Comment by mrkeen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrkeen | Hacker News Reader

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I'm all for whistleblower protection and don't think he should be serving time, based on the 15 minutes I've been aware of this, (so don't take this "but" the wrong way)

but,

What exactly was he blowing the whistle about?

> McBride had become dissatisfied with military leadership and increased scrutiny of soldiers.

> McBride's lawyers told the court that he had leaked information in an attempt to bring awareness to excessive investigation of soldiers.

What? Is he a counter-whistle blower? What am I missing?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_McBride_(whistleblower...]

Follow-up:

Ok this article makes it make a bit more sense: https://apnews.com/article/mcbride-whistleblower-court-priso...

> McBride’s documents formed the basis of an Australian Broadcasting Corp. seven-part television series in 2017 that contained war crime allegations including Australian Special Air Service Regiment soldiers killing unarmed Afghan men and children in 2013.

> McBride’s argument that his suspicions that the higher echelons of the Australian Defense Force were engaged in criminal activity obliged him to disclose classified papers “didn’t reflect reality,” Mossop said.

Listen to his actual words, not the reporting from the media: https://youtu.be/sYt4CxFfQUU?si=MpgD5PcFlB4gLzHj

You'll see the reporting is totally skewed (huge surprise). He identified certain low ranking military members being effectively thrown under the bus for small things, or things it's dubious they even did. While the Australian gov continues to protect the real psychos: special forces and the top brass.

Successive federal governments wanted to keep up appearances with the US, & kept them on station for too long. Oversight & discipline became frayed. Certain US special forces wouldn't work with them because of it. The grunts were sacrificed to protect the top brass, but especially the politicians who looked the other way. Particularly embarrassing to do otherwise when one (Ben Roberts-Smith) has already been given a Victoria Cross.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Files_(Australia)

> The documents were leaked to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) by David McBride,[3] upon and seven stories were ultimately published as a result. The documents covered a wide range of topics, however most notably it detailed multiple cases of possible unlawful killings of unarmed men and children.

https://michaelwest.com.au/david-mcbride-sentencing-reserved...

Odgers says the Army command was involved with “window dressing” which he suspected involved criminality; that is “command was undertaking improper investigations done for PR purposes, and he found that repellant and believed that he needed this to be properly investigated”.

> What exactly was he blowing the whistle about?

If you dig a bit deeper within your own Wikipedia link, you’ll see the actual list of issues [0].

> The documents contained at least 10 accounts of possibly unlawful killings of unarmed men and children

> of an incident in which an SAS soldier severed the hands of an Afghan insurgent for identification confirmation purposes

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Files_(Australia)

But he wasn't blowing the whistle on those.

He says, both in court and elsewhere, that his concern was that higher ups were undertaking investigations of soldiers he felt did nothing wrong, for PR reasons, and he believed that was illegal.

I was certainly confused before but I think it makes more sense now.

As a lawyer, his assignment was to prosecute a soldier whom he thought innocent - a scapegoat - when the top brass knew about actual war criminals (e.g. Ben Roberts-Smith).

So it seems to be a regular power struggle? All these guys did shady things and then some of the higher ups want to pick a few scapegoats to clear the record and save their asses? So one of the underlings just blow the whistles but clearly the higher ups still have things under control.

Just purely speculating btw...

My take is this is Abu Ghraib again.

David McBride is a military lawyer and is standing up for justice for the soldiers accused of war crimes because there is evidence they were acting under orders and did not simply lose discipline and go rogue. In other words this was coordinated terror campaign, not a few soldiers getting trigger happy.

They executed civilians.[1,2,3] You don't execute civilians. Any officer who gives you an order to execute civilians is giving you an unlawful order. This is so fundamental it is covered in basic training.

The reporting around this has indicated that basically there was a culture within the SAS that you needed to be "blooded" and serving SAS personnel were isolated, harassed or threatened by other personnel if they didn't participate by those who were in it.

The people being investigated may or may not have been acting under orders from higher officers...but the accusations are that they also directly threatened other soldiers if they objected to, or directly facilitated, those unlawful orders.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/may/...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-20/former-sas-soldier-ar...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-65773942

Agrree it's inexcusable. But I still find it hard to belive that 22, one of the most disciplined regiments, have totally gone to shit andlost the plot (notwithstanding some seriously criminal instruction from higher up). And thankyou for the elightening links.

What you've mentioned is underreported. He was whistleblowing because he was dissatisfied with military leadership and the *increased scrutiny* of soldiers.

Ironically, this led to further scrutiny and the identification of alleged war crimes.

This is the impression that I got from reading Wikipedia and quotes from his lawyer, so I wouldn't call it underreported.

Someone elsewhere in this thread linked me to a video where McBride explained that the top brass knew about actual war crimes (e.g. Ben Roberts-Smith,) and wanted to appear to be doing something, so they tasked McBride with prosecuting a scapegoat (whom McBride believed innocent) and that was what caused him to to start gathering and leaking documents.

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