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 |  Subject: OZschwitz: Military justice is to justice, what military music is to music''  Thu Jul 12, 2012 9:53 pm | |
| Wasn't it Georges Clemenceau who said, ''Military justice is to justice what military music is to music''?
The former journalist who became prime minister of France knew a thing or two about war and justice. He was prime minister at the final stages of the First World War and much earlier he ran his own newspaper called La Justice.
In his early years he lived in New York and taught French and horseback riding at a private girls school in Connecticut. One of his other memorable remarks was: ''Americans have no capacity for abstract thought, and make bad coffee''.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying Georges was onto something well before the outside lawyers' report on a large number of complaints from Australian servicemen and women alleging abuse, assaults and rape between 1951 and 2011.
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The investigation by the law firm DLA Piper, which was released this week, found that overwhelmingly the allegations appeared plausible and that many had not been reported previously.
Significantly, the authors of the report said they ''encountered resistance'' from current and former leaders during the investigation process.
The hostility was partly a response to outside lawyers coming in and ruffling the exquisite finery that had been draped over the myriad assaults and rapes.
The other internal concern was, according to the authors, that ''drawing attention to past abuse in the ADF could damage the ADF's current reputation and thus, damage the ADF's operational capability''.
If, as Dr Johnson said, patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, he was not aware of the possibilities that lay with the words ''operational capability'' (with a hat-tip to James Spigelman).
That naval officers might be buggers did not alarm Winston Churchill, but times and attitudes have moved on.
Earlier investigations had identified other horrors but, as this most recent report said, ''It seems that none of the matters went to trial''.
Assaults, rapes and bullying are no longer part of the human rights or rule of law landscape. So why should it be so in the military?
This is where Clemenceau had his finger on it. Military justice was not much of a justice system at all.
The trial process was dominated by serving or reserve officers, many of whom were lawyers. There was a lot of secrecy and closed courts. The protection of the system was more important than the enforcement of the law.
I hasten to add that was not always the case but certainly there was an attitude among officers that because they had been bastardised it was unworthy of youngsters to complain about the same thing. Cover-up and get on with it, was the order of the day.
The new Military Court system that was introduced last month may set a different tone. The judges cannot be serving officers but the paws of the Australian Defence Force have not been altogether prised off the bone because all military justice appointees ''will have past military experience or knowledge''.
Correspondingly, there have been timely observations about the ''internal'' justice operations of the Catholic Church.
Complainants are invited to waive their rights at law if they let loose the church's own procedures.
Loose is the operative word. As has been revealed in numerous investigations, the latest on Four Corners last week, the church has been more interested in protecting its own reputation and its ''operational capacity'' than providing satisfactory remedies for the victims of the clergy.
The cover-up and denial of justice was also brought to light by Chris Geraghty, a former Catholic priest and until quite recently a NSW judge. In his book Dancing with the Devil he confessed to his own inadequate response when a young seminarian sought his help in relation to the sexual conduct of the notorious and unfortunately named Father Vincent Kiss.
So entrenched is the idea that the institution has to be protected that Irish priests have declared they will flout a new state law that overturns the sanctity of the confessional and requires them to report details of sexual abuse.
The precious protection of self-regulation infuses numerous other professions and pillars of society, too, not least the police and the legal profession.
The police have been magnificently exculpated by their own internal investigatory processes, which come into play when ill-trained and inadequate officers kill a mentally disturbed member of the public.
The case of Adam Salter in 2009 is one of a number of shockers. He was shot dead by police when he posed no danger to them. The coroner said the police intervention was an ''utter failure'', ending with the killing of the person they were supposed to help.
The police closed ranks and produced a whitewash of an internal investigation, even involving deliberate lies, according to counsel for Salter's family, Stephen Rushton.
The police have clung to internal investigations for ''operational'' reasons.
The National Police Accountability Network has long argued that internal investigations should be scrapped, as non-police are perfectly able to do the work at arms length.
However, it is the legal profession that is the bastion of total self-regulation. At every step of the internal process, lawyers are investigating lawyers for misconduct. The ''independent'' legal regulator is also a lawyer, and the judges before whom go the more serious professional infractions are, we sometimes forget, lawyers.
I well remember a lawyer vehemently pressing his finger into my shirt-front and saying: ''I'm passionate about self-regulation.''
He must have momentarily forgotten that the whole point of a proper system of justice is that it is dispassionate.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/nothing-to-hide--just-ask-them-20120712-21ywf.html#ixzz20SnNbiPR
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