THE FRONT DORE: The astonishing arrogance of ABC’s war on truth amid Mark Willacy’s fake war crime expose

If you’re not one of us, according to ABC star reporter Mark Willacy, you’re a “bottom-feeder”.

Willacy thinks he’s a special journalist. He’s part of the “ABC Investigations” unit.

He’s a Walkley award winner. He’s a war crimes crusader.

Like so many at the ABC now, Willacy is a zealot.

A Federal Court case uncovered in graphic detail how a “hazy” decade-old memory turned into a fake war crime expose.

Willacy believes war criminals abound in the Australian forces.

He covets attention for exposing the murderous, callous inhumanity of Australian men wearing uniform.

Men sent to war, into dusty, desolate combat zones, to fight an enemy often not wearing a uniform but brandishing a smile, a weapon and a determination to kill Australians. Willacy reckons the reputation of noble Australian soldiers, and our nation’s good name, have been ruined by bad men. Murderers in khaki, killing innocent people, breaking the rules of war.

Willacy rails against the toxic culture in the military, and apologises to Afghan families he believes were poorly treated by Australian commandos.

Willacy chides the Australian public for not getting it. For not being outraged, like he is, by Australians apparently behaving badly during combat.

Willacy takes himself very seriously. He’s on a grand mission. Uncovering the truth. Exposing cover-ups. Catching killers.

Winning awards.

Willacy reckons he’s got a good nose for a yarn.

As he told Chris Masters in 2021 while celebrating his precious Gold Walkley award: “I got a bit of luck, but it was one of those situations . . . like all of the journalists who have worked in this space, you could smell something . . . it was a matter of getting to the bottom of it.”

So imagine how Willacy’s nose radar was going off when a US marine reached out to him with a shocking tale about Australian soldiers almost a decade earlier on a joint mission callously executing a bound prisoner in Afghanistan because there was no room left on an evacuation chopper.

This was his account. “I was providing overwatch as they conducted a drug raid after being dropped off . . . they had managed to capture a half dozen prisoners or so, and they called in to get picked up and gave the count of themselves and the prisoners for the helicopters coming to pick them up. The helicopter pilots informed them they were one person over capacity for the flight back, and seconds later we heard a gunshot over the radios, and they ended up saying they had one less prisoner than they originally reported. The flight back was silent in our aircraft, and nobody acknowledged what we had all heard because our comms were recorded, but it seemed pretty clear to everyone what happened.”

The marine told Willacy he didn’t see the execution. He heard it. He was wearing ear-plugs. And ear-muffs. But he heard it. The whole crew talked about it. Out-of-control Aussie killers in the wild. What a yarn.

Willacy was all in. He reached out to a few well-placed sources. They had never heard of the murder but were happy to back it in. Sounds about right, he says he was told. Those sources, like their motivations, remain anonymous and unknown.

When it came to publication, the ear-witness marine did raise a bit of an issue with Willacy. “My memory is pretty hazy,” he said.

“My memory is fuzzy enough that I would be useless anyways when it comes to giving specific enough details to go on,” he added.

It’s the audacity. The absolutely astonishing, unadulterated arrogance.

“It happened a long time ago . . . I had very little sleep . . . so I likely won’t be able to provide you with actionable information that could go anywhere useful in any specific investigations — only the bits and pieces I can remember.”

Of the mission he was on that night, the marine told Willacy: “ I couldn’t tell you exactly where it was . . . everything is kind of a blur.”

On the Australian soldiers he was accusing of murder: “Almost all of (the Aussies) had long wild hair, some of them had gauged ear piercings and most wore baseball style hats and tennis shoes instead of boots.”

Willacy had almost no detail. But he did have a bright red flag. His star witness, his only witness, could not have been more unreliable. How do we know? He kept telling Willacy precisely that. Willacy did not talk to one other person, American or Australian, on that mission. He barely tried.

Willacy recruited an ABC colleague, highly regarded investigative reporter Dan Oakes, to help out. Oakes phoned a source, a former commando. “Mark’s got this story from this US pilot. He’s talking about Australian soldiers shooting an unarmed civilian and then planting a weapon and killing an entire family in their home and killing an Afghani prisoner because there wasn’t enough room on a chopper for him. Do you remember anything like that happening?”

Commando source: “No — not that specifically. But I did hear other stuff. It was certainly at a high level.”

Rather than sit on the story, Willacy made little effort to corroborate it, satisfying himself after a few conversations that the American was an upstanding guy, and facing almost no resistance from his editors at the ABC, the journalist rushed it out, desperate to sneak it into the public domain before the notorious Brereton report into alleged war crimes was due to land days later.

“I am told the Inspector General of Defence could be releasing his long-awaited report this month and I think your story would be good to get out there before that happens as a news feature,” Willacy told the marine.

Ahead of the pack. Awards night, here we come.

In reality, it would later become very clear, the marine’s story was fanciful. Aside from all the other flaws in the vague tale, he couldn’t possibly have heard what he called a “pop” from the executor’s weapon from high above the scene piloting his helicopter.

To the world, Willacy and his colleagues in the ABC Investigations unit are experienced, highly qualified, reputable, respected and recognised professionals. They have a reputation. In the media, when Mark Willacy puts his name to a story, it is believed. He has done the work. Even if he can’t tell the full story, for whatever reason, we are satisfied that he knows what’s really going on.

What Willacy may not have expected when publishing this tall tale was that the commander of the unit identified in the story — a distinguished soldier by the name of Heston Russell — would take exception, and find media outlets, in particular broadcaster Ben Fordham and The Daily Telegraph in Sydney, prepared to tell his version.

Willacy immediately went into damage control, emailing his marine source: “Let me know if you hear from any Aussie journos! But as suggested, I’d just say I stand by my account, read the ABC story, and I won’t answer any questions. Murdoch’s people are tabloid bottom-feeders.”

As Russell fought to clear his name, the ABC’s Investigative Unit doubled down. They went after the former soldier, determined to discredit him in any way possible to cover for their shoddy hit job. The ABC, knowing the story wasn’t true, decided to use taxpayer money, more than $1 million of it, to unsuccessfully defend the defamation case in the Federal Court.

The ABC was ordered to pay Russell $400,000 even though the judge, Michael Lee, clearly took a dislike to the former commando, and was obviously enamoured and forgiving of the reporters.

Journalism can be messy. But the detailed breakdown of how the stories came to be published, as depicted in the trial, were beyond belief. Reckless is an understatement. It’s a study in shoddiness.

And yet, the ABC has never acknowledged it, or apologised and there have been no ramifications for anyone involved.

Willacy still stands as an ABC hero, undiminished, reputation intact.

ABC managing director David Anderson stubbornly refused to admit any wrongdoing: “I am not going to apologise to Heston Russell,” he told Parliament. His news boss Justin Stevens added:

“Mark Willacy is an exceptional investigative journalist and one of the country’s most formidable public interest journalism journalists in this country. His journalism is beyond disrepute. He has done some of the most important investigations in this country. He is one of the country’s best foreign correspondents and spent a hundred days straight, or thereabouts, covering the Iraq War for this country.

“He’s a fantastic journalist, and I think it’s important that, aside from the specifies of legal cases, his journalism is beyond repute. More broadly, I assume senators are alive to the fact that defamation law can at times constrain good public interest journalism. The bar is extremely high with truth defences with regard to the deployment of truth defences in defamation cases, sometimes to the detriment of good journalism.”

The implication here is the story, as outlined above, was actually accurate, we, the ABC, just couldn’t prove it in a court of law.

It’s the audacity. The absolutely astonishing, unadulterated arrogance.

The malice and the mendacity.

Willacy was caught out fudging, manipulating, manufacturing, spinning, cinching a half-baked battlefield rumour into a war crime.

Yet the ABC stands unbowed and unrelenting, blinded by their misguided mission, their obsession with awards and recognition and, frankly, themselves.

The righteous Willacy believes everyone else is in the wrong.

“The thing that pisses me off . . . I spent two months working on a particular story involving, you know, a US helicopter crewman.

“They dropped the commandos, then it was time to pick them up. And you know, they radio in and said, ‘we have got six, you know our guys, and six prisoners.’ And the chopper pilot he heard it through the communication, he said. ‘Well, we’ve only got room for five.’ And then “pop” . ‘Yep, we’re good, we got five’.”

“Now I check that story with other sources that I couldn’t, I couldn’t really go into. And I spent two months checking out, going back to this guy, getting more detail, more detail, speaking to other people who were there.

“We put it out, we went to Defence, and then, a while later a newspaper comes out with a headline “ABC’s Pop Fiction”.

“You know, there’s this idea that we make shit up and we don’t.

“I found it a bit disappointing that you know, yeah, come after me if I’ve made a mistake or I’ve been loose with my journalism, come after me, I welcome it.

“But this journalist didn’t even call me. Didn’t ask to speak to the people I’ve spoken to. And I just found it annoying that in one day someone can pull down reporting or will try to pull it down, that takes two months.”

He made these remarks in front of an audience at a Walkley awards event. He was being celebrated for his journalism.

Aside from this account being hilarious in its hypocrisy, riddled with distortions, the irony is, his story was as close to a fabrication as you can imagine and the newspaper counter-punch was accurate after all.

New ABC chairman Kim Williams once railed against what he called the “tummy compass” editors at News Corp used to make editorial calls. Judgment, news sense, experience, according to Williams at the time, was to make way for more measurable stuff, like data.

Williams, now at the ABC, might want to take a reading from his own tummy compass and do something about the culture that has been allowed to consume the national broadcaster from within. If that doesn’t work. Just check the data. It’s damning.

You, literally, couldn’t make this shit up.

Except the ABC can. And did.