The Australian Capital Territory’s Court of Appeal yesterday rejected a bid by David McBride to have his sentence reduced, as well as a challenge by the whistleblower against the authoritarian legal conceptions behind his jailing.
The ruling by the three-judge panel continues and upholds the extraordinary situation where the only individual convicted and imprisoned over documented Australian war crimes in Afghanistan is McBride. He is not accused of having committed the atrocities. His sole “offence” was to expose the violations of international law.
As an army lawyer, McBride had access to information demonstrating that Australian Special Forces soldiers had committed clear war crimes during the neo-colonial occupation of Afghanistan, including extrajudicial murders of civilians.
After McBride’s attempts to raise the issue within the chain of military command were blocked, he turned the information over to journalists. That led to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) 2017 publication of the “Afghan Files,” detailing some of the crimes.
That publication triggered a massive state response, including an unprecedented 2019 raid of the ABC’s Sydney headquarters by the Australian Federal Police and threats to prosecute the journalists involved. This was both a clear attempt to intimidate anyone contemplating further exposures and a continuation of a protracted cover-up of the war crimes, which had been committed between 2009 and 2013.
McBride was hounded for years...
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