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.
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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.
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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.
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getting UQ to dissociate with Boeing is hardly likely to actually achieve anything in the context of war
Absolutely fair. But it's the one thing UQ students have the most ability to affect, and if Boeing and other weapons manufacturers lost their associations with every research institution because of similar protests, that would have a much more sizeable impact.
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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.
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