Free Republic

Former SAS soldiers warn the prolonged war crimes investigation into Ben Roberts-Smith threatens to create life or death hesitation for troops in combat situations.The father of an Australian soldier killed in Afghanistan has questioned why a dedicated team of investigators has spent six years building a case against Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith while his son’s killer remains free.It comes as former SAS soldiers warn the Office of the Special Investigator’s (OSI) prolonged investigation into alleged war crimes is causing mental health issues to military families and creating life or death issues for soldiers in combat.Hugh Poate’s son Robert was...

Statement by Benjamin Roberts-Smith VC MG, 19th April 2026For the past 10 years, my family and I have been subject to a campaign to convince Australians that I’ve acted improperly in my service in Afghanistan.As I’ve always maintained, I categorically deny all of these allegations and while I would have preferred these charges not be brought, I will be taking this opportunity to finally clear my name.I’m proud of my service in Afghanistan.While I was there, I always acted within my values, within my training and within the rules of engagement.I’d also like to say I’m extremely proud of all...

Two of the five men Ben Roberts-Smith is accused of murdering while serving with the Special Air Service in Afghanistan have never been identified by war crimes investigators. Court documents seen by the Daily Mail show one of the Victoria Cross recipient's alleged victims is described only as 'Person Under Control 1', or alternatively 'Enemy Killed in Action 3'. Roberts-Smith is accused of murdering that Afghan male with another SAS soldier dubbed 'Person 68' at Syahchow in Uruzgan Province on October 20, 2012. Another alleged victim who is only known to authorities as 'Person Under Control 2' or 'Enemy Killed...

Ben Roberts-Smith was taking his teenage daughters on a shopping day trip to Sydney when he was arrested getting off a Qantas flight and charged with war crimes. The Victoria Cross recipient had flown from Queensland to NSW with his 15-year-old twins and partner Sarah Matulin on the morning of April 7 and all four were holding return tickets to Brisbane. Roberts-Smith, who will apply for bail today in Downing Centre Local Court, had treated his girls to an Easter school holidays expedition and none of the group had checked any luggage. Federal authorities knew the 47-year-old was making the...

Goodfellow’s BedfellowsWho’s in Bed with the Washington PostBy Fedora Introduction I. A Radical Education: Boston University and Cambridge-Goddard II. Vietnam Roots: Indochina Resource Center A. Luce at International Voluntary Services B. Luce and Cornell’s Hanoi for Lunch Bunch C. Luce’s Tiger Cages and the Indochina Mobile Education Project D. Luce and Branfman: The COLIFAM Connection E. Luce, Branfman, Winter Soldier, and Project Air War F. The Indochina Resource Center: Branfman, Luce, and Goodfellow G. The IRC and the Indochina Peace Campaign: The Hayden-Fonda Link III. Post-Vietnam Transition: Campaign for a Democratic Foreign Policy and Coalition for a New Foreign and...

Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith had written to Australian Federal Police and the Office of the Special Investigator multiple times offering to hand himself in before his high-profile arrest in front of his teenage daughters at Sydney Airport this week. Veterans have reacted ­furiously to what they see as an orchestrated and deliberate attempt to humiliate Australia’s most decorated soldier to justify only the second arrest after the Office of the Special Investigator’s (OSI) six-year, $300m investigation into ­alleged war crimes. Roberts-Smith was arrested in front of media cameras on Tuesday as he arrived at Sydney Airport on a Qantas...

- Ahmed Khalifan Ghailani, a/k/a "Foopie," is a diminutive Tanzanian with an Uzbeki wife, six children and a deep hatred of America and Western culture in general. A devout Muslim who plays a mean game of soccer but never learned to drive a car, Ghailani is also believed to be a key al Qaeda player who U.S. agents think is involved in a percolating terror plot aimed at disrupting America's upcoming elections. He had a $25 million price on his head as the FBI's No. 7 most-wanted terrorist - the same amount as the bounty for the capture of Osama...

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has decided not to seek the death penalty against a former Guantánamo detainee who was ordered by President Obama to face trial in a civilian court in New York. Mr. Holder communicated the decision to federal prosecutors in Manhattan on Friday, and they in turn informed the federal judge who is presiding in the case. “You are authorized and directed not to seek the death penalty against Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani,” Mr. Holder wrote to Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York. Mr. Ghailani faces federal charges of conspiring...

Australia’s most decorated soldier has accused Nine of being “malicious”, saying the company is commercially motivated to tear him down. Ben Roberts-Smith has accused Nine of being commercially motivated and malicious when it alleged the former soldier was engaged in war crimes. Australia’s most decorated soldier has hit back at claims he handcuffed and kicked an Afghan prisoner named Ali Jan off a cliff during a military operation in Afghanistan in 2012. The prisoner was then allegedly shot dead by another soldier. “I want Australians to know that I absolutely deny these hurtful allegations,” Mr Roberts-Smith said in a statement...

One of Australia's most decorated soldiers, Ben Roberts-Smith, has been arrested and is expected to be charged with five counts of the war crime of murder.The Victoria Cross recipient was arrested at Sydney Airport's domestic terminal after a flight from Brisbane this morning.The former special forces soldier's arrest comes after a mammoth defamation trial against Nine Newspapers that in 2023 ended in a court finding that on the balance of probabilities, allegations he was responsible for, or complicit in the deaths of four detainees in Afghanistan were substantially true.There have been no findings of guilt against Mr Roberts-Smith to a...

https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/2037354821632831563 DataRepublican (small r)@DataRepublican·Mar 26🧵🚨 MAJOR BREAKING: A $15+ MILLION DOE contractor and NoKings protest organizer with active nuclear security contracts is on camera recommending a color revolution "how-to" 🚨🚨His name is Steven A. Cash. Former CIA officer (Balkans, Clinton era). Under Biden: Senior Advisor to the Undersecretary at DHS Intelligence & Analysis.The day after Trump's 2016 election, Cash co-founded "The Steady State" — a network of more than 340 former intelligence community officials who decided Trump was an "existential threat".When Biden won, the threat was gone. Cash went into Biden's DHS. His own words: "we disappeared."Then Trump won again....

When Obama administration officials manufactured U.S. intelligence tying Donald Trump to Moscow following his stunning 2016 victory, they had no idea Trump’s own political appointees would help them undermine Trump’s presidency – and his chances of reelection in 2020. RCI’s review of recently declassified documents and exclusive interviews with former Trump officials reveals for the first time how key members of Trump’s cabinet and other appointees during his first term shrouded the previous administration’s machinations and either deliberately or inadvertently misled the public into thinking the fake Russiagate intelligence was real. Former Special Counsel John Durham, former National Security Adviser...

Prosecutors to appeal Ressam sentence August 26th, 2005 - 12:29pm (Seattle) -- Federal prosecutors say they will appeal the 22-year prison sentence of Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian national arrested in Port Angeles in 1999 and convicted of plotting to bomb LAX. The sentence handed down last month was significantly lower than the 35 years prosecutors had recommended, but could have been shorter still had Ressam agreed to testify against two of his alleged co-conspirators. In a statement today announcing his plans to appeal, U.S. Attorney John McKay says the standard sentencing range for the crimes Ressam committed is 65 years...

Durbin Asks Bush To Put Partisanship Behind Him Bob Roberts Reporting CHICAGO (WBBM) -- The Democrats are talking co-operation with President Bush, but already there is evidence that controversial legislation backed by the Bush administration won't move forward. WBBM's Bob Roberts reports. President Bush has asked the lame-duck Congress to give him legislation that would specifically authorize the wiretapping of foreign phone calls and computer traffic of suspected terrorists. The issue came up Friday during a meeting hosted by the President with Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). Instead, Durbin told WBBM Saturday, he is asking Mr. Bush...

Like a frenzied pack of howling curs, America’s malignant Left ravenously feasted upon the Abu Ghraib scandal when it broke. The opportunity it provided for them to engage in a wholesale orgy of America bashing was an allure they could not resist. In short order, horrified gasps of moral outrage were heard from leftist mainstream media as their headlines blared, “House of Horrors…sadism at Abu Ghraib prison!” (U.S. News and World Report) and “sexual depravity, sadism and violence orchestrated by US soldiers” (Chicago Tribune). Soon, pictures of Iraqi prisoners were being gleefully brandished as evidence that American soldiers were, indeed,...

Paul Craig Roberts and the Certifiable Right By Ben Johnson FrontPageMagazine.com | March 17, 2006 Quick – what columnist alleged in an article Thursday that President “Bush intends to attack Iran and that he will use every means to bring war about?” That Bush has used “bribery and coercion” to block “every effort to bring the dispute to a peaceful end”? That “in order to gain a pretext for attacking Iran,” he and a “’black opts’ [sic.] group will orchestrate [an] attack” on U.S. soil? One would never expect to hear the author is “chairman of the Institute for Political...

Former terrorist defenders now have key jobs in Obama's Dept. of Justice! Come clean, Mr. HolderNew York Post January 27, 2010 Whose side is the Justice Department on: America's -- or the terrorists'? It's just insane that a lawyer who defended Osama bin Laden's driver and bodyguard -- and who sought constitutional rights for terrorists -- could be one of the Obama administration's top legal officials. But there's Neal Katyal, occupying a top perch at the Justice Department as the principal deputy solicitor general. Then there's Jennifer Daskal -- who just months ago was an anti-Guantanamo activist. Now she's in...

UK Sailors-Iran Arrests Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray Monday supported Iran's decision to arrest 15 UK marines in the Persian Gulf last week. "In international law the Iranian government were not out of order in detaining foreign military personnel in waters to which they have a legitimate claim," Murray said, who was also a previous head of Foreign Office's maritime section, carrying out negotiations on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. "For the Royal Navy, to be interdicting shipping within the twelve mile limit of territorial seas in a region they know full well is...

EXCLUSIVE: Ex-British ambassador who is now a WikiLeaks operative claims Russia did NOT provide Clinton emails - they were handed over to him at a D.C. park by an intermediary for 'disgusted' Democratic insiders Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and associate of Julian Assange, told the Dailymail.com he flew to Washington, D.C. for emails He claims he had a clandestine hand-off in a wooded area near American University with one of the email sources The leakers' motivation was 'disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the 'tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders'...

A suspected terrorist accused of conspiring to assassinate President Bush said he proposed the plot but it wasn't pursued, and he was frustrated that other members of his al-Qaida cell lacked initiative, according to prosecutors. A government motion unsealed this week by a federal judge reveals new details in the case against Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, 24, who is scheduled to go on trial next month. Prosecutors say the Falls Church resident has admitted joining al- Qaida while attending college in Saudi Arabia and that he discussed numerous terrorist plots, including plans to assassinate Bush and hijack airplanes. Abu Ali...