prying eyes. From the outset, it was clear that the public (and its proxy, the news media) would be prevented from seeing and hearing anything it hadn’t already seen and heard about Operation Burnham.

It is worth asking why political parties so sharply critical of Operation Burnham when they were in Opposition have been so ready to accede to the demands of the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) now that they’re in government. The Inquiry is, after all, being held to ascertain the truth or falsehood of allegations levelled against the NZDF in the book “Hit & Run” by investigative journalists Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson. Was the NZDF responsible for the deaths of six Afghan citizens – including a little girl – or wasn’t it? Did our Special Air Service hand over captured Afghan insurgents to the Afghan security forces to be tortured – or didn’t it?

Such questions put the decency and honesty of the New Zealand military squarely in the cross-hairs of public scrutiny. Surely, a government determined to have a decent and honest defence force would not only move heaven and earth to have these questions answered, but also to have them seen to be answered. To that end, the Government should have done everything in its power – up to and including the passing of special enabling legislation – to ensure that the military was prevented from hiding behind the smoke-screen of “national security”. To preserve public confidence in the decency and honesty of the NZDF it is imperative that everything the military knows about Operation Burnham, the people of New Zealand should know also.

Naturally, the NZDF’s defenders have objected that the idea of politicians sending civilian investigators to rifle through the military’s files is outrageous. How can our allies trust the NZDF with their secrets if at some future point they could be revealed for all the world to see? The problem with that question is the implied assumption that there are some secrets that the world has no right to see. Like the video recording handed over to Wikileaks by Private Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning showing innocent Iraqi civilians being gunned down by the crew of an American helicopter gunship. But why should evidence of a war-crime be hidden beneath the shrouds of national security? What sort of military hides proof of murder?

A decent and honest NZDF would not have the public doubt in any way its willingness to co-operate fully in an inquiry into whether or not it deliberately gunned down unarmed civilians? After all, a military that could collude in suppressing evidence of murder could collude in all manner of crimes. It could be guilty of commissioning perjury, or conspiring to pervert the course of justice. It could be guilty of crimes so numerous and so serious that its commanders can only tremble at the thought of civilian investigators applying the disinfectant of sunlight to the accumulated reek of its misdeeds.

Which is why the fact that most of the Operation Burnham Inquiry will be carried out in the dark is so concerning. What sort of inquiry grants the legal representatives of interested parties only “summaries” of the evidence presented? What sort of a judicial officer submits to a “security clearance” before being allowed to view that evidence? And, when did the doctrine of national security override the right of the people to see justice done?

Two thousand years ago the Roman poet Juvenal asked: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” “Who will guard the guards themselves?” In relation to the Operation Burnham Inquiry the answer would appear to be: Not the Government. And, not the Inquiry heads; Sir Terence Arnold and Sir Geoffrey Palmer.

In New Zealand, the guardians have no guards.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 28 September 2018.

Not Worth The Effort: Decoding Bill English’s Response to “Operation Burnham”.

Bad Call: The Prime Minister's decision not to order an independent inquiry into Operation Burnham is as dishonourable as it is misguided.

 

NOTE TO READERS: As I was writing the following post, the Prime Minister announced to his post-Cabinet media conference (3/4/17) that he would not be ordering an independent inquiry into Operation Burnham. On the face of it, then, my last-minute appeal to the better angels of Bill English's nature had been overtaken by events. Re-reading the post, however, I felt that, far from blunting the point of the posting, the Prime Minister's reprehensible decision had sharpened it. I hope you agree.

 

THE PRIME MINISTER can still save himself from dishonour. There is still time for Bill English to set in motion an independent commission of inquiry into the events described in Nicky Hager’s and Jon Stephenson’s book Hit & Run. Over the past fortnight a powerful consensus has formed in support of such an inquiry. Senior parliamentarians, including the leaders of Labour, the Greens and United Future, have added their voices to those of the former National Party Defence Minister, Dr Wayne Mapp, and most of the nation’s leading newspaper editors and political journalists.

 

At the heart of that consensus lies a strong conviction that the reputation of the New Zealand Defence Force can only be protected by an independent and thoroughly transparent investigation into “Operation Burnham”. Anything less will, almost certainly, see our country subjected to the full rigour of international legal scrutiny. In the worst possible case, New Zealand could be found to have breached the rules of war. The Prime Minister owes his fellow citizens a better outcome than to be made the objects of international condemnation and censure.

 

Confronted with the painstakingly assembled evidence of Hager and Stephenson, English had only two options: to accept it, or, to reject it.

 

By accepting it, the Prime Minister would not be declaring Hager’s and Stephenson’s narrative to be accurate in every respect (mistakes have already been detected and acknowledged). What he would be saying, however, is that the authors have established a prima facie case for commissioning an independent examination of the evidence presented in their book.

 

The outcomes of any such investigation would, naturally, be unpredictable. The outcomes of a decision not to hold a full and independent inquiry, however, are readily foreseeable. A solid majority of informed New Zealanders will be left with no option but to conclude that English, his government and the NZDF have something to hide.

 

Deciding against an inquiry would also reveal something particularly shameful in the Prime Minister’s reasoning. English has repeatedly stated that there is insufficient “credible” evidence to justify an investigation. In other words, it is the Prime Minister’s contention that the investigation of Hager and Stephenson cannot/should not be given credence by his government.

 

What does this mean? The only logical conclusion to be drawn is that the Prime Minister is convinced that Hager and Stephenson have either concocted a false account of Operation Burnham; or, that the eye-witness accounts of the raid supplied by the villagers of Naik and Khak Khuday Dad; the death certificates and medical reports issued by responsible local officials (in which the names and injuries of 21 civilian casualties are listed) are not to be relied upon and should, therefore, be accorded no probative weight whatsoever.

 

The Prime Minister is further suggesting that the testimony of unnamed SAS troopers involved in “Operation Burnham”, gathered by Hager and Stephenson in order to corroborate the evidence of their Afghan witnesses, is without substance. Essentially, that they made it up. That everyone involved in Hit & Run: the authors, the villagers, the Afghan officials; are liars.

 

Just think about that for a moment. English had the option of treating the testimony of Afghan citizens (on whose behalf New Zealand undertook its 10 year military commitment) as a truthful rehearsal of the events of the night of 22 August 2010. Instead, he has described their evidence as lacking in credibility. But why would they lie? Presumably, because they were either fully-fledged “insurgents”, or Taliban supporters. (Even three-year-old, Fatima?!) Having killed a Kiwi soldier, these “enemy combatants” were now attempting to besmirch the reputation of his avengers.

 

Is this what the NZDF told the Prime Minister? Is this the essence of their classified briefings? That, in the villages of Naik and Khak Khuday Dad, and along the whole length of the Tirgiran Valley, there were no innocent civilians – only “insurgents”. That, wittingly or unwillingly, Hager and Stephenson have allowed themselves to be caught up in a Taliban propaganda exercise aimed at turning an “exemplary” SAS operation into a war crime.

 

But, surely, an “exemplary” SAS operation is something the NZDF would be only too willing to open up to the scrutiny of their fellow New Zealanders? What’s more, having been stung more than once by the investigative reporting of Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson, the NZDF would presumably relish the opportunity to expose the authors of Hit & Run as Taliban dupes – or worse. If the NZDF has nothing to hide then, surely, it has nothing to fear – and much to gain – by recommending to the Prime Minister that he set up an independent inquiry into Operation Burnham?

 

And Bill English, himself? What are we to draw from his willingness to turn his face from the inhabitants of the Tirgiran Valley who have spoken so movingly of the terror, pain and loss they experienced at the hands of SAS troopers and US helicopter gunships acting in our name? Doesn’t he want to make certain that New Zealand does not have blood on its hands? And if there are SAS personnel out there with grave misgivings about the orders they were obliged to follow on the night of 22 August 2010 – doesn’t he want them to be heard? Or are a handful of weather-beaten Afghan peasants, and their brats, not worth the effort?

 

Because if that is the conclusion of our Prime Minister: and if that, ultimately, is his decision; then it is as dishonourable as it is misguided.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 4 April 2017.

Us and Them: The Fatal Divisions of Exploitative Culture.

Us and Them: The trick to running a successful Exploitative Culture lies in defining who is – and who is not – a member of it. Or, to put it another way: who is included in the idea of “Us”, and who belongs with “Them”.

 

OURS IS NOT JUST A RAPE CULTURE: it’s a Kill Culture, a Rip-off Culture and a Lie Culture as well. But, rather than attempting to reconcile ourselves to living in a multiplicity of malign cultures, it is probably more helpful to think of ourselves as inhabiting a single Exploitative Culture. One in which human-beings are consistently treated as means to another’s end – not as ends in themselves.

 

The trick to running a successful Exploitative Culture, therefore, lies in defining who is – and who is not – a member of it. Or, to put it another way: who is included in the idea of “Us”, and who belongs with “Them”.

 

Generally speaking the smaller the “Us”, the greater the power. If you’re a member of the “One Percent”, for example, it not only means that you are obscenely wealthy and powerful, but also that 99 percent of your fellow human-beings are, in one way or another, exploitable.

 

Exploitation is always and everywhere associated with actual physical violence, or the threat of it. Without violence people simply would not consent to being treated as the means to someone else’s ends – they would rebel. Exploitative Culture (which is to say all culture) may thus be further defined as the organisation of, and the devising of justifications for, purposive social violence.

 

We thus return to “Us” and “Them”: which may now be thought of, respectively, as those who must be protected from the imposition of purposive violence; and those upon whom such violence may be inflicted with impunity.

 

Consider the current controversy surrounding “Operation Burnham” the botched, or exemplary (depending on whether you believe journalists Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson, or the Chief of the New Zealand Defence Force, Lt-General Tim Keating) attack on settlements in the Tirgiran Valley in Northern Afghanistan.

 

What happened in the Tirgiran Valley could not have happened if its inhabitants were regarded by the New Zealand soldiers taking part in the operation as members of “Us”. To listen to Lt-General Keating deliver his media briefing on Monday afternoon (27/3/17) was to hear a man doing everything within his power to make sure that the men under his command continued to be regarded by the New Zealand public as “Us”; and that the villagers of the Tirgiran Valley, “the insurgents”, as he called them, were seen as “Them” – our enemies.

 

In the eyes of the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) Hager and Stephenson are guilty of engaging in the most basic prohibition of all Exploitative Cultures: attempting to redefine the meaning of “Us” and “Them”.

 

The whole purpose of their book, Hit & Run, is to make the reader see the victims of Operation Burnham as people like themselves: hard-working farmers; a trainee schoolteacher home for the holidays; parents and grandparents; a three-year-old girl called Fatima. And the more successful the authors are at transforming “Them” into “Us”, the more outrageous Operation Burnham seems to the New Zealand public.

 

The subtitle of Hit & Run refers to the “meaning of honour”. The reference shows considerable insight on the part of Hager and Stephenson, because the concept of “honour” is inseparable from what it means to be a soldier – a warrior.

 

The military virtues are all “hard” virtues: valour, prowess, discipline, loyalty. They need to be, because bodies of armed men, willing to inflict injury and death on command, are the ultimate guarantors of Exploitative Culture. Crucial to the success of these hard military virtues is the continual and favourable contrast provided by the justifiers of exploitation with the “soft” virtues of civilian life: wisdom, creativity, tolerance, solidarity.

 

Significantly, Exploitative Culture assigns almost identical combinations of qualities to the constructs of masculine and feminine. Strength and masculinity is pitted against weakness and femininity in what can only be described as the primal social dichotomy: the first and most destructive reduction of human-beings from ends-in-themselves to means-to-an-end.

 

For ordinary men to accept their subordination to stronger, richer and more powerful men, Exploitative Culture supplies them with their own inexhaustible supply of subordinates – women and children. And since there can be no exploitation – no power – without violence, the maintenance of this primal dichotomy is of necessity achieved through the unremitting application of physical and emotional coercion. Domestic violence, rape, child abuse: these are not just the products of the masculine/feminine dichotomy, they are also the most tragic expression of the “Us” and “Them” divide.

 

The non-consensual penetration of a young woman at a party; the invasion of a distant river valley by airborne special forces; both are symptoms of the same dreadful disease.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 29 March 2017.

Nothing To Them: Tim Keating Hits Back at "Hit & Run".

Operation Obfuscate? Chief of Defence Force. Lt-Gen Tim Keating, briefs the news media about "Operation Burnham". If his mission was to sow confusion and doubt about the accuracy of Nicky Hager's and Jon Stephenson's journalism in Hit & Run, then it must be counted an unqualified success.

 

GREG PALAST is an American investigative journalist who won world-wide attention for his coverage of the 2000 US Presidential Election. This was, of course, the election decided not at the ballot box, but in the US Supreme Court. The history of the last seventeen years has turned on the manner in which the State of Florida managed its electoral roll.

 

Palast discovered that a company with strong links to the Republican Party had won a contract to purge the Florida roll of convicted felons. (Like a great many other state governments, Florida permanently strips convicted felons of the right to vote.) Concerned that the contractor’s software was likely to disenfranchise hundreds – perhaps thousands – of eligible Floridian voters, Palast contacted one of the major US television networks and offered them the story.

 

Initially, there was tremendous interest. Senior news executives told him they would spend a little time fact-checking his claims and then get back to him. Palast wasn’t worried. As a highly experienced investigative reporter he was confident that his story could withstand the closest scrutiny.

 

So he waited. And waited. And waited.

 

Eventually he ran out of patience and contacted the network. Where was the story? To his utter amazement, he learned that the network had decided not to run it. But why? The answer he received was a jaw-dropper. The network explained that it had confronted the Governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, with his allegations and been told that there was nothing to them.

 

That was all it took – an official denial from the brother of the Republican nominee – to spike Palast’s story.

 

Listening to Bill English this morning on RNZ, I couldn’t help being reminded of Palast’s ill-fated exposé. Like the American TV network, New Zealand’s prime minister had been presented with a forensically detailed piece of investigative journalism and asked to carry out an inquiry.

 

The internationally acclaimed war correspondent, Jon Stephenson, assisted by New Zealand’s leading investigative journalist, Nicky Hager, had patiently pulled together, and on Monday, 20 March 2017 published, Hit & Run: The New Zealand SAS in Afghanistan and the Meaning of Honour, an exhaustive account of “Operation Burnham”, a military raid carried out by the NZ Special Air Service (SAS) in the Tirgiran Valley of Northern Afghanistan in August 2010.

 

Stephenson and Hager contend that as a result of Operation Burnham six people were killed and 15 injured. The 21 casualties, it is alleged, were inhabitants of two villages located in the Tirgiran Valley: Khak Khuday Dad and Naik. Most of those killed or wounded are said to have sustained their injuries as a result of 30mm cannon fire directed at them and their dwellings by US Apache helicopter gunships attached to the SAS operation.

 

Prime Minister English’s response to the information contained in the Hager/Stephenson book was to ask the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) if it was true.

 

For the best part of a week the NZDF maintained “radio silence”. On the afternoon of Monday, 27 March 2017, however, the Chief of the Defence Force, Lieutenant General Tim Keating, answered that the material contained in Hit & Run did not describe Operation Burnham accurately. There had been a raid in the Tirgiran Valley in August 2010, during which US Apache gunships had ridden shotgun for SAS troopers, but the action had not taken place at Khak Khuday Dad or Naik but two kilometres to the south at the village of Tirgiran.

 

Lt-Gen Keating’s media briefing was a lengthy and detailed affair involving a number of power-point slides and a special legal briefing from a senior NZDF lawyer, Lisa Ferris. He reiterated the NZDF’s long-standing claim that 9 Taliban insurgents had been killed in the raid and described the conduct of all the military personnel involved in Operation Burnham as “exemplary”.

 

What the Chief of the Defence Force did not explain, however, was how so much common information could have possibly emerged from what must have been, if his account of Operation Burnham is correct, two separate attacks.

 

In the words of Jon Stephenson: “Is [NZDF Chief] Tim Keating really saying there were two raids using identical aircraft, in identical places with identical commandos, that left behind identical munitions in that one village, then [in] a village two kilometres south? Seriously?”

 

Stephenson’s incredulity notwithstanding, Keating’s explanation proved to be more than serious enough for Prime Minister English. “The Defence Force was in one place, the allegations are made about villages a couple of kilometres away. That doesn’t look like it requires investigation.”

 

Nothing to them, you see? Because the man at the centre of the allegations says so. Jon Stephenson and Nicky Hager should have a chat with Greg Palast. If anyone knows how they must be feeling right now – it’s him.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 27 March 2017