David McBride: former army lawyer sentenced to five years for stealing and leaking Afghanistan war documents
David McBride: former army lawyer sentenced to five years for stealing and leaking Afghanistan war documents
McBride, who had pleaded guilty to stealing commonwealth information and passing it to the ABC, receives non-parole jail term of 27 months
Complete bullshit. Regimes that punish whistleblowers harder than war criminals reveal themselves as dreaming of tyranny.
The entire trial was cooked, and I'm furious :(
That non parole period is nuts too, pure revenge. What danger does this man represent? If he's out on the streets some war criminals better watch their backs?
edit: I should add, it's also quite frustrating that at the end of all this top brass has had no light shone on them, which was his initial goal on leaking. He thought the SAS was being investigated overmuch as a distraction from leadership failures. I guess we'll never know. A slap on the wrist for the executioners, no systematic investigation, and an inconvenient man in gaol.
The material was used as the basis for an investigative series exposing war crimes committed by Australian defence personnel in Afghanistan.
If it's war crimes the good of humanity should come above the good of a regime committing war crimes.
I'm going to be honest - that's better than I was expecting. Obviously he should not have been sentenced to prison in the first place, and his trial definitely shouldn't have been pretty much rigged like it was, but I was definitely expecting to see him cop life, or a sentence long enough that it essentially is life.
Yeah that's actually not that bad. but he'll miss out on a lot of his daughter's life and his dog's which is probably the saddest part of it. I'm surprised people don't care about this case, like there are students protesting in Universities about something going on in the middle east something they will have very little influence over. No such protests over David McBride.
note: I'm not saying I disagree with the free Palestine protests.
I dunno about other universities, but I'd say the UQ protests actually are focused on something they have more ability to change than McBride's conviction. Boeing has a very cosy relationship with UQ, and their core demand is to end that partnership and stop their own university being complicit in genocide by association.
A UQ student has more ability to change what corporations UQ partners with than they do to change court decisions made in Canberra.
The understanding young people have of the world around them is so heavily influenced by algorithm-based social media now, and English-based social media is in-turn heavily influenced by American current affairs which tends to dominate the algorithms. It is very hard for the trial of one Australian whistleblower to compete with that and even if students are aware of it the pro-Palestine/pro-Israel student movements are so much more appealing. They give those young people the opportunity to become part of a global movement and feel like they are effecting real change beyond their own borders. Additionally I'm not sure if the Afghanistan War is actually relevant to the current generation of undergraduate students. They were very young during the period in which it was something Australians felt strongly about and likely can't connect to the historic war crimes committed by Australian soldiers there in the same way they can connect to the war crimes they are seeing in their feeds now.
The year is 2034, war has become the norm. Prisons are filled with dissidents, whistleblowers, and more. Prison gangs move from violence to scary Sudoku.
When the whitleblower gets prosecuted instead of the war criminals...
Ausnazitralia what a shit hole
This was a much crazier headline the first time I read it, when it was about Danny McBride.
I think leaking military secrets is as good as treason.
Down vote me all you like.
I also recognise it's a slippery slope that will lead to criminal investigations etc being leaked and punished just as hard to keep a politician or police officer safe.
The difference is the military is here to protect everyone, the police are here to protect those in power.
If you sign an NDA with a private company, they can sue you for violating that NDA.
If the reason you violated the NDA was to reveal that the company is doing something illegal, you are legally protected from that lawsuit.
The same ought to be true with the government. We have laws describing what the defence forces are and are not allowed to do in the execution of their military objectives. These are laws passed by the Australian Parliament in order to keep us in line with the internationally-accepted standard laid out in treaties. If the military is violating Australian law, it's important that they be made to stop this. Ideally that would be done by a soldier reporting the crime to their superior, but what if the crime was ordered by superiors? Or if it's a widespread institutional problem widespread across the military?
Well for that, we have whistleblower protection laws. We created these laws specifically so that whistleblowers would be allowed to reveal crimes. And McBride had 2 expert witnesses lined up to support his whistleblower defence. But the government stopped them from being allowed to testify, making a ridiculous claim of "national security". I say ridiculous, because courts are allowed to be closed to the public & press for precisely this reason. We don't know what the evidence he sought to bring in was, but we do at the very least know it's not "identities of agents or codes", thanks to comments from McBride's lawyer.
The fact that he was prosecuted in the first place in a gross violation of Australia's principles. The fact he was not allowed to present evidence in his defence is a gross perversion of the justice system. This is absolutely indefensible.
Not going to downvote you, partly because I only downvote spam and partly because kbin doesn't federate downvotes so I can't even see downvotes from you and vice versa.
But I fundamentally disagree. One of the lessons of Nuremberg was that obeying orders isn't a good enough reason to commit war crimes.
One of the corollaries to that, for me, is that obeying rules isn't a good enough reason to be complicit in covering up war crimes either.
If a secret is a crime it's more treasonous to keep it a secret, because the people of our nations haven't voted to leave the Geneva Conventions and go out and commit war crimes.
It's not like he handed them to a stranger at a train station or sold them to the highest bidder. He carefully sought out a trustworthy investigative journalist from the most trustworthy and reputable broadcaster in the country. A public one mind you, without a pure profit motive and stringent ethical guidelines.
The military is not an impartial or objective body either. They are just as politically active as the police with their own self serving goals.
I don't want to downvote because that's not good conversation.
I also recognise it’s a slippery slope that will lead to criminal investigations etc being leaked and punished just as hard to keep a politician or police officer safe.
That is exactly what is going on here - those in power in the military were covering up their own failures and investigating innocent soldiers instead of those committing war crimes, i.e. Ben Roberts-Smith who was their PR guy basically who the politicians were using to sell the war.
The difference is the military is here to protect everyone, the police are here to protect those in power.
Given the premise for our military engagements since WW2 it is quite difficult to argue that. I think it's dangerous to think that the military can be above the law and do things which may damage Australia's international reputation without the consent of the Australian people. If we don't know what's happening we can't consent to it.
I will concede we should know what is going on, but unfortunately I'm certainly not qualified to make decisions on what we should and shouldn't know and i doubt you are either.
It's bad to know we have to live in ignorance, but imagine if an asteroid was coming to earth tomorrow 50/50 of hitting, the right thing would be tell everyone and let us make our own decisions. The ramifications from that though would be monumental. Yes this is hyperbole but it I think gets my point across.
Sometimes people in power know better, and if this was the worst thing happening then we're not doing to bad.
Bro he leaked war crimes you ass, that's the morally right thing to do.