1
00:00:00,440 --> 00:00:03,240
Speaker 1: Jersey and Amanda jam.

2
00:00:03,080 --> 00:00:06,640
Speaker 2: Nation Victoria Cross recipient Ben Robert Smith was one of

3
00:00:06,640 --> 00:00:10,119
Speaker 2: the most highly decorated Australian soldiers. While he was being

4
00:00:10,119 --> 00:00:13,440
Speaker 2: celebrated in the public eye, rumors and allegations of war

5
00:00:13,520 --> 00:00:17,240
Speaker 2: crimes were being investigated in the background. Our next guest

6
00:00:17,320 --> 00:00:20,520
Speaker 2: heard the rumors before we did. Award winning journalist Chris

7
00:00:20,520 --> 00:00:23,440
Speaker 2: Masters was one of the first to start an investigation

8
00:00:23,640 --> 00:00:26,520
Speaker 2: into Robert Smith, and it's led to a new book

9
00:00:26,640 --> 00:00:30,440
Speaker 2: called Flawed Hero, Truth, Lies and War Crimes. To tell

10
00:00:30,520 --> 00:00:32,440
Speaker 2: us about that, Chris Masters, Hello.

11
00:00:32,600 --> 00:00:34,800
Speaker 3: Hi there, Hey Chris. It's a hell of a book.

12
00:00:34,840 --> 00:00:36,520
Speaker 3: It's a brave undertaking.

13
00:00:37,360 --> 00:00:40,519
Speaker 1: It took a long time. Yeah, I mean, obviously there

14
00:00:40,520 --> 00:00:43,279
Speaker 1: wouldn't be a book if we hadn't had the outcome

15
00:00:43,280 --> 00:00:46,200
Speaker 1: that we had. But before the book came one hundred

16
00:00:46,200 --> 00:00:50,160
Speaker 1: and ten days of court sittings and a judgment by

17
00:00:50,880 --> 00:00:55,960
Speaker 1: a seven hundred page judgment by Justice Pasanko. And I'm

18
00:00:56,000 --> 00:01:02,080
Speaker 1: really relieved enormously that his judgment on what occurred was

19
00:01:02,120 --> 00:01:04,039
Speaker 1: pretty much parallel with ours.

20
00:01:05,360 --> 00:01:08,600
Speaker 2: When did you first start to hear rumors about Ben

21
00:01:08,760 --> 00:01:12,640
Speaker 2: Robert Smith and some of his behavior overseas?

22
00:01:13,920 --> 00:01:16,960
Speaker 1: I embedded with special Forces. I'm the only journalists to

23
00:01:17,040 --> 00:01:21,840
Speaker 1: have ever done so with Australian Special Forces in twenty eleven,

24
00:01:22,440 --> 00:01:24,800
Speaker 1: I suppose I started hearing this. I know it. By

25
00:01:24,880 --> 00:01:29,040
Speaker 1: twenty twelve his name was coming up as a controversial figure,

26
00:01:29,080 --> 00:01:32,600
Speaker 1: not a war criminal. And look, you know, Amanda, I

27
00:01:32,640 --> 00:01:35,759
Speaker 1: didn't take that much notice of it, because, oddly enough,

28
00:01:35,800 --> 00:01:39,840
Speaker 1: even though Matship is supposedly such a profound force in

29
00:01:39,880 --> 00:01:43,720
Speaker 1: the Australian defense community, there's a lot of bitching too,

30
00:01:43,840 --> 00:01:47,960
Speaker 1: particularly in special forces. You know, they're the warrior elite

31
00:01:48,000 --> 00:01:50,680
Speaker 1: and they're the sort of the A graders, so they

32
00:01:50,720 --> 00:01:54,320
Speaker 1: tend to be very competitive. What I heard was that

33
00:01:54,400 --> 00:01:59,880
Speaker 1: Ben was a bully and not necessarily always a pleasant blow,

34
00:02:00,080 --> 00:02:02,400
Speaker 1: but that didn't mean that he was a war criminal.

35
00:02:02,440 --> 00:02:07,000
Speaker 1: And soldiers, specially special forces soldiers have to be tough,

36
00:02:07,120 --> 00:02:09,600
Speaker 1: have to be hard, have to be brutal to some degree.

37
00:02:09,800 --> 00:02:13,320
Speaker 1: So you know, that wasn't such a surprise. It really

38
00:02:13,440 --> 00:02:18,280
Speaker 1: wasn't until I got into an argument with him, if

39
00:02:18,280 --> 00:02:21,200
Speaker 1: you like, about an incident that occurred in two thousand

40
00:02:21,240 --> 00:02:25,520
Speaker 1: and six, only because I started to hear competing accounts

41
00:02:26,040 --> 00:02:29,960
Speaker 1: of the action that won him a medal for gallantry

42
00:02:30,360 --> 00:02:33,600
Speaker 1: and I had to put some questions to him, and

43
00:02:34,160 --> 00:02:35,480
Speaker 1: really it went from there.

44
00:02:35,720 --> 00:02:40,960
Speaker 3: Wow, because most Australians and myself included, we interviewed Ben

45
00:02:41,040 --> 00:02:42,840
Speaker 3: Roberts Smith. I think at the time when he got

46
00:02:42,840 --> 00:02:45,320
Speaker 3: the Victoria Cross and we were just impressed with him.

47
00:02:45,320 --> 00:02:48,639
Speaker 3: It was almost like it's like Superman suddenly turning out

48
00:02:48,680 --> 00:02:50,000
Speaker 3: to me not such a superman.

49
00:02:51,080 --> 00:02:54,440
Speaker 1: Yeah, well I was too jonesy, I thought, you know,

50
00:02:54,480 --> 00:02:57,280
Speaker 1: when I first met him, I remember, well I met

51
00:02:57,320 --> 00:02:59,200
Speaker 1: him a few times, but we had this interview that

52
00:02:59,240 --> 00:03:01,840
Speaker 1: went on for two and I made a note at

53
00:03:01,840 --> 00:03:04,360
Speaker 1: the time. For the first hour he reasoned, and for

54
00:03:04,400 --> 00:03:09,200
Speaker 1: the second hour he ranted. I mean he can put

55
00:03:09,240 --> 00:03:13,399
Speaker 1: on that statesman like visage where he gets the words right.

56
00:03:13,480 --> 00:03:16,760
Speaker 1: You know, he comes from an esteemed family, he went

57
00:03:16,840 --> 00:03:22,000
Speaker 1: to a private school. He had a serious job, you know,

58
00:03:22,120 --> 00:03:25,400
Speaker 1: he was the managing director of Channel seven in Queensland,

59
00:03:25,560 --> 00:03:28,839
Speaker 1: so he could put on an impressive face. He did

60
00:03:28,840 --> 00:03:33,359
Speaker 1: so in court as well. But after a while, it's

61
00:03:33,440 --> 00:03:37,040
Speaker 1: that thing about truth, you know, it's quite punishing and

62
00:03:37,160 --> 00:03:42,440
Speaker 1: after a while, if you kept hitting him with alternative facts,

63
00:03:42,760 --> 00:03:46,240
Speaker 1: then that facade started to weaken.

64
00:03:47,040 --> 00:03:49,920
Speaker 2: What do you say, Christa, people who say we can

65
00:03:49,960 --> 00:03:53,760
Speaker 2: never understand what happens on the fields of war. It's

66
00:03:53,800 --> 00:03:57,000
Speaker 2: not our place to judge these actions and we should

67
00:03:57,040 --> 00:03:58,200
Speaker 2: leave well enough alone.

68
00:03:59,000 --> 00:04:03,520
Speaker 1: Well in the the Second World War, when Japanese soldiers

69
00:04:04,320 --> 00:04:08,640
Speaker 1: were bayoneting our soldiers to death, our prisoners on the

70
00:04:08,640 --> 00:04:11,320
Speaker 1: Burma rail, we didn't think much of that. You know,

71
00:04:11,400 --> 00:04:15,360
Speaker 1: when sister Vivian Bullwinkle was machine gun to death by

72
00:04:15,400 --> 00:04:17,640
Speaker 1: the Japanese, we didn't think much of that. You know,

73
00:04:17,680 --> 00:04:21,760
Speaker 1: we fought against that kind of conduct. You know, we

74
00:04:22,640 --> 00:04:26,680
Speaker 1: condemned the Nazis for killing civilians, but why is it

75
00:04:26,720 --> 00:04:30,560
Speaker 1: differentive Australians to it. You know, that proposition that if

76
00:04:30,600 --> 00:04:34,360
Speaker 1: they're wearing an Australian uniform it's not a war crime

77
00:04:35,279 --> 00:04:38,000
Speaker 1: has never sat well with me. And look, it doesn't

78
00:04:38,040 --> 00:04:41,960
Speaker 1: really sit well with the image of the Australian soldier either.

79
00:04:42,240 --> 00:04:45,360
Speaker 1: I mean, the rules of war are pretty clear. You know,

80
00:04:45,520 --> 00:04:52,360
Speaker 1: you don't kill non combatants. Certainly it's a messy business

81
00:04:52,360 --> 00:04:55,960
Speaker 1: and certainly mistakes are made. But one of the things

82
00:04:56,040 --> 00:04:59,080
Speaker 1: we tried to make clear all the way through and

83
00:04:59,360 --> 00:05:02,920
Speaker 1: still having the argument to this day, is that the

84
00:05:02,960 --> 00:05:05,760
Speaker 1: matters that we dealt with were never fog of war.

85
00:05:06,279 --> 00:05:10,320
Speaker 1: Heed of the moment. Things they were we alleged outright

86
00:05:10,480 --> 00:05:15,039
Speaker 1: callous murders, and it wasn't just morally wrong, it was

87
00:05:15,080 --> 00:05:18,400
Speaker 1: strategically wrong. You know, whenever this sort of thing happened

88
00:05:18,400 --> 00:05:22,239
Speaker 1: in Afghanistan, it turned the local population against us.

89
00:05:22,240 --> 00:05:25,320
Speaker 3: Ben Robert Smith has steadfastly denied this and said this

90
00:05:25,400 --> 00:05:28,680
Speaker 3: is what is all about war. So he's never going

91
00:05:28,720 --> 00:05:30,680
Speaker 3: to come around and say, oh, okay, you got me.

92
00:05:31,240 --> 00:05:36,080
Speaker 1: No, he's not. No. And of course it is true

93
00:05:36,120 --> 00:05:40,080
Speaker 1: to say that this has not been demonstrated to a

94
00:05:40,080 --> 00:05:43,559
Speaker 1: criminal standard. This was a civil court action. It wasn't

95
00:05:43,600 --> 00:05:47,200
Speaker 1: so much about it wasn't a war crimes trial as

96
00:05:47,279 --> 00:05:50,600
Speaker 1: much as it was a trial, a defamation trial. It

97
00:05:50,680 --> 00:05:55,160
Speaker 1: was about whether we could truthfully support what we had asserted.

98
00:05:55,400 --> 00:05:58,600
Speaker 3: And will this lead to further recriminations for Ben?

99
00:05:59,680 --> 00:06:02,360
Speaker 1: Yes, I mean there's a long way to go. The

100
00:06:03,600 --> 00:06:06,360
Speaker 1: Office of the Special Investigator was set up after the

101
00:06:06,360 --> 00:06:11,280
Speaker 1: Breton Inquiry to look into not just allegations involving Ben

102
00:06:11,360 --> 00:06:15,520
Speaker 1: Robert Smith, but also other soldiers as well, and there's

103
00:06:15,520 --> 00:06:18,600
Speaker 1: a prosecution about to begin with one of those matters.

104
00:06:19,400 --> 00:06:23,680
Speaker 1: As far as Ben's concerned, there'll be an appeal process.

105
00:06:23,720 --> 00:06:26,760
Speaker 1: We presume. We don't know for sure whether he will appeal,

106
00:06:26,839 --> 00:06:30,360
Speaker 1: but we'll know within a week or so. And beyond

107
00:06:30,400 --> 00:06:32,680
Speaker 1: that there are prospective criminal charges.

108
00:06:33,000 --> 00:06:35,200
Speaker 3: Well, if Ben Robert Smith was a good bloke, do

109
00:06:35,200 --> 00:06:36,400
Speaker 3: you think he would have gone away with this?

110
00:06:37,040 --> 00:06:39,520
Speaker 1: That's a good question, you know. I think in a way,

111
00:06:40,520 --> 00:06:42,680
Speaker 1: there's a damn good chance he would have. I mean,

112
00:06:42,760 --> 00:06:46,080
Speaker 1: one of the reasons that those soldiers turned against him

113
00:06:46,160 --> 00:06:48,840
Speaker 1: was they didn't think he was a good bloke. They

114
00:06:48,960 --> 00:06:52,800
Speaker 1: were actually quite angry at the impact that Ben had

115
00:06:52,839 --> 00:06:56,480
Speaker 1: on so many of their brothers, you know, particularly the

116
00:06:57,160 --> 00:06:59,680
Speaker 1: younger ones. As one of them said to me, Look,

117
00:07:00,120 --> 00:07:02,279
Speaker 1: I don't mind him pushing a dirt farmer to his

118
00:07:02,400 --> 00:07:05,799
Speaker 1: knees and blowing his brains out if he does it himself,

119
00:07:05,960 --> 00:07:09,840
Speaker 1: but he was bullying other younger soldiers into doing it,

120
00:07:10,400 --> 00:07:14,000
Speaker 1: and it was their consciences that couldn't cope. Wow.

121
00:07:14,640 --> 00:07:18,880
Speaker 3: Well, Chris, it's a fascinating read. Flawed Hero Truth, Lies

122
00:07:18,920 --> 00:07:21,240
Speaker 3: and War Crimes goes on sale from Wednesday at all

123
00:07:21,240 --> 00:07:23,960
Speaker 3: good bookstores. Chris Masters, thank you for joining us.

124
00:07:24,160 --> 00:07:24,720
Speaker 1: Thank you