All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Introducing today's very special guest, Brayden Chapman.
He was a Lance Corporal in the Australian Army Special Forces, deployed to Afghanistan in 2012 and 13, and was featured in the news report from ABC News Australia, Four Corners, called Killing Field, Explosive New Allegations of Australian Special Forces War Crimes, that came out in March, and the entire thing is available to see on YouTube.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Brayden?
I'm well, yourself?
I'm doing really good.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show today to talk about this.
So you were there in 2012, so this is sort of the tail end of the American surge, which was mostly 2009 through 12, and was, I guess, began winding down in the summer of 2012.
Where were you deployed?
Was it in just one area of the country or in different areas of the country during your time there?
Our base was at Tarankout.
We operated out of there.
And what part of Afghanistan is that?
That is more central, north of, south of Bagram, quite a bit south, actually.
So you guys, yeah, this is like, we're just southwest of the Ghazni province, is that right?
I believe so, yeah.
Yeah.
But north of Helmand province, somewhere right around there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We mainly just operated in our area.
We didn't really go up towards Kabul and places like that.
And then, so as a special forces soldier, what was your overall mission there?
We were targeting the higher targets in our area, you know, your area leaders, that kind of thing, bomb makers.
Pretty much, yeah, like your higher value targets.
And then were you guys working with the Afghan army and the Afghan government a lot, or that was more, you know, regular army guys doing that part of it?
We were attached to some Afghan military.
We weren't attached to the general army.
We had actually Hazarans with us, who were from out of area.
To go out on an operation, you've got to actually have like locals, or our mandate was we had to have locals attached to us.
And there was a ratio that got larger and larger as our deployment went on.
And you mentioned the Hazaras there, were you essentially, you know, I mean, if you're hunting down the Taliban, those are primarily Pashtuns, right?
So you're kind of using Hazaras against Pashtuns, is that it?
Yeah.
And because they were out of area, I remember speaking to one of them saying, like just, there was obviously a language barrier, but that his words were like, you know, all Pashtun are Taliban.
That's how he saw the locals.
So you could definitely say there was a tribal tension.
Yeah, I'm sure they didn't see him as part of the family necessarily either.
No, they look quite a bit different too, to the locals.
All right.
So for an American audience, help us understand the role of the Australian military and then especially, you know, your special forces battalion there in what was largely an American war there, especially right around that time at the height of the surge.
Yeah, so we were on an American base and a lot of the times, like America has all the intelligence infrastructure, so we're using the US infrastructure as well.
So we were basically just supporting them in that area.
We were the only kind of tier one, we were the only ones with tier one, tier two capability in that general area.
What's that mean?
Tier one and tier two, so tier one would be your Delta guys.
Oh, I see.
Tier one.
I'm sorry.
That Australian accent got me.
I just said T1 and T2.
I get it.
Tier one and tier two, as in tier one being SEALs and Delta Force and tier two being Rangers and Green Berets, that kind of thing.
Yeah.
So we filled that gap for the Americans in that area.
I see.
And we would build up our own intelligence as well, so we'd have our own feeds coming in from our intelligence trying to get targets, but we'd also, if there was a guy in the area who the American, like if a guy blew up, say, a checkpoint of Americans somewhere and they knew he was in the area, they'd feed that to us as well.
So now, I guess there must have been some, quote unquote, successes along those lines at hunting down a particular bomb maker or that kind of thing.
But overall, did you see where y'all's intervention had made things more stable there for the local government or any kind of metric that an outsider would agree with would show reasonable gains of some kind or another for all your efforts there?
We were pretty successful going after targets, but I believe at that stage, we had the most targets killed or captured from the Australian standpoint, but in 2012, they were starting to hand back your smaller outposts to Taliban, sorry, went to Taliban, but back to the Afghan military and on average, it was taking about a week for those bases to fall into the hands of Taliban.
When you're hearing that, you're like, yeah, we're making no difference whatsoever.
You can run really hard on a treadmill, but it doesn't necessarily amount to progress over ground there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we were bringing in a lot of targets, but I didn't really see how we were making a positive difference on the area.
Now, is it a fair guess that when you deployed there, that your head was full of all of the regular kind of TV narratives or bootcamp narratives about how we're going to help these people by hunting down the bad guys so they can be free and all this stuff?
Yeah, there was that.
There were people though, who I deployed with who'd been there quite a few times and they always, like some of their opinions were quite negative of the area.
And before I even deployed, one guy said, you know, I don't care about the people over there.
I'm just going there to earn some money and blow up.
And that was before we deployed and I was like, okay.
And then how long before, I mean, after you were deployed, how long was it before you really realized that, you know, maybe this wasn't the sociology class project you've been led to expect?
I would say probably 2014, I really started to get into kind of the, you know, I was kind of reaching for something, just, I didn't want to have anything really to do with what I was doing.
I just started reading and reading and eventually came across some libertarian stuff and went down that path.
But that was about it, probably around the end of 2014, I really started to not see the military in the same light as I did previously.
And it was, so it was while you were deployed, it was what, you started reading antiwar.com or?
No, so 2013 was my second deployment.
I was actually attached to Americans up at Bagram for that one.
But end of 2014, I'd injured my back earlier that year.
So I was kind of had a bit of spare time.
And then, yeah, I just started reading and kind of, yeah, as I said earlier, I was kind of just reaching for something that was just different to my ideas of what was right and wrong.
And that's when I started coming across websites like antiwar.com and Libertarian Institute and all the other podcasts and websites that are out there that talk about this stuff.
Have you read Fools Aaron?
I have.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That book blew my mind.
I knew it was bad over there, but just the whole, you know, in one area we're funding the Taliban to fight Al-Qaeda and then in another area we're funding Al-Qaeda to fight Taliban.
That blew my mind.
Yeah.
The whole thing's pretty nuts.
Paying, especially the taxes paid to the Taliban.
I saw Donald Trump got this right even the other day, someone was saying that, hey, the people are warning that you shouldn't be too hasty in pulling out of there.
And he's saying, look, our war funds the Taliban.
Hey, he actually got one right.
A pretty important point to make there that where would these guys be if the Americans weren't paying them protection money all this time, you know?
Yeah.
I can't remember if it was Fools Aaron or somebody else's book, but they were talking about how out of possibly Kabul or Bagram, there were contractors who just had like rooms of cash to go deliver to areas like to local Afghanis or it may have even been Iraq, but it was just crazy the amount of cash that was laying around that they were just feeding to all these, you know, former warlords.
Yeah.
No, that wasn't in my book, but actually once I was done publishing Fools Aaron, I realized that someone had written an entire book just on the subject of the protection money and how the Americans were quite literally paying the Taliban billions of dollars, not just hundreds of millions, billions of dollars in protection money just to wage the war against them.
And how can we get out to our fire base if we don't bribe these guys to let us drive our men and our guns and our gasoline out there and just.
Yeah.
And like we had the local, I believe he was the provincial governor of Tarenkout or that area.
He had to sign off on all of our missions.
Not so much individually, but kind of he had a standing sign off and he kind of, we wouldn't tell him our targets, but we had to inform him every time we'd go on a mission of where we were going roughly.
And we went, we went to one area and we happened to arrest his brother who was our target.
And we got halfway through that mission and we got a call over the radio saying, let him go and you need to leave.
And you're just like, why would that was about one of the, that was probably one of the main mission where I was just like, wow.
Okay.
Fine.
That's amazing.
And you know, it's funny in the, in the, the news report here where they show what a nice country it is.
And they show a clip of you talking about it.
It seems like it would be a great place to go backpacking or, you know, this kind of thing if it wasn't such a horrible war zone is, you know, many parts of it anyway, or seem to be very nice just to have this kind of chaos going on there forever like that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, you go to some of the areas and it's just so green through the valleys, you know, this place is really nice.
Some, some of the missions, you know, you're just sitting up on a hill, you know, overwatch looking, looking down over a village and just like this place is so beautiful.
And then my second deployment with the Americans, I was actually in surveillance aircraft.
So you're flying over the country constantly and just flying over snow cap peaks and stuff like that.
You're like, wow, if we just, uh, if this place was, you know, not full of war, it would actually be really nice place to visit, which I guess people did back in the seventies.
Yeah.
Quite a contrast there.
Um, and yeah, it has been since the seventies, since the Americans deliberately baited the Soviets into invading and plunging that place into this devastation that was still going on.
Uh, although we switched sides in the war since then, but Hey, Hey man, you guys are going to love no dev, no ops, no it by Hussain Badak Chani.
It's a fun and interesting read all about how to run your high tech company like a good libertarian should forget all the junk read, no dev, no ops, no it by Hussain Badak Chani.
Find it in the margin at scotthorton.org Hey y'all, here's the thing, donate a hundred dollars to the Scott Horton show and you can get a QR code commodity disc as my gift to you.
It's a one ounce silver disc with a QR code on the back.
You take a picture of it with your phone and it gives you the instant spot price and lets you know what that silver, that ounce of silver is worth on the market in federal reserve notes in real time.
That's the future of currency in the past to commodity discs.com or just go to scotthorton.org slash donate.
Hey guys, Scott Horton here for expand designs.com Harley Abbott and his crew do an outstanding job designing, building and maintaining my sites and they'll do great work for you.
You need a new website, go to expand designs.com slash Scott and say 500 bucks.
Now Brayden, you talked with ABC news Australia, um, for this, uh, documentary that they did killing field about war crimes that you witnessed on behalf of your peers there in Australian special forces and they don't name names in the, uh, TV report.
They just call them soldier a and soldier B and this kind of thing.
But uh, you know, so I guess, well, first of all, I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about some of those episodes, um, and what it was that made you go ahead and come forward to the news media like this.
And then I guess I'll save the question about, uh, what's happened since then and any legal, you know, development since that time.
But can you take us through some of the stories here that motivated you to, and, and, and tell us what motivated you to finally go ahead and, and come forward to the public with these stories?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the three, the three incidents, I'm sorry, the three, yeah, the three incidents I witnessed that I came forward about were, um, once like one soldier just shot an unarmed man.
Um, he, he was seen walking from a target compound and when he saw us, he threw his phone and then kind of put his hands, he, he did, he put his hands straight up, um, kind of like a referee would for, for a touchdown.
And the soldier in front of me just shot him in the chest and then shot him in the head as he walked past him, which is kind of, well, they called it, you call that a battlefield clearance is, you know, he's dead, but you make sure, uh, so that was the first incident.
And at the time I was like, okay, I've just witnessed an execution and you kind of just move on.
We were pretty busy, so you just kind of move on and, um, I'm sure it was discussed behind closed doors, but it was, it was, it's one of those units where, you know, while you're at the unit, it's very hard to come forward and say stuff because, you know, these things are investigated and they get away with it at the time.
So you kind of really don't want to ruin your career, I guess.
And you know, the fact that, you know, they're getting away with this stuff, even when it's officially investigated by the military, you know, you know, it's not going to change anything for the time.
So that was, that was the reason I didn't come forward at the time.
And then there was another incident where that same soldier, um, told the Hazarans we were working with, he, he, um, we confirmed the guy was the target we were after.
And then, yeah, he led him away with one of the Hazaran soldiers and told the Hazaran to shoot him.
And then there was another incident, um, I witnessed, or I didn't witness the actual incident.
I witnessed the soldier leading a injured Afghani away.
And then he came back some point later and said that the guy didn't make it.
Yeah, this is the guy that just had a superficial leg wound, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
He was patched up.
Good to go.
Um, obviously, you know, the medic would have told him to go to a hospital and get further care.
But yeah, he was fine.
He was just sitting there.
And in your story there, the medic was pretty upset too, when the guy came back and said, oh yeah, he didn't make it because the medic was responsible for him, had patched him up.
And then now he's dead inexplicably.
And so now he was kind of implicated in a way, right?
Yeah.
And he actually came forward last year, which was the motivation for me coming forward to support him.
Okay.
Um, so yeah, he was on a show called 60 Minutes.
Um, he came forward and spoke about that incident and, you know, how it's affected him since.
So yeah, at the, at that time I, I started kind of just reading more about what he was speaking about.
Um, just like, you know, going through articles to see any fallout that had happened.
And then, and also I hadn't caught up with him in a couple of years.
So I was trying to kind of find out whereabouts he was.
And then I came across an interview, uh, sorry, I came across an article by the ABC reporter who ended up interviewing me.
And then I reached out to him just to kind of support my friend.
And then it kind of led on from there to the interview.
Later on, it took maybe six, seven months before we agreed to an interview.
And then the, the last incident was the video, which I did not witness, um, in the interview when he, when he shows me the video.
That was actually the first time I'd seen that video.
Yeah.
You can tell from your reaction that you're going, oh man, here's another one kind of, um, and now, so, so this is the one that, you know, got the most attention a few weeks back.
If anybody could pay attention to anything, but the virus for a minute was, there was this, uh, video that was circulating of Australian special forces.
Um, now, so they chased the guy down.
I forget.
Had he already been shot once or he was just hiding and they caught him.
He was kind of hiding in some tall grass or something.
He was just on the edge of a wheat field near a tree.
It looked like, um, there were helicopters flying around, so I'm not sure what they saw, but he was just, you know, from the video, you can say he's just standing there on the edge of the wheat field.
Um, they kind of walk over towards him and the dog, he sends the dog after him.
Um, to, to put him down.
And then, you know, from there it leads on to the shooting, but it didn't look like he was doing anything.
Like it's hard to tell.
And by leads to the shooting.
I mean, there's a, there's a real pause in there where they have the guy at point blank range.
He's completely surrendered.
Essentially.
He's not resisting or anything like that.
And there's no heat of the moment here.
It's just a straight up murder in cold blood.
Correct.
Yeah.
Well, he asked, he asked, he asked the dog handler, you know, should he, should he shoot him?
And the dog handler says, ask the patrol, the patrol commander, who's a Sergeant.
Um, he asked, you know, he tells him like, ask so-and-so.
Um, and then from, you know, he asked two or three times says, can he drop him?
And then you don't hear an answer or say a signal or anything, but then, yeah, he just looks back and shoots him.
Like maybe he was giving a hand signal by the guy wearing the body cam or something.
Is it a body camera guys holding a camera?
It's just, I'm not sure what, it was probably a Sony action cam back then.
Yeah.
It was just a helmet cam.
A few of the guys wore them.
They were just like personal.
I see.
So, but regardless, in other words, if you're the investigator, there's an open question as to whether the Sergeant actually gave permission to fire or not.
That's not a hundred percent proven, but there are indications that maybe he got visual affirmation to go ahead.
Right.
You'd think so for him to turn back and pull the trigger.
He, you know, he, he obviously wanted to do it and he was just making sure he had the backing of people around him.
So there was no kickback to him.
And now there's no real reason for him to believe that this is the guy who's been making the bombs that killed all my friends or anything like that.
This is essentially just some schmuck Afghan farmer out in the middle of nowhere who didn't, there's no indication he really did anything.
Correct?
No, none at all.
And the thing is like, they, they use the term squirters for people running.
And it's, it's funny because I've seen comments since in threads where people are talking about the video and they're like, Oh, how do you know he's not a squirter?
Blah, blah, blah.
And it's like, do you know how scary it is for these people when we rock up in, you know, we've got Apache circling, Blackhawks, like a bunch of armed men.
They know these people, you know, will kill them.
And then of course people are going to run.
Like not everyone just stands there and puts their hands up.
And if they're further enough away that they think maybe they can get back to their house or, you know, to, to somewhere else and be safe, they're going to do it.
Not, you know, not everyone who runs away from a soldier is, is Taliban.
And, and that's one of the things that frustrates me the most with comments from people about this and some of the discussions where they're just, they're saying stuff like, you know, how, how do you know they're not Taliban?
And, you know, we, it'd be better to just shoot them now, just in case they come back at you later.
And it's like, okay, that's how we're going to operate against an entire country, like just in case.
Yeah.
Well, and that is the nature of the war.
You're not fighting against an army.
There is no army.
You're fighting against militia men defending their own land.
And so they are essentially civilians with rifles is what they are.
And so you're constantly skating the line between cold-blooded murder and fighting a combatant in a traditional war sense there.
And so accepting the premises of the war, those commenters are in a sense, correct.
Right.
That any fighting age male could be a threat.
Look at him standing there.
You know, he's thinking hostile thoughts or whatever it is.
And I'm not saying it's justified at all, of course not, but just that you can see why they believe that, you know, the idea that they're here to win this guy's heart and mind rather than shoot him in the heart or the brain you know, it's kind of hard to be both, you know, they got to choose.
And since they're soldiers, they choose war.
Of course, they're not social workers, you know, and they're not farm advisors either, you know, they don't have any other role there other than shooting these people.
Yeah.
And we were like the guys I was deployed with, I wouldn't say they were trigger happy, but they had no issues with shooting people.
But, um, yeah, I, I, like my second deployment with the Americans was a bit of an eye opener as well.
I thought, wow, mainly, mainly in the, I guess a lot of the, uh, the Delta and seal teams had kind of moved to Africa by that stage and they were kind of moving out of Afghanistan.
And then, yeah, like the Rangers were kind of controlling all the SF stuff up in out the background and, and we'd be flying around in aircraft and, you know, we had video feeds and stuff and you'd get calls over the radio saying like, has that guy got a gun?
Like trying to, you know, bring in drones or whatever to strike these people walking through their fields.
And it's like, who cares?
He's probably got an old Lee Enfield like from the, you know, from the sixties.
And then, yeah, that would like trying to call up strikes on these people.
And I used to say to the video feed guy, I just used to be like, Hey, just tell him it's a ho or something.
Because if you say he has a gun on him, this guy will want to, you know, bring in a drone.
Yeah.
And that, and, and that was, you know, that was pretty much the attitude on that whole second deployment.
And were there specific instances?
Um, because of course they're going to say, Hey, if he had a rifle, that's within the rules, at least as criminal as it might be in, you know, reality.
Uh, but were there specific abuses like the straight up murder of unarmed people?
Like you saw with your own comrades there?
I mean, on the part of the Americans?
Not that, not that I, like I saw them, you know, shoot target.
Like I saw them, um, do strikes on targets who were unarmed.
Um, but once they'd kind of confirmed the target, they're on that, whatever that kill list was.
So it was open season.
They, it didn't matter if they had a weapon or not because they were higher, higher value targets.
I see.
Yeah.
They had the name.
So that didn't matter.
But yeah, we, we definitely on the aircraft I was in, we definitely had to, had to tell some of the commanders back at, at the ops center that, Hey, like, you know, they're, they're trying to get us to like feed them the words so they can call in a strike.
And you really had to, you really had to push back or it would have happened.
Yeah.
Um, they, yeah, like we flew over one, one, um, vehicle one day and they all had AKs and they were shooting up in the air and just celebrating, like we're flying at, you know, 25,000 feet.
So they're not shooting at us.
They probably don't even know we're there.
And then, yeah, the commander was like, are they shooting at you?
Like trying to call in a strike.
And it's like, no, they're in a vehicle.
They're probably just celebrating or going somewhere.
Yeah.
But just looking for an excuse to light up somebody, I guess that makes sense.
Yeah.
Get, get your kills.
Yeah.
Um, all right now.
So after you came forward to the media in Australia, did the military investigative services call you and, and talk to you?
Yeah.
So the, the IGADF is, has been doing an investigation.
That's the inspector general of the ADF has been doing investigation for maybe since 2015.
Um, and he's, he's got over 50 incidents that are potential war crimes or unlawful killings.
Um, he, he should be releasing his paper to parliament in July, supposed to come out in May, but apparently he's, he's just keeps finding more and more incidents.
And what about the criminal investigative services?
Are they looking at it yet?
Are they're waiting for him to go first?
They kind of are waiting for a lot of the incidents, but because that video came out and, you know, caused a media storm, uh, the, the, um, minister for defense, uh, referred it to the AFP who are our federal police.
So they've been interviewing people about that incident.
And then recently about the other incidents that I spoke about.
So they are, they are interviewing people and that's, that's already started.
Um, it's, it is good to see, you know, they're taking this serious and not trying to cover anything up.
Yeah.
Well, and we do see in America that from time to time, soldiers are prosecuted, almost never officers, um, or, you know, the, the real commanders, uh, but low ranking guys.
So I, you know, it'd be interesting to see how this develops and how well the rule of law compares in Australia to the way it does here, you know?
Yeah.
They're actually going after our most decorated soldier.
So that'll be interesting.
Yeah.
Ben Robert Smith.
He's a Victoria Cross winner.
Um, they get, they're going after him for some potential unlawful killings.
In Afghanistan.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's, and I believe it is more than one incident.
So, and if, and yeah, so if they bring, you know, if they arrest our most decorated soldier, I think it'll be open season after that.
I guess we'll see.
It'd be nice to see some accountability for all that.
And on behalf of the Americans, sorry for getting you into that war, but, uh, I do appreciate you coming clean about what you saw over there.
Yeah.
It's, you know, you can, I think a lot of this, a lot of this stuff, you can only sit there and hold it inside for so long.
And from what I'm hearing, a lot of soldiers are coming forward now.
So yeah, a lot more, a lot more than I thought would come forward anyway, still serving as well.
So, right.
Well, you know, in my experience from having written the, uh, Afghan war book, every veteran of that war that I've talked to likes the book, agrees with it, learn things from it, appreciates it.
And I haven't been contradicted yet.
And that goes for soldiers from the, uh, American military, you know, the, the U S army goes for American Marines and it goes for foreign troops like yourself, who've been there and back Brits I've talked to.
And I'm waiting for someone to tell me that what you just don't really seem to understand Horton is this or that, but nobody ever says that, which is, I'm not bragging.
I mean, that goes to show what a catastrophe that war really is.
If my portrayal of it is as accurate as all these soldiers keep telling me it is.
I mean, uh, I didn't doubt that I was right about that, but it really is something else that here three years later, I've yet to meet a veteran.
Tell me that I'm wrong.
I mean, even in the Amazon comments or anything, you know, the Amazon reviews and whatever, it's, uh, it's as ugly as I thought.
And that's pretty ugly.
Yeah.
There's obviously nothing I could fold about it or not, not even like, I thought it was so good because you didn't just put an opinion on it.
You used hard facts and sources from all different sides.
It wasn't just, oh, here's all these, you know, anti-war journalists talking about this.
You used government sources and everything.
So yeah, I did try my best on that and I appreciate that you appreciate it.
It means a lot to me there and I'm sorry we're out of time here, but I will encourage everybody to go and look at this documentary by ABC News Australia.
It's called Killing Field, Explosive New Allegations of Australian Special Forces War Crimes, featuring footage furnished to them by our guest, Lance Corporal Braden Chapman, veteran of the Afghan war and the Australian army there.
Thank you again, Braden, for your time.
No worries.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
