When the book Hit and Run was published in March last year, the Chief of Defence Force Tim Keating held a press conference claiming that the book had nothing to do with the New Zealand SAS because the SAS had been in a different place on that date.
Defence Chief Tim Keating and the Prime Minister exhibit the “colonial” reflex in completely ignoring the villagers as a source of information. Bill English looked at a few American videos of the battle and considered that to be enough to reject any inquiry. Keating didn’t consider evidence from the locals as relevant enough to mention.
It is insane that we can live in a country where there is a bloody investigation over how a drug dog was shot at Auckland airport but there won’t be an investigation into serious war crime allegations.
“In the past two weeks since Hit and Run was published there have been calls for an independent inquiry from New Zealanders from all sides on the political spectrum. It is disappointing and concerning that Bill English has refused.”
Four Rhymes Inspired By “Hit & Run”
Location confusion must not detract from civilian casualties, a dead girl and serious breaches of defence force rules
It is now up to the media to rip the NZDF to pieces. They’ve lied to you as much as they have lied to the people of NZ, surely you can’t let them lie directly to your faces and you’ll just accept it?
The Chief of Defence Force Lieutenant General Tim Keating presented the NZDF response to the book Hit and Run at a press conference on Monday 27 March 2017. For 45 minutes he and his colleagues suggested that everything in the book was incorrect.
The Hit and Run authors have now had time to study the defence chief’s statements. Our conclusion is that the NZDF criticisms are wrong – with one exception – and that they have failed to address almost everything of substance in the book. This is what a cover up looks like.
The AM Show have made the claims of war crimes into a joke and they went up against a person who takes it incredibly seriously.
…the book already crosses the evidential threshold for a criminal investigation and NZ is signed up to international laws that impact our domestic laws.