Justice has been served and it’s a shit sandwich: whistleblower David McBride is now the first person to be sentenced to jail in Australia for reporting war crimes.
While his lawyers say he will appeal, McBride’s sentence on Tuesday was for five years and eight months.
By all accounts, McBride tried to do the right thing. As a military lawyer, he raised his concerns of Afghan war crimes internally.
After being ignored, he went to the ABC. Ironically, journalist Dan Oakes was later awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia for ‘service to journalism’ for his work on the Afghan Files.
Federal Labor could have intervened with McBride – as it did for another high profile whistleblower and former ACT Attorney-General, Bernard Collaery.
Labor Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus QC, discontinued Collaery’s case using his power under the Judiciary Act 1903 in early July 2022.
So why didn’t Dreyfus do the right thing, and drop the case against McBride?
‘It’s not unpatriotic to denounce an injustice committed on our behalf, perhaps it’s the most patriotic thing we can do.’
– Author E.A. Bucchianeri
The Collaery intervention was perhaps driven less by doing the right thing, and more about containing political damage.
The ACT Court of Appeal ruled against holding Collaery’s trial in secret, so allowing the prosecution to continue would have required admitting in open court that Australia (both Labor and Coalition governments) had spied on Timor-Leste during negotiations over oil and gas reserves.
Federal Labor would presumably rather maintain the facade that protocols need to be followed, and that such action compromises the nation’s security and defence.
It’s a well worn trope from all governments, all across the globe.
Yet there is little to any evidence that the exposure of such secrets leads to an advantage for adversaries, or puts the lives of security forces at risk.
It didn’t with Julian Assange’s Wikileaks documents, of which the material released to the public was vast. He is still in jail.
There were no deaths reported after the revelations by Edward Snowden, who is unable to return to the US for fear of his life.
Generally, whistleblowers are diligent insiders who develop a conscience after the system fails them.
They want the best for their country, and understand the government is not their country.
The Guardian reported that the presiding judge in McBride’s case said he ultimately believed McBride was of ‘good character’, but he appeared ‘to have become obsessed with the correctness of his own opinions’.
Was that an opinion that embarrassed the government?
Hans Lovejoy, editor
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