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.
wtaf
You’re one of the saner voices around these parts.
I honestly don’t even know how to respond to someone saying they would rather have 10 people die because of keeping a fucked up secret than have an open and honest society. Like seriously that’s just beyond the pale.
I think often when people think of other people dying they internalise it as a headline does. Such and such died, ok that’s sad I guess.
I think the correct way to interpret it is to take the death of the person you have been the closest to ever. All that pain and grief and rage, multiply that by the number of people expected to feel that per person, then by the number of people dead. you start to interpret pointless, preventable, or cruel deaths with the appropriate amount of madness-tinged grief then.
Exactly. I touched on this in another reply but this could easily be us in a parallel universe (or even our own, one day). We are civilians too. The murder of civilians by armed forces should concern us, regardless of where they live in the world. I wonder how this person would feel about the situation if it was reversed, and a whistleblower in another country was being prosecuted for revealing the murders of Australian civilians by foreign armed forces.
I like to take every government act I think is a bit iffy and contextualise it as “north Korea does X” to see what my opinion of it really is.
I’m saying it’s better a fucked up secret is kept than 10 people die not the other way around
Ok, but that’s not what your earlier comment said. It’s quite the opposite of your earlier comment.
Anyway, even if we do take it that way, as others have said, it just doesn’t work that way. Keeping these secrets is enabling more deaths to occur. The “fucked up secret” was “people are getting away with murdering noncombatants and prisoners and covering it up”. By revealing this “fucked up secret”, McBride was helping to save lives.
Ironically, this is kinda what you seemed to be acknowledging in your earlier comment. You said that keeping the secret leads to deaths (“keep a fucked up secret then have 10 men die”).