- by C Bartholomew
- The Guardian
- Issue #2203
David McBride outside of the Supreme Court in Canberra, 2024. Photo: Consortium News/YouTube – commons.wikimedia.org (CC BY 3.0)
Australian whistleblower and former ADF legal officer David McBride has been released on parole after serving the full non-parole period of his unprecedented five-year and eight-month sentence handed down by the ACT Supreme Court in 2024.
As of writing, McBride is still the only person involved with the Afghanistan war crimes scandal to have served time. The perpetrators remain unpunished. Given that most of the Australian media has kept silent on the issue of war crimes, aside from highly publicised individual cases like McBride’s and Ben Roberts-Smith’s, it is worth remembering what exactly the scale of the issue is.
McBride raised concerns within the ADF in 2013 when then-ADF chief (and later Governor-General) David Hurley sought to change the rules of engagement. McBride was concerned that rank and file ADF soldiers were going to be made the scapegoats for Australian war crimes in Afghanistan while the decision makers who allegedly sanctioned and encouraged such conduct remain unaccountable. It was only after being rebuffed by ADF officials that McBride provided ABC journalists with the documents that became the Afghan Files.
McBride’s prosecution came at the same time as the prosecution of Witness K and Bernard Collaery, who revealed illegal ASIS bugging of the newly independent Timor-Leste’s cabinet offices to sabotage the country’s negotiations over control of marine oil and gas resources.
Another whistleblower, ATO officer Richard Boyle, was also persecuted after revealing unlawful debt collection practices, though he eventually avoided conviction. Alongside scandals like Robodebt, these whistleblower incidents expose that the Australian government has been willing to knowingly break the law to carry out the aims of imperialism and capital. While these incidents happened under the Coalition, Labor has maintained many illegal practices of their own.
The war crimes in Afghanistan exposed by McBride, some of which were most likely perpetrated by Roberts-Smith as found in his failed defamation case, are emblematic of Australia’s broader involvement in global imperialism. Roberts-Smith was found, by the civil standard of proof, to have murdered civilians, pressured an SAS officer to murder an unarmed elderly man to “blood the rookie,” machine-gunned a man to steal his prosthetic leg, and committed many more acts of criminal violence against Afghans and bullying against fellow Australian soldiers.
However, the media frenzy around Roberts-Smith, both critical and supportive, serves to obfuscate the involvement of top officials in encouraging this criminal culture. Australian war crimes are not the acts of a single man, but rather a key element of our war policy.
Australia’s espionage against Timor-Leste, our earlier support for Indonesian control of the region, and our current support for Indonesia’s genocidal hold on West Papua indicate that Australian brutality extends beyond Afghanistan. Australia was an eager contributor to the Iraq War, including potential contributions to the running of black site torture camps according to US documents.
Our role as an attack dog for the US dates back far earlier, such as our participation in the invasion of Korea that destroyed up to 20% of North Korea’s population and infamously left “no more targets” for bombers to strike.
Australian complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity continues to this day. An estimated thousand Australians are current or former soldiers of the IDF, the Israeli army that has been carrying out a campaign of settler-colonialism, terrorism, and genocide for almost 80 years. None of these people have even been threatened with criminal prosecutions.
Australian private manufacturers and government contracts are also deeply involved in the production of F-35 jets, meaning every single jet used to carry out the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia’s genocides and wars of expansion in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, and Yemen uses Australian-made components. Rather than taking action against the more than 75 Australian companies involved in the F-35 supply chain, the Albanese government has helped facilitate contracts.
Albanese, Wong, and Marles have continually lied to the Australian public about Australian involvement in Israel’s genocides, while actively working to bring the ADF even closer to the US through AUKUS. Meanwhile the US and Israel are bringing their militaries closer together.
Australia is a signatory to Pax Silica, expanding Australian manufacturing and technological involvement in imperialism. Meant to aid in preparation for a potential war on China, Pax Silica brings together the US, Israel, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Qatar, Finland, Greece, India, Norway, South Korea, Sweden, the Philippines, the UAE, the UK, and the Chinese island of Taiwan (as a non-signatory member) to cooperate in the development of AI and critical mineral supply chains crucial to many advanced military technologies. Australia has been ranked second globally as an AI data centre investment location, after the US.
McBride’s release is a moment to celebrate. It is also a moment to reflect on the lengths successive governments have gone to in punishing anyone who threatens the secrecy of their illegal activities. Individual scandals must not be treated as such. We must keep in mind the bigger picture of Australia’s enthusiastic participation in war crimes, genocide, and imperialism at the expense of human lives abroad and at home.
