"The Circle" can VC recipient.

[David]

[nomadjack]

I don't disagree with much of what you're saying David, and you'll need to go a long way to find a stronger advocate for transparency and accountability in government. McBride is not the poster boy for this though. If he had his way our special forces soldiers who were accused of a range of atrocities would not have been investigated. These actions run completely contrary to transparency or accountability. As the recent court case made clear, he chose to leak documents to push his case without fully exploring internal processes. His complaints were investigated and were found to be unsubstantiated. He had the option of pursuing them further in house but instead, when he didn't get the answer he wanted, he leaked to a number of journos. Ironically, the Afghan files reports that flowed from these completely blew up in his face by lending creedence to the need for investigating atrocities that McBride was effectively an apologist for. He's no friend of transparency or accountability.

[Magpietothemax]

[David]

[Magpietothemax]

^Well it makes far more sense if in fact he was iniitially motivated to protect lower level employees whom he thought were being targeted, rather than the suggestion that he was leaking documents in order to protect the top military brass! !
It makes no sense, as you pointed out, to argue that he was opposed to transparency - if that were his position, leaking any documents whatsoever would be anathema to him! Regardless of the initial motivations, his actions initiated a sequence of events which were of immense benefit to publci consciousness, and required great personal courage to undertake in the first place.
..and now you mention it, i do recall reading that the top military brass was attempting to palm off the atrocities on to a small group of "bad apples" who were to be blamed for the war crimes committed, rather than the general policies and attitudes that were being created by the military command, necessary for creating the type of soldiers necessary to carry out a criminal colonial war in which every Afghan person was seen as an enemy. So by opposing the criminalisation of a few soldiers, McBride's actions logically led to the exposure of an entire brutal and criminal military policy pervading the ADF from the top downwards.
As an example of what I am talking about, the order was issued by the military command in Afghanistan that the hands of Afghanis killed by the ADF should be servered off the corpse for identification purposes. This is the kind of attitude towards the Afghani popultion that the military command was responsible for, and which therefore created a force of trained military killers capable of murdering innocent civilians.

[nomadjack]

MM, I've got a novel idea...take the time to read the bloody court transcript including McBride's own words. If you were to do so you would find that McBride defended the practice of soldiers severing the hands of Afghanis for id purposes as an operational necessity. Military command were against the practice because of how the Australian public would most likely react. McBride's whole argument with command was that the threshold for investigating potential misconduct and war crimes was set too low, meaning that soldiers were potentially going to be 'unfairly' investigated and potentially held accountable for actions he regarded as legitimate, including the accidental /careless killing of civilians. It's all there on public record and in McBride's own words if you care to look. You've hitched your wagon to the wrong horse.

[Magpietothemax]

In fact McBride was defending soldiers from prosecution whom he believed were being prosecuted unjustly to cover for real war criminals who were being protected by the military command.
The military command in Afghanistan realised that it has a public image problem when several war crimes committed by Australian troops in Afghanistan were publicised and responded by issuing new Rules of Engagement which placed extreme conditions on the justification for soldiers to pull the trigger. This was to cover up for the real war criminals, who continued to falsify their reports - while the soldiers with integrity, who gave true reports of events, then found themselves questioned over their decisions, and then unjustly prosecuted. The new ROE were ":window dressing" for the real war criminals, while other soldiers attempting to do the right thing were being prosecuted for public consumption, ie to create the facade that the Australian military "takes war crimes seriously".
McBride's entire argument was that these rules of engagement were placing the lives of honest soldiers in danger, while the war criminals continued to do as they pleased because their reports were continually being falsified.
Dan Oakes, the reporter who used McBride's evidence for the Afghan Files report, appeared in an "exclusive" ABC interview just before McBride's court case, and helped publicise the malicious distorsion that McBride was not interested in reporting war crimes, but simply wanted to defend soldiers from unjust prosecution. Naturally, this distorsion appears in the court transcript, which is just as despicable as the Oakes'ABC interview. The Gauardian is the only news outlet which has at least had some degree of balance in reporting on McBrides case:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-n ... -the-media

I think NJ that you have hitched your horse to the wrong wagon.

[nomadjack]

^I don't have a horse in the race. I also prefer to base my views on evidence rather than someone's summary of a Guardian journos article. Read the transcript including McBride's own words.

[Magpietothemax]

^I don't have a horse in the race. I also prefer to base my views on evidence rather than someone's summary of a Guardian journos article. Read the transcript including McBride's own words.

I just explained why the transcript is garbage.

[nomadjack]

Simple question - have you read it?

[Magpietothemax]

Simple question - have you read it?

Have you read the Guardian article i referenced?
Have you read the other link i included in my previous post?

[nomadjack]

Yes to both. And David's link. Pretty radical idea, but if I'm arguing with someone I actually take the time to read what they put up. Interesting to note the WSWS piece dances around McBride's motivations and focuses entirely on the issue around whistleblower protection. It's disingenuous in intimating that McBride was a warrior against war crimes without actually saying his actions were aimed at bringing these claims to light. Almost as if Head new such claims were indefensible given McBride's own statements. Read the transcript...it doesn't take that long.

[David]