Australian David McBride has 3 law degrees and was in the British army. He is an Australian whistle-blower and source for the Afghan files revealing crimes against innocent Afghans by the Australian military. He was sentenced to 5 years, the same as Julian Assange for speaking truth to power.
The message is that those who reveal secrets of crime will be jailed. So I guess we fill the Serco owned jails. Truth sets all free, not war. There is no war, it only is created in the minds of those not at peace and distorting reality to justify cruelty.
My question:
Was the murder of innocent Afghan people to ‘blood’ Australian soldiers so they could attack the Australian public?
We saw Wilsons security attack innocent refugees and then get a contract guarding the Parliament. This seemed to me about teaching those in security to attack innocent vulnerable people. They had their contract cancelled on Manus and Nauru. The contracts for offshore detention pay up to a trillion dollars. All homeless would be housed if this was diverted to the people not foreign contractors.
Another case of attacking innocent people could be easily identified during Covid lockdowns in Melbourne. The public protests at the Shrine of Rememberance looked to me like military style operation with powerful weapons used by men in black (not Victoria police) shooting rubber bullets at the people when their hands were UP. Was this operation to teach Victoria Police that this is how you suppress protest? Training? All the public were saying was no to mandatory vaccines, there was no violence, it was hardly an issue that warranted the attack. The violence from those in authority was the real issue shutting down opposing voices in a democracy where we have a right to protest and freedom of speech.
My step father came with me to drive me to Parliament and we went in the back way to Parliament. It was there that he showed me ASIO was attached to the Parliament. This is a breach of the ‘separation of powers’. ASIO as an intelligence organisation should not be physically attached to the Parliament. It is not appropriate. My step father was concerned.
In 2019 I attended the Parliamentary Inquiry in Canberra into the AFP raid on the ABC and took notes (they are published in my Covid-19 Senate Reports on Australia). What I observed was a fraternity or congeniality between Intelligence (ASIO, ASIS), AFP police, Home Affairs and politicians. Thus, no separation of powers which is important. When I went to the public toilet Senator Keneally was in the toilet and came out as I was saying to a woman ‘interesting‘. I noted she didn’t go to the Senate toilets why public? She asked me who I am? I said the ‘public’ then said ‘public media’. I wasn’t with any community media at the time, I was referring to witnessing the proceedings as I felt inspired to be there. She advised me to go to the media part of the inquiry in Sydney.
After I left the toilet I felt inspired to give her a poem I had in my bag. I realised she was the one I was to give it to, as I had not intended to give a poem. It was called ‘We the People’. I stood next to her in the inquiry until she finished speaking and I said this is my poem it is for you. Then I noticed behind the glass panel at the back, a man was busily looking at me and gathering data, looking serious Who am I to stand there uninvited, as ‘the public’, who you all are supposed to represent. This is a link to my poetry book go to page 60. Refer: https://ha.worldpeacefull.com/wp-content/uploads/A-CIVIL-INTEGRITY-MANIFESTO-final23.pdf
I felt sitting amongst the intelligence community was the place to BE. I always will remember Michael Pezzullo Home Affairs Secretary saying ‘we are brothers and sisters’, immediately I felt secret society. Intuitively my sense was this was a core issue. I was one of a few members of the public there that day and I stood out like a sore thumb.
I just found out that Michael Pezzulo was sacked over comments re China. I believe war is being talked up and set up with the nuclear submarines as a core issue. We do not need nuclear submarines or nuclear power (see Chenobyl, Fukushima). Funnily enough Admiral Davidson mentioned the submarines and I had a feeling about ‘submarines’ at the time. I made a mental note. I believe a nuclear sub will make Australians a target “threat” and I believe this is deliberate. Although UFOs are well known to shut down nuclear silos as has been reported by the military. As for enemies, this is unlikely given Chinese CCP interests in Australia and alliances. You only need look at the pharmaceutical industry cross-ownership to see countries are all working together, not for their people but more because ‘greed is good’. This is the New World Order, in my view, creating conflict which diverts resources away from the people pauperising countries and creating the conditions for austerity and further control. We so easily get ‘fooled’ by the narrative. This is why whistle-blowers are speaking up. There will be more and more the longer this goes on. 2024 is a turnkey year. Thank goodness. The article is by the privatised ABC provides their content on Michael Pezzulo. Refer: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-22/mike-pezzullo-admits-mistakes-warns-of-china-threat/103754858
A few days after my visit to the Senate my mother and step-father were stopped by police. I happened to be walking to their place from the Woden Plaza on a path parallel. I saw the police flashing lights. I didn’t know it was my mother. She wasn’t speeding. She told them off for being dangerous as they flashed their lights as she went around a roundabout and she couldn’t pull over. I believe mum’s car number plate was flagged when my step father Glen and I went to the Parliament. It is likely they thought I was driving. I also had a police light turn on at the Plaza (Woden Plaza) as I walked passed. I would say facial recognition. I had committed no crime, yet was being watched which is why I don’t feel safe today. I believe I am targetted for my research on Covid-19 which was to empower the public.
A link to my Topline Summaries: https://www.academia.edu/72518213/COVID_19_Senate_Submission_Topline_Summaries_Report
The intelligence community need real checks and balances as they can be weaponised against the public by data collection, talking up threats and assassination. This is not to say that there haven’t been intelligence officers wanting to speak up, there have been. There would be those in this community that want to protect our country and feel unable to make a difference. However, there are others who believe they are a law unto themselves and are doing the bidding of foreign interests, themselves compromised or believing untruths as this is the world of deception they live in. Kevin Shipp a former senior CIA intelligence officer in his presentations discusses the Deep State and Shadow State and a post Constitution government. The biggest threat he says was his government. Australia is on the same boat.
It was a timely Senate hearing just before the Covid-19 operation and release of a bioweapon on the global population. Of course the military were deployed during Covid-19 at checkpoint Charlie (I called them), when the public were unlawfully prevented from moving around our country and forced to get permits. We were being taught to show identification and still are. None of it is lawful. Laws were put in place to ensure justice, what happens when those in leadership are engaged in crime, what then? Who protects ‘we the people’?
We are in redefining times where we are waking up to Crimes Against Humanity and the jailing of those speaking the truth. Will AI take over the police, the military, the government as we lose all rights? I recall in 2018 the US Admiral Davidson at the Lowly Institute (broadcast) who said Australia was a pilot study for AI and Automation, is this why we cannot speak the truth or reveal crimes?
I speak for the people, no-one in this country wants this, they want the corruption stopped and the killing of innocent civilians or setting them up or smearing them, to stop. We want a return to ‘good government’. I definitely want our government but not a corrupt government influenced by foreign actors. The hard work is to investigate the ‘why’ of war crimes and how people justify them as some ‘good’. At what point do we become a civilisation that moves beyond the need to harm others but actually do the hard work of solving our own problems that arise through unquestioned thinking. I advise people to go to The Work of Byron Katie. Start questioning your own thoughts for truth and see where that leads you, as within yourself truth is there. As Byron Katie says, all war should be on paper. I agree with her.
Australian war crimes whistleblower David McBride jailed for six years
Eight years after Australia began investigating alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, a whistleblower is the first to be punished.
By Al Jazeera StaffPublished On 14 May 202414 May 2024
Former Australian Army lawyer David McBride has been sentenced to five years and eight months for revealing information about alleged Australian war crimes in Afghanistan.
Supporters of McBride have long expressed his concern that the Australian government was more interested in punishing him for revealing information about war crimes rather than the alleged perpetrators.
“It is a travesty that the first person imprisoned in relation to Australia’s war crimes in Afghanistan is not a war criminal but a whistleblower,” said Rawan Arraf, the executive director of the Australian Centre for International Justice, in a statement released after the sentencing.
“This is a dark day for Australian democracy,” Kieran Pender, the acting legal director of the Melbourne-based Human Rights Law Centre, said in the same statement, noting McBride’s imprisonment would have “a grave chilling effect on potential truth-tellers”.
McBride, who arrived at the Supreme Court in Canberra, Australia this morning with his pet dog and surrounded by supporters, will remain behind bars until at least August 13, 2026, before he is eligible for parole.
In an interview with Al Jazeera before his trial began last year, McBride said he had never made a secret of sharing the files.
“What I want to be discussed is whether or not I was justified in doing so,” McBride stressed.
The former Australian Army lawyer’s sentencing comes almost seven years after Australian public broadcaster, the ABC, published a series of seven articles known as the Afghan Files based on information McBride provided.
The series led to an unprecedented Australian Federal Police raid on ABC headquarters in June 2019 but details published in the series were also later confirmed in an Australian government inquiry, which found there was credible evidence to support allegations war crimes had been committed.
A Spokesperson for the Office of the Special Investigator (OSI) told Al Jazeera that a former Australian Special Forces soldier who was charged with one count of the war crime of murder on March 20, 2023, is on bail with a mention scheduled for July 2, 2024.
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“This is the first war crime arrest resulting from [joint investigations between the Office of the Special Investigator (OSI) and the Australian Federal Police]”, the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson also said the investigations were “very complex” and “expected to take a significant amount of time” but that they were conducting them as “thoroughly and expeditiously as possible”.
In a separate case last year, an Australian judge found Australia’s most decorated soldier Ben Roberts-Smith was “complicit in and responsible for the murder” of three Afghan men while on deployment. The finding was made in defamation proceedings brought by Roberts-Smith against three Australian newspapers who had reported on the allegations against him.
Roberts-Smith has appealed against the defamation ruling.
‘Greyer, murkier, messier’
McBride’s sentencing comes four months after Dan Oakes, one of two ABC journalists who wrote the Afghan Files, was awarded an Order of Australia Medal, with the citation simply saying he was recognised “for service to journalism”.
Oakes was quoted by the ABC at the time as saying, “I’m very proud of the work we did with the Afghan Files and I know that it did have a positive effect in that it helps bring some of this conduct to light.
“If [this medal] is at least partly due to that reporting then I do feel some sense of satisfaction.”
But Oakes, who has reportedly not spoken to McBride in six years, later told the ABC’s Four Corners programme that the story was “much greyer and murkier and messier than people appreciate”.
While Oakes and McBride have not stayed in touch, the whistleblower has attracted the support of a wide range of Australians, including human rights lawyers, senators and journalists.
On Tuesday, supporters gathered outside the court, with speakers on McBride’s behalf including Australian Greens Senator David Shoebridge.
It would be “an indelible stain on the Albanese Labor government” if McBride “walks into the Supreme Court this morning” and is then “taken out the back to jail”, Shoebridge said before the sentencing hearing.
In a joint statement from several Australians issued after the hearing, Peter Greste, the executive director of the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, said that “press freedom relies on protections for journalists and their sources”. He also noted that Australia had recently dropped to 39th in the global press freedom rankings.
Greste is a former Al Jazeera reporter who was jailed with two colleagues in Egypt from 2013 to 2015 on national security charges brought by the Egyptian government.
“As someone who was wrongly imprisoned for my journalism in Egypt, I am outraged about David McBride’s sentence on this sad day for Australia,” said Greste.
McBride is one of several Australians facing punishment for revealing information, while high-profile Australian Julian Assange will face hearings on his potential extradition from the United Kingdom to the United States later this month.