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think positive 
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| pietillidie wrote: | With this type of thing you need to hold two perspectives at once. First, you've got the genuine need for defence, which is responsible risk management. Then, that inevitably involves persuading a mix of people, some dedicated and some without better options, into signing up to do a thankless and periodically deadly task.
At the same time, you've also got the natural creepiness of isolated, opaque, authoritarian organisations. You need them, but they will always attract their share of crazies and deviants, and create a good number more.
So, there is a need for both support and distrust at the same time. It's just how it is with some things in life. |
correct weight
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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Pies4shaw 
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Looks like the Julian Knight comparison I made back in the day was far more apt than I knew. This guy might be the most prolific murderer we’ve produced in a generation.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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watt price tully 
Joined: 15 May 2007
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| slangman wrote: | Your hypocrisy is staggering.
On one hand your argument is that BRS didn’t follow proper procedure to ascertain the guilt of the Afghan person, but you’re more than happy to throw proper procedure out the window with the murder accusation against BRS to suit your narrative.
You can’t have it both ways.
Until there is a proper criminal trial, I won’t be jumping to accuse BRS as being a murderer. |
With respect you can defend the murderer and liar all you like but the weight of evidence is (not by me or you) is quite clear.
Investigative journalists who had their information corroborated through multiple sources;
An independent Judge looking at all the available evidence shows he had no good reputation to defend;
Threatening witnesses and lying;
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, has an old fashioned name of a city as a famous meal used as an adjective before it (or tastes like a duck),
Has feathers and is still allowed to be shot in Victoria then it’s a 🦆.
While people should be deemed innocent until proven guilty the overwhelming evidence here is that he is. I’ll stick by the honest soldiers and honest journalists well before a person demonstrated to be a bully and liar.
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“I even went as far as becoming a Southern Baptist until I realised they didn’t keep ‘em under long enough” Kinky Friedman |
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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mmmmm Duck Hunting. Haven't done that for decades, gonna need a new shotgun if I want to do it next year, the current one is designed for close range mayhem, not duck shooting.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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The trial of the whistleblower who revealed the Afghan war crimes, David McBride, is beginning this week. Here's an article by Peter Greste on the case:
https://www.crikey.com.au/2023/11/13/david-mcbride-charges-transparency-reviews-afghan-files/
| Quote: | Transparency reviews ‘meaningless’ unless charges against McBride are dropped
Peter Greste
In the ACT Supreme Court today, a judge will open the first trial in relation to war crimes committed by Australian special forces in Afghanistan. But the man in the dock is not any of the soldiers accused of executing civilians in cold blood. It is David McBride, the military lawyer who blew the whistle and helped publicly expose the allegations.
McBride was working with the military when he saw evidence of war crimes and took his concerns up the chain of command. He was worried that the “operators” — the soldiers working in the field — would take the blame for what he ultimately regarded as lousy leadership. But when nobody responded, he went to the Australian Federal Police (AFP), and when still nothing happened, he finally went to the ABC with a dossier that it eventually published as the “Afghan Files”.
The files were explosive. They exposed details of how SAS soldiers allegedly executed unarmed men and boys. Some marked AUSTEO — “Australian Eyes Only” — spoke of “problems” within special forces, an “organisational culture” including a “warrior culture” and a willingness by officers to turn a blind eye to poor behaviour.
Years later, the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force (IGADF) Afghanistan Inquiry, known as the Brereton Report, vindicated all that McBride complained of, and referred numerous cases to the AFP for criminal investigation.
So why is the lawyer-turned-whistleblower facing charges that could send him to prison for the rest of his life?
McBride is facing five charges, including one of theft of Commonwealth property (the reams of paper documents that he handed to the ABC), two of unauthorised disclosure of information under the Crimes Act, and two of breaches of the Defence Act. McBride has pleaded not guilty. But he has openly acknowledged that he was the ABC’s source, and the documents likely included information that breached those other two laws.
McBride is therefore expected to argue that he was acting in line with his highest responsibility as a public servant, literally serving the interests of the public by exposing patently bad behaviour, rather than the Defence Department which was interested in maintaining secrecy.
In October last year, McBride was forced to withdraw a formal “public interest” whistleblowing defence when it became clear that if he pressed ahead, the government would seek to prevent him from using relevant evidence under national security laws. This is absurd, given that the whole point of the Public Interest Disclosure Act is to, well, protect disclosures that are in the public interest.
Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus insists he believes in transparency in government, yet has refused to exercise his power to drop the charges and send a clear signal that he is genuine about reforming the culture of secrecy that has infected the Australian government.
Dreyfus has acknowledged that the system is not working as it should and ordered two separate reviews — one of the Public Interest Disclosure Act and the wider ecosystem of support for whistleblowers, and another of national security-related secrecy laws to see how they can be amended to protect press freedom. Both are laudable, but meaningless as long as McBride remains on trial.
To be clear, McBride’s case is a serious foundational challenge to our democracy. As a coalition of civil society groups recently told a parliamentary inquiry: “Presently, in Australia, the balance between secrecy and transparency is unjustifiably and undemocratically tilted in favour of secrecy.”
To deal with the problem, the government needs to make at least three substantial changes. First, it needs to follow through with its commitment to reforming whistleblower laws, dramatically strengthening the public interest test, and establishing an independent whistleblower authority to support people such as McBride.
Second, it needs to introduce a media freedom act that effectively enshrines the media as the whistle-of-last resort, with a hard-wired presumption in favour of publishing. My organisation, the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, is working on a draft that we believe would dramatically shift that culture of secrecy.
We are not arguing the media should have the right to publish whatever it wants regardless of the consequences, but investigators would be obliged to show a compelling overriding public interest in investigating a journalist’s sources and suppressing publishing.
If those changes were in place before the ABC published its “Afghan Files”, it is hard to see how the government could prosecute genuine whistleblowers acting in the public interest.
Which brings me to the third change Dreyfus needs to make: don’t let a whistleblower go to jail. |
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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Right down the very bottom of the hole ...: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-28/nsw-ben-roberts-smith-ordered-to-pay-indemnity-costs/103159896
| Quote: | Mr Roberts-Smith previously accepted he should pay costs on an indemnity basis only as far back as March 2020 — when the publisher made a second offer to settle.
"In my opinion, the applicant should pay the respondents' costs assessed on an indemnity basis from the commencement of the proceedings," Justice Besanko said today in a written decision.
The case was initiated in August 2018.
Journalist Chris Masters, one of the respondents, has previously said it took five years and about $30 million to defend the case. |
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Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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