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.
All right, you guys, introducing Mark Willisey from ABC News Australia, and he has been in charge of this series, head writer on this series about Afghanistan and war crimes by special operations forces there.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Mark?
I'm good, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Really appreciate you joining us here.
So I guess this one's the latest, oops, I'm clicking around too much.
This one, the same AK-47 was photographed on two dead Afghan civilians by Australian soldiers, I think is the latest, although that's sort of a recent development and a long running story.
I guess we'll get back to that.
But you want to start with how you got on this story, and was it Brayden Chapman came to you?
Look, I'd had some sort of murmurings from special forces contacts last year about some more of the nefarious activities that went on by Australian special forces, mainly the Australian SAS, which are the pinnacle of our special forces here in Australia.
And I discovered that there'd been an incident in a village called Sarkhum in Afghanistan in 2012.
The SAS had come in, they put an Australian combat dog onto an Afghan farmer.
He was trying to fight the dog off and the allegation was that the SAS then shot him dead.
The SAS shot an elderly Afghan man through the fleshy part of his thigh.
The SAS medic went and treated the man.
It was a flesh wound.
He would need treatment, further treatment, but it wasn't life threatening.
And the allegation was that a senior SAS officer then came, took the man away and stomped him to death.
Now, these are very serious charges.
We managed to get the Afghan family to speak on camera.
Their view of what happened matched what the Australian sources were telling us.
And that's, we ran that story.
And then I got an anonymous email on my ProtonMail account, which is not unusual.
And it was a very, very detailed account of what had happened at Sarkhum, which matched what we reported.
And over several months, I was back and forth with this contact.
And that turned out to be Brayden Chapman.
And I went and met Brayden, we got to know each other.
And that's when we decided to do a big expose of not just that crime, but of several other alleged crimes.
How many pieces are there in the series now?
I think we're up to about a dozen now, Scott.
The biggest one, of course, involved Brayden coming on the record, being interviewed with us, talking about that killing and two others that he witnessed as well.
And I've interviewed Brayden on this show, and I'm proud to say he told me, although I wish he had said this during the interview, that it was reading my book that helped inspire him to go ahead and come forward and tell you the truth about what happened.
So that's my tiny little role in this.
Now, he did tell me that he'd been inspired by your work and that it made him think a lot harder about what happened in Afghanistan.
So yeah, that's very much what he told me as well.
All right.
Anyway, the point is, I guess I just want to give you free reign then to go ahead and go through and no hurry.
You can start with Brayden's, the ones that he saw, as you've reported, because you don't just have his testimony.
Of course, you have all the rest of your reporting and corroboration and the rest.
So if you want to maybe start with his again, there, the old man with the leg wound and the one with the dog, right, was one of his.
Sorry.
Yeah, he told me that he was at that village of Sarkhum and he saw the SAS officer take away the wounded Afghan man and then come out and he said, oh, he didn't make it.
And the medic going, what do you mean he didn't make it?
That was a flesh wound.
And so Brayden had witnessed what had happened there.
And when we sat down and got to know each other, he told me that he saw another killing involving a man who was bound and was blindfolded.
He was a prisoner.
He was a Taliban target that the SAS were looking for.
However, he was he was totally in control.
As I say, he was he had plastic cuffs on and the SAS sergeant ordered an Afghan special forces soldier to shoot the man dead.
And he saw that happen.
Then he said he saw that same SAS sergeant shoot an Afghan man who had his hands up.
And on and on it went.
And I traveled around Australia, which, like America, is a huge country.
And I interviewed guys.
I collected a lot of their helmet camera footage that they had taken while they were in Afghanistan, stuff that had never been seen outside the SAS before.
And then one day after I collected about 11 hours of it, I sat down and over a week I went through every frame and I remember it was 6 p.m.
Friday.
I'm still in the office and I'm looking at this one piece of footage.
It looked like yet another raid into an Afghan village.
They let the dog off.
The Australians always used these dogs and the dog latches on to this young Afghan man in a wheat field.
And the SAS guys converge on the man.
He's trying to fight the dog off.
The Australians call the dog off.
One of the SAS soldiers just saunters up to the man, points the rifle at him and asks, do you want me to drop this?
And I won't use the word.
You can imagine what the word is.
He asked that three times.
Do you want me to drop this?
So and so.
And after the third time, he puts three bullets into this Afghan man who's lying on his back with his hands and legs in the air.
He's truly frightened.
All he has in his hand is a set of red prayer beads.
And I remember seeing that footage.
Like I said, it was Friday evening.
I was in the office and I thought, wow, here we go.
This is the first time we've seen an Australian special forces war crime like that caught on camera.
And of course, so with Braden's testimony that other other bits and pieces of vision from this footage, we aired that here in Australia and it created an absolute sensation and obviously got covered around the world as well.
All right.
Now, the headline for that one is a shocking video of an Australian soldier shooting dead an unarmed man.
And I think this is the one that's the big profile of Braden is Australian SAS veteran says radios were planted on dead bodies to cover up unlawful killings, correct?
That's right.
And in fact, in that killing that we broadcast, you don't see it in the footage because they move on.
They go and get a few more targets and then they come back.
But what happened after that is they placed a radio or an icon, as they call it, on the body of that dead Afghan, the unarmed civilian.
And they then took the photo, which is standard operating procedure.
They wrote their report up and that was assessed, reviewed.
And it was, yep, that guy, they said he was he was maneuvering tactically.
He had a radio and that he was the soldier was 15 to 20 meters away when he shot him.
And that was approved and that was accepted by the Australian Defense Force.
And what the footage showed was every aspect of that was a lie.
And after that, that soldier who was still he's still a special forces soldier in the SAS in Australia.
He's been stood down.
And our version of the FBI is now investigating him for war crimes.
So, you know, Braden helped bring that to light.
But he got me very inspired about believing that, you know, what we were hearing, these rumors, these allegations, some of them were true.
And Braden's story is quite compelling.
He was very brave to come out and speak to us because SAS guys, former SAS guys, do not show their faces.
They do not talk about what they saw.
It's very much a code of silence.
And I think there is no great courage in that.
The courage is in what Braden did.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's really something else to see that footage.
And I think in the profile of Braden, it's revealed that he was not there on that day and and did not know about that incident.
But when you showed him the footage, he said, oh, man, I know who those guys are, though.
And that really helped him.
Yeah, that's right.
He knew who the dog handler was, the SAS dog handler.
And he knew who the soldier was who pulled the trigger.
And ironically, you know, you know what it's like.
Was the officer not on foot?
There was a it was just a sergeant or who?
I'm sorry.
There was a sergeant off off camera now in the SAS patrols.
He's the senior officer.
And that's when the soldier with the gun over the top of the Afghan keeps going, do you want me to drop this?
So and so he turns finally to his commanding officer.
The footage, you can't hear what the commanding officer says.
You can't see what whether he motions to him.
But it's very clear that the Afghan was contained.
He was compliant.
He was frightened.
You know, he was no threat.
So even if an order was given, it could be argued it's an unlawful order, therefore you shouldn't follow it.
So and the thing about that, Scott, was that after he shot the Afghan, he just walked off like it was something he did every day.
And I thought that looks like he's done that before.
And after the program went to air, I got contacted by two other former SAS guys who were on that same patrol who said to me, he killed another Afghan, unarmed Afghan, a disabled man about two months before that.
And we were there.
We saw it.
And he just blew this guy's head off for no reason.
And so that's the thing.
I think one first story led me to Braden, which led me to the videos.
That story then led me to the second killing by this guy.
And since then, it's been mushrooming about planted weapons.
We have the wrong target being executed.
We've had up to 10 civilians being killed in one mission alone.
We do know that here in Australia, the inspector general of the Australian Defense Force, that's the big investigative unit of our military, has been investigating these allegations of war crimes for four years, and they're still going.
So what that tells you is that something seriously bad was going on undercover, in the valleys, the green belts, the villages, the compounds of Afghanistan.
This profile of Braden begins with, I think you're quoting him, saying that they used to joke about the size of the rug that you're having to sweep all this under.
And so it seems, and how it's going to be such a big deal when it all finally comes out.
And here you have this huge series for at least one of the most prominent outlets in Australian media, of course.
And you have this investigation, but, and maybe I'm just too used to American justice.
I'm not exactly sure how it works there, but it seems like probably the real authority, you know, the civilian authorities here, the criminal authorities, are just finding a different rug to sweep it all under, right?
Because they don't want to take on the special forces of the Australian army, do they?
Well, one of the people who is under investigation, as well as the guy who featured in the video I played, he's won the Victoria Cross.
Now the Victoria Cross is the highest military decoration you can win for valor and bravery in the British army, the Australian army, the New Zealand army, and the Canadian army.
The Commonwealth armies, as we call them.
He is a superstar over here.
He has been trotted out by politicians as being the very embodiment of the honor, the valor, the bravery of our Australian special forces.
Now, I'm not saying he did something or he didn't do something.
I don't know.
We don't know.
But the stakes are extremely high, and not just for the soldiers, but for the politicians who lionize these guys and for the media who back them, you know.
And in fact, this whole thing about war crimes has pitted certain media outlets against each other because one of the media outlets here is owned by a billionaire who thinks this VC winner is so good, he's employed him in his media company.
So the tentacles and the interactions are so deep, it's hard to say where this will land in the end.
And the Australian Federal Police, our version of the FBI, you know, is renowned for being very slow, very conservative.
And according to some here in Australia, they don't know anything about war crimes.
We don't have a dedicated war crimes unit.
So this could, A, take years to work through the investigative process before it even gets to the courts, and B, it might not even go to the courts.
And a lot of these soldiers are saying, I've got PTSD, which is understandable in many cases.
So who knows where this will end up?
Again, it may stay buried under that rug that Braden talks about.
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Well, you know, part of this, too, is just the absurdity of Australian anybody's special forces or anybody else murdering random Afghan peasants as what, revenge for September 11th or something like that?
At what point does the costus belly run out here where, I mean, obviously none of these guys ever met an Egyptian in their life.
They don't know the first thing about an attack on the United States.
That's right.
And one of the- And Australia is not one of the United States, so what the hell do you have to do with that anyway?
Well, we certainly act like we are.
We've sort of fought with you guys in every war since World War II, whether that's Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War, the second Gulf War, Afghanistan.
You know, often it's joked over here, we sort of act like your deputy sheriff.
And I know there's a lot of people who are uncomfortable with that, that we tend to follow the United States into these wars in a very blind manner.
But yeah, the Afghan war, I think for the Australians and probably for the Americans and for the British, I think they lost their way.
And, you know, here we were in 2011, 2012, 2013, with special forces from Australia running around southern Afghanistan, apparently just executing people, not all of them, some of these exercises and raids, I'm sure, you know, achieved the right target of the mission.
But it appears that some of these things didn't, and a lot of these guys literally got away with murder.
Well, perhaps they won't, but perhaps they will.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, the right target just means according to intelligence, which may just have a phone number of a phone number of a guy who called another guy one time, they think.
So the right target doesn't necessarily mean guilty enemy in any way.
But I understand that for their purposes, as far as they know what they're doing.
That was the context of what you meant.
But you know, also, this whole thing is going on in the context of the big counterinsurgency campaign, where we're there to win the hearts and minds and let the people of particularly the Pashtun South and East of the country know that we, the Americans and Australians love them more than their husbands and brothers and fathers do.
And we are here to protect the people from themselves in that way.
And then we got these special forces hotheads going around murdering crippled guys and 80 year old great grandfathers.
You might think that that would be counterproductive for winning over these people to submit to American and Australian power to remake their society in our image, you know?
Yeah.
And look, I think I think the whole hearts and minds thing is, you know, what the special forces for the Australians that I've been focusing on, they did nothing for that.
They were counterproductive, as you say.
And Braden tells the same thing, you know, and and I've spoken to guys there, you know, they'd shoot the dogs in the Afghan compounds, they'd shoot donkeys, they'd pour sugar into fuel tanks of vehicles.
On some occasions, they'd actually set fire to the village car because obviously not everyone has a car.
The village shares it.
You know, I've spoken to guys who said they saw the, you know, a platoon sergeant punch a child in the face.
You know, even if you take away the allegations of killing, just the general conduct of some of these special forces, Australians, it was just disgraceful.
And as Braden said, you know, we'd leave and and we go, well, geez, I think we've just created Taliban.
Not only have we not won the hearts and minds, we're creating Taliban.
They're not going to come and they're not going to cooperate with us anymore.
They're going to go, well, yeah, the Taliban are bad, but hey, they're not as bad as these bloody Australians.
That's right.
It's such an important point that the whole surge, it wasn't like, well, it's only temporary.
And so eventually they're going to come back.
The surge was counterproductive the whole time.
It was driving the insurgency, made it far worse than it was before.
And of course it did.
That's true.
I mean, I don't know which province you're from there and you have provinces right there in Australia.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They were.
Yeah.
You mean in Australia here now?
Yeah.
I mean, if you guys were invaded by an occupying army of posh toons, I bet you'd shoot them.
Oh, they took all y'all's guns.
You'd be helpless before the Taliban.
Sorry, but you know, back before they took your guns.
Some of these special forces say, yeah, exactly.
You know, they say if it was us, we'd fight back.
And you know, that war just dragged on.
It was, I think the longest war in your history, the longest war in our history.
And in the end, I don't think we achieved anything.
In fact, you know, for this, for these series of stories, I've very much wanted to talk to the Afghan end, you know, to talk to the victims' families.
And get their point of view, because often they're ignored and forgotten.
And so, you know, it's too dangerous for me to go out in these areas.
And I've got a great couple of teams of Afghan journalists who help me out.
They're great guys.
And even for them, they're born and raised in these provinces like Ruzgan and Kandahar.
Going outside Kandahar or Tarin Kowt, the capital of Ruzgan, is extremely dangerous for them because the Taliban's back in power.
So, you know, their whole idea is what did it achieve?
It achieved nothing.
In fact, you could argue that the Taliban is back and embedded more than ever.
So, even if our policy objective was to push the Taliban back, well, that's been an abject failure.
Yeah.
Hey, I don't blame you.
You cannot go to Helmand province.
You know, even if you could just parachute right into the center of Lashkar Gah, I don't know if that would be safe either, you know.
But yeah, the road into town is booby trapped.
That's it.
They're not getting anywhere.
It wasn't too long ago that a couple of reporters, I think from NPR News or something, oh geez, it might have been five, six years ago, tried to go down.
I think they wanted to interview the Taliban and they got killed on the way down to Helmand.
Well, yeah, it's a very dangerous place to be.
And, you know, we've seen obviously this thing with apparently ISIS, you know, trying to bust its guys out of prison overnight, there's at least 20 dead there.
So, you know, it's just delivered a lot of instability, I think.
You know, it was always going to be a tough war.
They don't call it the graveyard of empires for no reason.
Right.
Okay.
So tell me this about Australian public opinion.
I mean, after all, they didn't knock your towers down.
Not that the Taliban knocked ours down either, it was Al-Qaeda that did that.
But anyway, same difference according to our governments anyway.
It seems like public opinion in Australia must have soured on all this even before it did in this country, no?
Well, what was interesting, I think, Scott, is that our main military focus, or our main, our regular army, if you like, it was there to do reconstruction tasks or so.
So they said.
So schools, wells, whatever it may be.
And, you know, after a while, they wound that back and that was the end of that.
Meanwhile, the special forces are still going out and they're hunting targets, their so-called targets.
Now, the thing about that, because it's the SAS and the Australian commandos, the special forces, that was top secret.
So the Australian public never saw it.
We never knew.
And the media was never allowed to cover it.
And if there was a press conference with the defence minister here, if you asked a question, he'd say, I can't answer that on operational security grounds.
So for the Australian public, it was a hidden war.
It was off the front pages.
It wasn't even in the middle pages.
So there was no public opinion.
And it was only when we started reporting on it and my colleagues in other media organisations started reporting on it, that there was a bit of public disquiet.
But having said that, you know, I've got a lot of support from the Australian public for the reporting I've been doing and investigations, but, you know, there's also been threats.
There's also been that typical response, you're not a patriot.
What would you know about war?
Why don't you get a gun and go and defend your country?
You know, you should be, there was one guy who said I should be put on trial for treason.
So there still is that mindset in this country, and I'm sure it's in your country too, that by even discussing it, questioning it, reporting on it, you're a traitor.
You're unpatriotic.
Of course, defending your country defined very broadly here as just government employment, basically, you know, I guess.
That's right.
You might as well have invaded Brazil.
And would that be self-defense too?
I don't know.
Why not?
Yeah, exactly.
You can always, you can always bend your foreign policy objectives, can't you, to some sort of nefarious goal or objective or reason.
Yeah.
So now during this time, and this is all early teens, I know you said the word 2013 in there somewhere.
Can you help me out on that?
Yeah.
Look, look, the inspector general who's doing the big investigations, been going for more than four years, he's investigating from 2006 through to 2013.
So that gives you an idea that there is at least allegations that stretch over that seven, eight year period.
So it's quite broad.
The main one that I've been sort of focused on is around 2011 to 2013.
That's where a lot of the more verifiable events that I've been able to look at have occurred.
And then, so how closely were these guys working with the SEALs or Delta or for that matter, the Green Berets or Rangers or whichever groups of American special ops guys were there?
Do you know?
I know that the SAS were working closely with the Green Berets at times and that they were generally enmeshed with the US special forces and adopted the American special forces kill capture mission or objectives.
The commandos, which is our other special forces, they were working with the Marine special forces.
In fact, I spoke to a guy who was in helicopter support for the Marines who dealt with the Australians and he said, the Australians were out of control.
And we were shocked with what they did.
You know, they burnt compounds, shot civilians, they killed prisoners.
And I had a good chat with him.
He's based in Idaho now, he's out of the military, but there was definitely a sense that the Americans and Australians were so tight.
In fact, a former major general in the Australian special forces told me that our special forces were more enmeshed with your special forces than they were with their own military, the Australian Defence Force.
So there was very much that special forces club with the Americans, but also the British.
And as we've seen over the weekend, you know, there's allegations now, the British SAS that they ran kill squads, you know, that 21 people or whatever it was, were killed in one mission alone who they believe were civilians.
So yeah, very much the Australians were caught up in that kill capture special forces sort of headspace.
And unfortunately, a lot of times there was no capture, it was just kill.
And now, so this is overall, their missions were essentially the standard special ops night raid?
Yeah.
The commandos would do a lot of drug work with the DEA.
So they'd go in and knock over compounds and supposed drug labs.
That was a lot of night work.
The SAS would operate mainly actually during the day.
So they would hit a target anytime in the morning and they'd probably go out in about three to four Blackhawk helicopters, American Blackhawks, American crews.
They dropped them at various points and they would converge on a target compound or a target building.
And the idea is obviously to go after a particular target.
They would have had an intel briefing earlier that day.
And often, you know, they'd get their target or the target had slipped the net or the target would end up dead.
So look, most of the stuff I've got is all daytime operations.
Yeah.
I noticed that from, I mean, what footage I had seen there.
And I guess part of that is because it's easy to see what's going on in the daytime as far as that footage.
But that was the footage that you got was all sort of daytime footage or how does that work?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Pretty much all daytime.
It's all pretty much daytime.
That's because the night stuff is going to be all in green.
Night vision footage was just going to be recorded on some different kind of hardware, something that you have to go find somewhere else.
Right?
Yeah, that's right.
And because most of the footage I got was SAS, therefore daytime footage.
So you know, they, you know, the SAS began as a surveillance reconnaissance special forces unit.
So they obviously they're trained to kill.
But the idea of the Australian SAS was that they would go out in long range reconnaissance missions and surveillance missions.
They'd set up observation posts and they would not be seen.
They were about sniper teams and stuff like that.
None of this sweeping, kick the door in, you know, blow holes through compound walls.
That's what it sort of devolved into in Afghanistan.
And I think for a lot of the old traditionalists, the SAS was no longer the SAS.
It was sort of more like an American SEAL team or Delta Force or whatever you may call it.
So yeah.
DEA, that sounds about right.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
I had to say that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No.
Well, the DEA went out with the commandos.
That was the Australian commandos, not the SAS.
And the commandos, from what I've been told by the commando side of things, that was a lot of night operations.
Yeah.
Targeting, you know, supposedly Taliban-linked drug manufacturer and cropping and whatever you like.
And then are there still Australian forces in Afghanistan right now?
Not in any great number, not doing that sort of work.
We understand that there's sort of trainers over there and a very small team of people.
But no, largely our mission, especially with the Special Forces, finished around 2014.
And I think that's an interesting point, because by about 2015, the rumors were getting around and people were whispering about what happened over there.
So they come back in 2014, by about 2015, it's getting around that not all was good.
2016, the inquiry by the inspector general starts into allegations, rumors of war crimes by Australian Special Forces in Afghanistan.
So it started in May 2016.
And it is, what, now August 2020.
And it's still going.
And I understand that the report hopefully will be ready by the end of the year.
It could be up to 5,000 pages long.
Wow.
Well, I'm so grateful that you are going to read that and report on all the important parts in there.
Well, that's my plan.
If they don't, that's when we get to the point that, Scott, how much will be released publicly.
No one can tell us that.
Will any of it be released publicly?
And that's the thing, you know, what's the point of doing a huge investigation and coming out with, say, a 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 page report?
If the Australian public, who these guys fight in our name, and we can't see what the allegations are and the evidence is, then, yeah, that's another debate.
Well, I mean, hopefully they'll at least turn it over to the prosecutors to look at, you know, the IG thing.
Maybe not.
Like around here, sometimes they'll go, oh, well, we're keeping our work separate.
But yeah, well, there's still WikiLeaks and, you know, they have not finished off Assange yet, but there's other people running it while he's locked up.
And so for people in the Australian government who, you know, want to have the courage that Brayden Chapman has showed here and do the right thing, it isn't too hard to, you know, get...
You know what they have?
These micro SD cards now.
That's like an SD card, only teeny tiny.
You can smuggle that thing out, you know, behind your ear in a magic trick.
No problem whatsoever to get a 5,000 page report out of Australian government database.
And then, of course, there's the great journalist at ABC News Australia, abc.net.au, who would be willing, perfectly willing to accept that along with the likes of WikiLeaks and do the work.
Yeah.
And look, if there's any American service personnel, former, who, you know, worked with the Australian Special Forces, the commandos or the SAS, who want to get in touch with me, have a chat to me about what they thought.
I'm writing a book at the moment.
I know you're a prolific author yourself, Scott, and I'm sort of focusing on this period with the Special Forces in Afghanistan, the Australians.
By all means, do you mind if I give you my address, my ProtonMail address?
Absolutely not do I mind.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
It's Mark Willisey, which is M-A-R-K-W-I-L-L-A-C-Y at ProtonMail, P-R-O-T-O-N-M-A-I-L.com.
So if anyone wants to get in touch, drop me a line.
I've already had a couple of really nice American guys get in touch and tell me about their experiences and it's really valuable material because it gives me a view from outside the Australian bubble about what other people thought about how we acted over there.
Sure.
And especially if they have evidence, it's great corroboration from the other side of the, well, not the other side of the story, but another angle on the story there as well.
It's a good thing that you said that because I do know that there are a lot of Afghan war vets that listen to this show and they're, I mean, I know that I was banned, that they're not allowed to listen to me at the Pentagon anymore.
And so I'd like to think that that meant it was becoming a problem over there.
I don't know.
Wow.
Okay.
So yeah, if people, you know what, here's the thing.
We asked 18 and 19 year old guys mostly to go to these wars to risk their lives on these ridiculous missions where they have no business in the first place, where they're killing people and risk getting killed or maimed for life and it's horrible things.
Well, the people who are back at home walking around the hallways with manila folders and things like that, it seems like they could, you know, portray a little bit of that same sort of courage in a way by risking prison time to leak the important truth about crimes to the media, to WikiLeaks, to whoever needs to know the truth and that, yeah, that would suck to go to prison.
It would also suck to get your legs blown off.
And if these guys are willing to risk that, then these other guys ought to be able to risk the former there.
That's what I think.
And so that's a call to real whistleblowers because the people look at, they sat on this truth all along and then it came out.
Now we're talking about it deep into the future in the year 2020 when this truth was there.
It could have been leaked all along and there's more to know that's still secret.
Indeed.
Yeah.
War crimes should never be kept secret.
That's for sure.
All right.
Well, listen, it's really great to hear that you're writing a book about this thing.
And do you know when that's going to come out?
It's coming out next year, probably about the middle of next year.
Unfortunately, in Australia, Scott, we've got seriously tough defamation laws.
We've got no amendment about free speech in the media and all that sort of stuff.
So unfortunately, when the book's written, the lawyers will have to spend a lot of time going over it.
But hey, I've got multiple sources on all this stuff.
I've got very brave people who are willing to stand up and say in court that they told me the right thing.
So I'm pretty comfortable, but probably middle of next year.
So plenty of time if any of your listeners who worked with the Aussies and maybe didn't like what they saw or want to get in touch.
Love to hear from you.
Yeah.
You know, if you want an American publisher, talk to me.
I'll figure something out.
I will, man.
I will.
I will, man.
That's great.
All right, man.
Well, listen, thank you so much for coming on the show, Mark, and for all your great work on this important subject.
I really do appreciate it a lot.
Thanks for having me on, Scott.
It's been a real pleasure.
Thanks, man.
All right, you guys.
That is Mark Willesee.
He is at ABC News Australia.
That's abc.net.au.
And the latest story is the same AK-47 was photographed on two dead Afghan civilians killed by Australian soldiers before that.
And this one is the profile of Brayden Chapman, Australian SAS veteran, says radios were planted on dead bodies to cover up unlawful killings.
And also shocking video of an Australian soldier shooting dead an unarmed man.
Again, those are all at abc.net.au.
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.
