Ron Smith: Watching the Media

My 25 April blog on SAS involvement in taking prisoners in Afghanistan, who might subsequently be subjected to ill-treatment, suggested that the New Zealand policy of not officially taking prisoners at all was untenable, but that the purposes of the Jon Stephenson Metro article complaining about it, went beyond mere concern for human rights. It was, I argued, part of a continuing campaign by left-wing, anti-American interests, to force the withdrawal of New Zealand troops from the Afghan campaign. Comments by the parties (NZDF and Stephenson and his supporters) over the last week have done nothing to address either of these issues.

Of particular interest to me over the last two weeks has been the performance of National Radio’s Mediawatch. In the first treatment of Stephenson’s story (on 1May), we were treated to a gushing interview, with no probing of the evidence on which it relied and no critical questions, such as why, when his ostensible concern is human rights, he did not ask Colonel M* of the Crisis Response Unit about the treatment of captives in his charge.

Ron Smith: Afghanistan: prisoners and torture

I last wrote on this topic in August of last year (‘What to do with the prisoners?’, 25 August, 2010) when, as now, the matter of prisoner-taking by our SAS forces in Afghanistan was raised as a political and moral issue. The matter has now resurfaced through a long article by Jon Stephenson in the latest (May 2011) edition of Metro magazine. Again, accusations of impropriety are made against our SAS forces, and our political and military leadership, in relation to prisoners taken in counterinsurgency operations, in which our forces were involved, and who were subsequently handed over to US custody, or to the custody of various Afghan Government agencies. It should be noted that there is no suggestion that prisoners have been ill-treated by New Zealand soldiers. The focus of concern is rather on what happened to them after they have been handed over and this because of our legal (and moral) obligations under various international treaties and conventions.