Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Got Anti-Venin?

Now, this is bad for foreign relations, of course, but it also strikes me as just plain dumb. North Queensland's Outback has plenty of critters with a mean, homicidal streak, starting with insects and snakes. Running around out there in the boonies with your privates exposed just seems - well - unusually ill-advised, even granting that it was July, the coolest month in Australia:
NAKED army officers posed for photographs wearing head dress and brandishing firearms in the latest shameful episode to rock the defence forces.

The Daily Telegraph can reveal the tasteless prank - which included male officers from Randwick Army Barracks in Sydney - is now the subject of an Defence Department investigation.

The episode occurred during a joint training exercise between Australian and US troops in July. The huge joint exercise, dubbed Talisman Sabre, was a mock training run between the Australian armed forces and their US allies. But for a group of soldiers seconded to the Shoalwater Military Base near Rockhampton, it became an opportunity to ridicule Arab men in front of the cameras.

...RSL bosses were appalled by the pictures, which depicted officers wearing head dress associated with men in Middle Eastern countries.

The case is similar to the Ku Klux Klan scandal revealed in November last year when soldiers at Townsville's Lavarack Barracks wore KKK-style hoods to intimidate black comrades.

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