In the cult movie, “The Blues Brothers” there is a car chase; possibly the best car chase ever filmed. Such is the chaos being wrought by Jake and Elwood Blues on the freeways leading into Chicago that just about every police car in the force is out on the road determined to capture them. At a critical point in the chase and with the reputation of the force on the line, the officer in the radio room issues the instruction, “The use of unnecessary force has been approved.”

When the first of the allegations of cruelty by Australian naval personnel against asylum seekers was reported by the ABC, I was sceptical. That is not what we do, I thought. That can’t be true. But subsequent to those alleged New Year’s Day events, a claim surfaced that there existed within the Navy a group linked to the Australian Defence League, an…