Today, I’m speaking with David McBride, who is a retired major and former legal officer in the Australian Army. After deploying twice to Afghanistan in 2018, David was charged with several offences related to unlawfully leaking information to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation after concerns about the Australian Defence Forces’ excessive investigation of special forces soldiers. The information David provided to the ABC ultimately led to the uncovering of numerous instances of alleged war crimes carried out by the Australian SAS. These findings were made public by the ABC and led to the Afghanistan inquiry, better known as the Brereton Report, which found credible information that 39 Afghans were illegally killed by Australian soldiers. In 2023, David pleaded guilty to the charges laid against him and is currently awaiting sentencing. He joined me today to discuss his actions, what led to them, his trial, and what he hopes to achieve. David, thank you very much for joining me on The Voices of War.

Thanks Maz, thanks for having me on.

So for many in our audience, especially in Australia, yours is somewhat of a household name, but there are those overseas that perhaps might not be aware of your story. So perhaps to get us started, maybe you can give us a brief kind of big picture of your story, and then we can dive into some of the details.

I think one of the key things about my story is that I was someone from very much inside the system, inside the establishment I went to private school, was sort of a military school where we had cadets. I went to law school after that, didn’t really want to become a lawyer. I went, did a master’s degree at Oxford University or a second law degree. And I realised what I really wanted to be was a soldier. I was a soldier in the British Army for about 10 years.

And I, not as a lawyer, just as a normal army officer, and I went to Northern Ireland and saw various other things. I was very much a true believer in the Western democracy and the war machines that support it. I then came home to Australia. I settled in Australia. I became a lawyer for the first time in my life, quite old when I was about 40, even though I had law degrees.

And I, but I missed the military service and I rejoined as a military lawyer. Was it a good job for me actually? It was sort of half lawyer, half officer. And one of my friends didn’t really have any sort of status I would have liked in our life, but it was one of my friends accurately said, sometimes you hear truth for your friends that he said, that’s the perfect job for you.

half lawyer, half soldier, and it was in many ways. I really enjoyed it. A lot of people… Well, I think just being a normal soldier was a little, I wouldn’t say, it’s a bit tough to say brainless, but you kind of, you didn’t really have that much scope for using your initiative and doing things a bit differently.

Why did he say that? That’s interesting.

And likewise, as a normal lawyer, you tend to be defending career criminals. And it’s very, even though you do your best for them on a matter of legal grounds, it’s not particularly satisfying. And so I generally, I’ve got respect for soldiers, got respect for people that put on a uniform for their country. I used to have a lot of respect for the Western war machine that’s been shaken a little bit, but I will discuss that. So I just thought it was, yeah, it was nice. I mean, yeah, even your worst soldier, I mean, we can talk amongst each other, you know, civilians might get a bit upset about this, but even your worst soldier is generally more likeable than some of your best civilians in that they are the sort of people.

I’m going to go to bed.

They’re prepared to put their life on the line for the country. Yes, they may make mistakes. You know, you will remember, I don’t know if they still have it, but the defence travel card dealt with a lot of travel. But these were all good people who had a bad, you know, had got into debt or something, you know. And I generally quite liked them. You know, I helped people who were on the wrong side of inquiries. And I suspected certain amount of political bullshit, they were being made scapegoats. And I generally liked fighting, and not just for the soldiers, but sometimes there were commanders that were trying to get something reasonable done and red tape and again, political bullshit was stopping them getting it done. And I quite liked being able to apply the law to help those commanders to achieve, you know, to make the…to make the military achieve their goals. And so, yeah, I liked that. I liked using my legal skills to achieve a sort of military aim and…

Yeah, I could have happily done it forever. In Afghanistan, and I guess it’s important to note, I had my doubts early. I did two tours of Afghanistan, as you said, but even in the first tour, in fact, even before I got to Afghanistan, I became concerned that, again, I can’t really think of a better expression, but the sort of political, bullshit. We were becoming more and more political footballs, I guess, where whatever the minister wanted for the flavor of the month was becoming a reality. And that was really affecting the soldiers badly. And it wasn’t often we didn’t care about what the law was. We just cared about the public appearances. And I could see, because we live in a democracy and the minister’s sort of in charge of the defence force, but I could see, and I’d also been involved in politics before I joined. So I’d seen the, I’d seen the see me side of politics where anything can be turned into some sort of political point scoring by either the opposition or the government.

I’d just come back to Australia and there was the Tampa incident, which you’re too young to remember, but you would have been a little kid if you were alive at all. It was kind of a cynical use of fear.

Maybe I looked that young, but I was well and truly here.

And to say that these sort of refugees, whatever you think about refugees, these people were trying to get to Australia for a better life, whatever. But they were painted as terrorists and they were painted as all potential terrorists. The army were called out. In fact, the SAS were called out. And you know, help win the election because it showed the Prime Minister was tough on crime, tough on boat people or whatever stop the boats. And they had another incident called Children Overboard where they said, there was some sort of rumour where they said, oh, these are the sort of people that these refugees are so cynical that if we don’t pick them up, they chuck their babies in the water. And that’s the sort of people that they are.

Well, something I probably should have mentioned before we started recording. I’m also a refugee. I’m a refugee from Bosnia who then went first to Germany, then migrated to Australia.

I reckon, well, I only, that’s about the only thing I noticed you had an unusual name. Yeah, I’ve been calling you Maz. And then when I saw the email, I was looking for an email from Maz and there was nothing. And then I saw what your name was. And yeah, I started to tweak only in small things. But yeah, no, that’s interesting. Well, Bosnia, you would know too, you know, there was a very political war and appearances.

Yeah.

They weren’t always wrong, but appearances were very important and people, you know, I guess that’s always been part of the war propaganda and things, but often you get very, very big appearances, all this side, all that side, and those people in the known, yeah, narratives matter and that’s okay. And this is one of the things I’ve always tried to emphasise in my own case.

Yeah. Narratives matter. Yeah.

I understand, because your enemies will sort of paint you as someone who was just a little bit too wound too tight and couldn’t handle the fact that things are not black and white and can be grey. But I don’t accept that. I think that while narratives are important, you can go too far. And in fact, that’s a kind of a soldier thing. I noticed that was one of the…the things the witnesses, one of the witnesses, the key SAS witnesses against Ben Robert Smith said. And it struck a chord with me when he was interviewed afterwards, they were like, well, you know, what are you, do you feel guilty, you know, ratting on one of your comrades? And I think he said something like, he said, look.

None of us were choir boys, you know. Yeah, we all push things to the limits, but Ben Robert Smith just took it too far. And that kind of sums up my case to say, yeah, I was prepared. I knew that not everything was gonna be rosy and I was certainly prepared to…roll my eyes and raise my eyebrows at certain things that you saw, which were part of the narrative, part of the war. But I think we got carried away. And this was when I, when I, jump ahead, but I, for example, in my first Afghan tour, I could see that we were putting up PowerPoint, it was very important to say, oh,

We’re winning. It’s all going well. And I could see that wasn’t the case. And I could see that we were just saying that because it was a very short election cycle, it was a very short tour cycle. No one wanted to be the one that was in charge when things weren’t going well. So everybody just said, it’s going well. You high five the people coming in, give them a wink. And the standard joke was it was going fine when I was there everybody knowing, everybody knowing that full well it was eventually going to fall down and you know, must have been your fault that it fell down because it was all fine when we were there. And yeah, when I was, I didn’t.

Ha ha! When I was there, yeah, yeah.

Again, I didn’t make a complaint about that, but it made me feel uncomfortable. Not because putting out a positive narrative was necessarily the most evil thing in the world, but the idea… Firstly, it involved… If you’re pretending that you’re winning when you’re not, it’s OK to put that out to the public.But if you actually know you’re not winning, you need to change your tactics because otherwise you’re just gonna keep reinforcing failure, a bit like a company that’s making a loss and pretends to make a profit. That’s all right to keep the shareholders happy, but you can’t really start believing your own bullshit on the inside. It probably isn’t, I probably isn’t. It’s probably a crime actually. I’m just trying to be as open-minded as I can.

Is it? No, no, but it’s, I, and I, and I, that’s what I love about this because that is reality. But what you’re talking about is there’s this idealized world that we all try to think and embrace and imagine, and then there’s reality, right? And what you’re referring to is to Afghanistan is, and all of us, and I was there myself, and all of us kind of had an inkling in the back of our mind. It’s, you know, something’s not going right here. You know, when is this going to win? How do we, what does success even look like? What does victory even look like?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Well, yeah, that was one of the things that bothered me. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I noticed that because especially doing two tours in quick succession, in the 2011 tour, they were saying, yeah, in 2011 it was like, oh, we’re gonna win next year. All the conditions are set for victory. And I also knew even before I came back, I also knew that they said that in 2009.

But no one dares to speak it up because, yeah. Because you went there in 2011 and 2013. Yeah.

And that’s okay, but someone needed to draw attention to that to say, we can’t keep saying that every year. And yeah, and so I was kind of, I had my doubts about things, but you know, as you know, you get on with your job, you’ve got to do and if you do your job, that, you know, that’s where you kind of park it. But I knew then that we were

I think where it came unstuck for me is when you could see this was more than just trying to put out a little bit of good news to keep calm the troops. The politicians were making political mileage out of stories, which were sometimes completely false. And they got a taste for it. And that was a bit like…They say later, I think Samantha Crumford, who did that study into killing, she was, I haven’t read it, but I mean, basically she’s saying people got a taste for killing and they just want more. Blood lust, I think it’s called, which gives you an indication. I think that the, and while it doesn’t sound sexy, it’s not like killing people, but I think the politicians got a taste for…

and culture.

the popularity they could get from, popularity boost they could get from putting out false messages.

Can you give us an example just so that people can understand what type of messages and what type of political victories you’re actually referring to?

I think pretty much everything you knew about the war, like the fact we were winning and it was going well, I think kill counts. I think that while they tried to downplay, oh, you know, we don’t get involved in that, I think that the politicians were secretly pleased. There was a battle on her in 2009, I think the one that Ben Roberts-Smith won a VC for, Shewolley Cott.

That was any time someone was awarded a medal, especially a major medal like the VC, politicians got to go along, there was a lot of press and I think that they liked it. I think that they, and I think even the, I suspect, and funny enough, one of the, it’s always good to have your suspicions confirmed by Alice. One of the witnesses, again, in the Robert Smith case, said,

He said, you know, everybody in the SAS knew that medals weren’t necessarily a fair indication of bravery, but they were a good news story for the minister. And I think that rang, that rings true for me. It does not to say that everybody got a medal. I think often they, they arrive at these conclusions by accident. I think Tampa, going back to Tampa was a bit of an accident when

John Howard was behind in the polls, very much behind in the polls, and the polling, he probably made an offhand comment about it and the polling went up. And then they’re like, oh, this is gold. And a bit the same with the award of Victoria Cross relatively early in the war to a guy called Donaldson, Mark Donaldson, who I think was very deserving, particularly I like about his story. And you’ve read my book probably.

It showed a real respect for the Afghans in that he went back under enemy fire to grab the interpreter and bring him back at great danger to himself. And the other SAS guys, well, they probably didn’t say it, but they were like, why would you bother to go and rescue an Afghan and possibly risk your own life? And I think that was the epitome of a really good, well-deserving medal. Many people under pressure might have said, well, too bad, so sad, he’s stuck behind the Taliban lines. I’m not going to go back there to get him. But I think that was a very deserving medal. But the bad lesson politicians could have learned was, wow, this was a great day for Australia. We had medal ceremony. I think he went in front of the Queen. And all of that, having been in politics, even though it’s only sort of reflected glory,

Politicians love it because they get a bit, I think there’s a certain amount, this is only my rough theory, I’ve never seen it proved, but I do believe that they have an attitude. If the population are happy with the way the military are going, they’re happy with the way the government’s going. And you’d see that in Vietnam, when that war became very discredited and the actions of the soldiers became very discredited. We had a lot of change of governments as well. And we had…

Mm-hmm.

So I think that they’ve worked that out. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d find, if you dug into the bottom draws in Canberra, you’d find polling on it. Even though people don’t vote for the defence force, they vote for the government. And if they’re unhappy or happy with the defence force, it reflects in the way they voted in the election. So yeah, I think the medals got out of control and I think the medals were used. In order to make the, give people a good news story, I think the, and that’s where a lot of the rot set in because I think particularly, this is relatively detailed stuff, which is not, I don’t know how much your viewers know about this, but the Chris Masters book deals with this, and that when Robert Smith got his Medal of Gallantry, the first major medal he got in 2006,

There was lots of question marks over that. You know, it looked like he just shot. Well, he had shot an unarmed shepherd boy on Afghan. And then it wasn’t him. And then people came out. It could have been as far as anybody knew, it could have been the family of the dead kid. And even the other SAS people were like, you shouldn’t have shot that guy. Anyway, they killed all the other people that came out. They called them Taliban. But it was written up as.

this very brave mission and the boy was changed from a boy to a Taliban militia force trying to outflank the SAS position. So it was made, it was what was an illegal killing was made into an act of bravery by not by Robert Smith, but by the defence people who wrote up that report. And they also know at that time, these are all small details, at that time, no SAS individuals were able to give press conferences and because of the secrecy and because they didn’t want to reveal their identities. They wouldn’t necessarily come, they’re not professional media people, they’re very brave and they’re very efficient soldiers, but they’re not necessarily going to do a very good. They might be a little bit too blunt, but Robert Smith was allowed to give praise, and I think it’s because they saw in him someone who presented very well and would help them.

They didn’t care about him so much, but they thought he can help us popularise the war. In 2006, we only had a small contingent there. And in fact, the chief of the Defence Force at the time, an Air Force guy called Angus Houston, who was, in my experience, very good, he said, look, to the minister, he said, it’s all very well killing Taliban in the summer. And…

But it’s like cutting the grass. They’re going to come back next year, bigger and better. And eventually we will lose some of our own people and you’ll be sorry, we won’t have achieved anything. And he was overruled, which is unusual. He was overruled by the politicians because they could see that this was going over there and shooting people in turbines and coming back with stories of bravery was looked good for certain amounts of certain…

people that didn’t like vote people or whatever, it won votes. And that, I think, even though that’s early in the war, I think you can see it set a very bad pattern to say, if you look the part and you’re out there killing people, the government’s going to back you. And I think that set a very bad precedent for Robert Smith and he knew, and others, but he knew…

If you could exaggerate the stories and look good and act all brave, that’s all they wanted. They didn’t care about the reality. And I think it only got worse. They say that his VC was exaggerated as well. And one of the witnesses in his defamation case, again, the guy that said the

And it sounds true that Robert Smith wasn’t on the top of the BC list, but he was bumped up. And because the minister’s staff saw he was good media. And you can see that when a couple of years after this, they awarded him Father of the Year, even though I think at the time he was having an affair. But and then there was a photo opportunity of him.

hugging Rosie Batty of domestic violence, campaigner and victim. And he looks great in it. He looks terrific in the shot. And like he knew how to play the media. And that’s what they cared about. And I think that was, they need their heroes. And if you’ve got someone that knows how to play the part. And I think that, oh yeah, look, yeah, absolutely looks the part, yeah. And…

I guess people need their heroes, right? And looks the part. I mean, he’s a man mountain, right? I mean, he looks the part.

And people, it turns out people within the SAS did make complaints about him. You know, people knew, right, even back in that 2006, the guy that said you shouldn’t have shot that kid, Robert Smith said, you know, you step out of line again, you’re going to get a bullet in the back of the head. And he was obviously a guy that meant what he said. And people who did speak out were sort of bullied and shunned and that we had set a very bad precedent whereby the truth didn’t matter. And the only time we really cared about things was where if the media cared, we cared. And sometimes it went the other way when soldiers who were actually just doing their job properly, the media didn’t understand it, the media got upset, and some people from the media. And then the minister would act inappropriately. And that’s, in fact, now we’re…introduction. That’s how we get up to my case. And when I was there, I’d already seen things before I got in. In early 2013, they changed the rules of engagement. And I was working at Special Operations Command. This is where it really began for me because I said, you know, we’ve got a year to go on the war. Rules of engagement are not well understood anyway. People muddle their way through them, you don’t have time to retrain people. Why are you taking such a drastic step? And all the those questions, which you sometimes know you’re on to something when they don’t even bother to answer your questions properly, you know. And I just got told basically to shut up my own business, even though I was a stakeholder being the sort of operations law or lawyer for Special Operations Command.

And I thought that was straight.

Just before we go any further, just quickly, just first can you give us a quick outline of what the change in the rules of engagement was and also what is the role of a legal officer who is embedded or is working with the special operations on operations. Just so people get a context as to what your day-to-day life was and why these rules of engagement even matter for you as professionally, but also for the soldiers in the ground.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, no, I had two roles and it’s a bit confusing. Well, I worked in the headquarters for most of 2013. I was in the headquarters in Canberra, looking at things like rules of engagement and looking at inquiry reports when things had gone wrong. Like it just, you know, well, it is very much a desk job. And then later in the year, I actually did a different

similar but different role in that I became the lawyer on the spot actually in Afghanistan. So similar roles but slightly different. And I was able to see things on the coal face. When you’re on the lawyer on the ground and they’re trying to drop a bomb on someone, fire a hellfire missile, they come to ask you and say, do we have legal clearance to do this?

And so you’re very much involved in the kill chain when you’re over there. When you’re back at base, you do more like looking at the rules of engagement and see that they’re workable. And one of, I’d been in the British Army in Northern Ireland and I knew the Australian rules of engagement weren’t workable in the sense that they were…convoluted. And I think again, I could tell, you know, my critics say I was trying to have this. I could tell, but I could tell that there was something wrong. It looked like that they were put up there for show in the sense that they were, you know, they had all sorts of many different tests and regulations all stuck into one. It was if you were trying to show some very left-wing civilian how good we were and you’d have all these masses of rules and regulations. But I knew that they weren’t being followed and I knew that also they were so overly complex, it made it impossible to follow, which made it more likely that they actually have war crimes, paradoxically, because if people can’t follow the rules of engagement, they’ll just do a workaround.

And even from a, it’s not just a matter of protecting the soldiers, but if you want to put a soldier on trial for not doing the right thing, you need to have clear rules of engagement so you can say you did not act according to the rule. And it’s got to be quite simple. And I understand that just being a critic from the sidelines is very easy.

And so I went to great lengths to propose a separate set, a new set of rules of engagement where we just had to, soldiers just had to think of three pieces of information, persons holding a weapon, they don’t respond to warnings and it looks like they’re going to use it or whatever. One, two, three, bang. And that way, not only does it give the soldiers a bit of a clear…a clear idea. But if you want to prosecute someone, it’s much easier. And so it works both ways. Well, the actual ones on the ground had six tests and they had words in them like reasonable, you know, you’ve got to act reasonably and possible. Now, those words are no good

How is that different to the… How are those three different to the actual ones on the ground?

and direct participation in hostilities, which is a term of art that only really lawyers know what that means. And you can’t put that to soldiers on the ground. You’ve got to say, holding a weapon, moving to a position, and use sort of earthy phrases that they can understand. But if you say, you’ve got to act reasonably, and then it’s bad both ways, because you put the soldier in the witness box and you say, were your actions reasonable? If you’re a good lawyer, you can easily get them to stumble over trying to explain why it’s reasonable and vice versa. If they’re smart, even if they’ve killed someone, they can come up with some sort of a, you know, you go down the rabbit hole about what reasonable means rather than saying, did you have… Yeah, exactly. That’s a far better expression.

Yeah, I felt under threat. Yeah.

and you couldn’t help but say, well, these were not helpful. And at first I thought this was, you know, that they were just, the legal officers just didn’t have any life experience. But I began to think it was a bit more sinister than that to say that they were actually, it was all just window dressing and they,

They knew it was bullshit, but they just, they didn’t care because it was all about appearances for the media. And as long as you didn’t get caught, they didn’t really care. And so I, and they had another incident in 2013, where I suspect it was Windows. And this wasn’t even to do with Afghanistan. There was something which is now known as the Jedi Council incident, where it involved an obscene email trial. Something that happens in the military or any large organization when you’ve got masses of employees. someone had filmed himself having consensual sex and he’d actually left the military, but he sent it to his mates. And it was pretty, it was bad, but saying that we see much worse things. And it was beat up, the media found out about it. And the…

The Defence Force, because the laws relating to sending obscene information on the internet at that time were not that clear, and I think they decided that it wasn’t clear how they could charge these people. I don’t know when they weren’t just a barrier on the carpet anyway. But once the media found out about it, the Defence Force really went on the attack and pretended that they really cared, even though they didn’t, or they hadn’t for a year or so like four years old, I think. And they did this media conference, which is the famous one with General Morrison. And he said, you know, he said a lot of phrases, but at a time I was nodding my head, but I thought, hang on, this is strange because this hasn’t come to court yet. And he’s made a public statement, which is against the law, about saying what went on when it has never been proved. And even if he really hated these guys, that’s a mistake because that allows them to get off scot-free because he’s breached, you know, the prejudice, he’s prejudiced the trials. And not only that, the Defence Force Media Department leaked one of the, the names and addresses of one of the people, I think, deliberately. And, and then the press was straight outside this guy’s house. And it wasn’t even clear he’d done anything wrong. He was an email recipient, but it wasn’t clear that it even opened it. And the guy suddenly had 50 people from the press outside his house and he tried to commit suicide. Now, he doesn’t that, they weren’t my clients or anything, but I could see the defense had handled it badly legally. You’re not meant to do that. You’re not meant to prejudice trials. You’re certainly not meant to release information of defendants in order to make the press happy. Now, these ideas were unformed, but I began to think that we were not playing with a full deck when it came to major incidents. So when I was in Afghanistan in 2013, there had been allegations, and we now know there was lots of war crimes in 2012 when I wasn’t there. But In 2013, suddenly everything was being investigated to a great degree and the media were being informed about the investigations. And when I was in Afghanistan, I was taking call for the media saying, oh, we hear you’ve had an incident, we hear that the cops are coming across, et cetera. And it struck me not as being bad, but being strange that when we’d had…

We had all these really, we now know to be war crimes, serious, and they weren’t investigated and the media weren’t informed. And then we had a whole lot of things which couldn’t be war crimes. One, for example, was an American pilot shot the wrong target. Now that can’t, we don’t even have jurisdiction over the American pilot, but that was, we investigated as if we did and the media were informed about it. And I just thought something’s going on here. I didn’t know what.

But I thought it looked like we were saying, look over here, don’t look over there. And that’s what first got me onto it, to say why. And we weren’t even following our own protocols. And I was like, and the lawyer, you can only really bear witness to what you can see. And you can’t really speculate about what may or may not have occurred. But I could see that we weren’t following our own procedures. I could see that every time I asked question about what was going on, I just got fobbed off. And I, yeah, I decided enough was enough and I was going to do something about it. And they were almost even in Afghanistan in 2013, I was threatened to be charged, because I was just asking too many questions. And they were like, we’re going to charge you with obstruction of justice. And I’m like, well, I’m a lawyer.

I’m allowed to ask questions about why we’re doing this and why we’re doing that and why are we different? That was the really main thing. Why is everything different with these new rules of engagement in 2013 as it was in 2012? One of my, I didn’t know at the time, but what I now suspect happened was that they knew about Ben Roberts Smith in late 2012. The complaints did get through. I mean, they had drone footage, for example. So if someone had made a complaint they could have easily looked at the drone footage and found out whether it had any legs. You wouldn’t necessarily be able to get a conviction just from drone footage, but you would know when people are lying. And then they didn’t want to have to investigate Ben Robert Smith because they knew he was so famous and the whole world would come tumbling down.

But what they did is they’d find some scapegoats, some sort of minor people, people that no one had ever heard of. And they put them on trial to sort of distract from what was a very, very large risk. And I was sort of caught in the middle because I could see something was up. I didn’t know what it was.

As in, as in they were already, it was already happening. They were going to take him to court. Uh, or you suspected it was going to happen.

I suspect they knew about him, but they weren’t going to do anything about him. Yeah. Well, there are other cases in 2000. Yeah. In 2013. And as it turned out, as I suspected, nothing ever came of them because there simply wasn’t evidence. But they made a big fuss about it. The media were called and.

Sorry, yes, about Ben Robert Smith, and because he was too famous, he’s too much of a hero, it would look bad. But you mentioned there was some other cases that they wanted to make scapegoats out of.

And they were saying, oh, look, we really care about this. But I was saying, well, this is someone that looks like they were just defending themselves. And why are you investigating him and not the 11 people that were killed in one day and all this and all that? And I never got a straight answer. And it made me suspect that we really cared more about appearances than reality.

We also know now, and again, these things come out piecemeal, from what General Campbell said last year or the year before, to say that the Americans take this thing called the Leahy Law quite seriously. And that means that they cannot work with any military force who has sort of credible war crimes, allegations made against them. And

So it may have been, they might have, the Americans might have said to the Australians, we want you to sweep this under the rug because if you do have credible investigations into war crimes into Australia, we will have to, you’ll have to leave Afghanistan. We can’t, because we’re only there with their support. And if they took away their support aircraft and everything, as you know, we wouldn’t have been.

be there. And that would have put a big hole in their supporting of the nation. They would have had a whole province without anybody in it. And then they also, it would have put an even bigger hole in their credibility to say their allies, the Australians, may have committed war crimes. And so it would have been in their interest to tell us to shut up, make a fuss maybe.

Again, big picture stuff, the International Criminal Court, who can come investigate? You’ve seen that in Yugoslavia. It was a different version, but it was basically the war crimes tribunal in Yugoslavia, which was the same sort of thing. But as happened in Yugoslavia, when those tribunals come, they tend to look at the senior people, not the junior people as well, but they hold those at the top responsible. That would have scared Australia. They would have said, shit. You won’t get an international tribunal if it looks like you’re doing something. I think that they started to just look like doing something rather than actually doing something. I believe it all became very political, very big picture stuff because at the coal face where I was, it didn’t make sense. And we were investigating things that weren’t crimes and didn’t turn out to be crimes. And we weren’t investigating things which we now know to be crimes. And, you know,

Just a couple of points for context for our audience as well. I mean, I think that from the ICC perspective, when you’re saying about the leaders being dragged into the courts, contemporary example is Putin. Putin’s got, he’s a wanted man by the ICC to stand trial against allegations of war crimes committed in Ukraine. So not the soldiers, but Putin, but also Netanyahu is now being potentially is going to be indicted by the ICC as well.

Yeah.

for the potential alleged crime of genocide in Gaza. So the ICC is a really big international body or institution that does in fact, even though it might not have teeth, it does have a big impact historically on how a leader is perceived as the role they’ve played in history, not today, not tomorrow, but in history. And I think from a strategic perspective for Australia, I’ve covered this in the podcast so many times, including with our own generals, that we went to Afghanistan only and only because of our US alliance, which is why we didn’t really have a seat at the table. We didn’t really have a seat at the planning or strategy of Afghanistan, which potentially again speaks to the points you tried to make that this is all about appearances. As long as things look good, we politically for Australia’s national interest have ticked the box of standing with our principal ally to US.

Well, let’s just not worry about the finer details because that can put all of this in question.

Yeah, yeah, no, you’re spot on. I didn’t actually, because I’ve so, I wanted to do your podcast, but I’m so rushed. I didn’t read your background, but yeah, if I could fist pump you, I would. Yeah, we see things on the same plane. That’s exactly why. And they even let it slip. One of the Chiefs of the Defence, this is why I find quite frustrating, because all this stuff is in the public domain if you’re prepared to join the dots.

One of our chief of defence forces actually said somewhere, we are only in Afghanistan. They use the weasel words to say, just to strengthen the US alliance, but what that means is to make Americans happy. And that, I think a lot of the problems came from that because if you’re only there just to be there and you’re not there to work, truly there to help the Afghans, you’re there to pretend to help the Afghans.

A lot of evil comes from that because then what are soldiers going to do? They’re going to do things which kind of look good, whether or not they’re good kill counts. I mean, there was no authoritative study ever to say…

that killing senior Taliban was going to win the war. And so you could see that in our own organization. If my boss had got a bullet in the head one day, I don’t think I wouldn’t have openly celebrated, but I would have been like, well, okay, well, that’s instant promotion. And it’s all just being soldiers. You don’t really care so much about your boss getting killed. You just take over. And they knew that it was not a policy that…was really ever going to work. It sounded good and it looked good. And the Kill TVs, bitches were sexy. But yeah, I don’t think they ever had a workable strategy. This is one of the things that I suspected. The strategy was to win the US presidential election in 2004, 2008 by making it look like they were doing things. But there was no authority for it.

And people, some of my critics would say, well, who are you to question the strategy? It’s not so much saying, oh, we’ve got to choose A or B. It was like I suspected there was no coherent strategy written by someone who was an expert in the area, but the strategy came from polling to say, it looks great when we blow up a whole mountainside with them.

B-52s and people see it on the 7.30 news and we get, as you said, tick in the box. You get the tick in the box. I don’t think that there was any really, I mean, even right, if you go right back to the beginning of the war, when the Taliban actually said, look, we will, we’re not, well, I think they said, we’re not completely opposed to handing over Osama bin Laden, but we’d like, you know, to see some evidence and,

et cetera. And that was just ruled out of hand because it was politically much more valuable to just go drop bombs and fuck them up. That was going to win votes. And there was no… And I think that set the scene in the sense that… And that they were so enthused by the public reaction from the invasion and takeover of Taliban within months that they moved to Iraq and said, this is a vote winner. You know, this is something where people love it. Anyone that kind of answers us back, the next thing they know, they’re gonna get a shock and awe. And of course they came unstuck in Iraq because it didn’t work nearly so well. And I think, you’ve read my book and soldiers get this, but you know, civilians don’t necessarily, but so especially those around the world, we are quite sort of spiritual and it is a sort of a job where morality and it matters. I always believe that’s why we won the Second World War because we were right and I believe that while there was some sort of a moral high ground for Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002, we lost it. But there was none in Iraq and that’s why it went so off track because they didn’t really have any moral high ground. And once you don’t have moral high ground, you see things spin out of control. I mean, and because, yeah, and so, yeah, I think that I do, I agree with you on all that big picture stuff. I think that once, if our aim wasn’t really to help,

Yeah, and you’re right, we also, we just played along with whatever the Americans said. There were a lot of things that didn’t actually make sense. The kill capture or the kill, you know, the fact that if you captured someone and they got sent off to jail, they tried to make it a sort of Western, they put in a constitution sounding good, Western style constitution, Afghanistan.

And the special forces, if they captured people, they were sent off to jail, but often they didn’t stay there very long because the evidence, if there wasn’t Western-style evidence to hold them there and they’d make an appeal a year later and saying, where are my fingerprints on the bomb? And of course they didn’t exist. And so they’d be let out and they’d be back on the battlefield and then the special forces would get sick of it. So they’d murder them. And…

Yeah, that’s right.

Just on that point, I think that’s a really important point. So I was an intelligence officer in a particular specialized field in intelligence. And our reporting was used in support of the kill chain, which you then, people like you would then approve, okay, this person, we can positively identify this person, we can prosecute because there are multiple source reportings suggesting that this person is X, Y, Z, objective, whatever, right? Who is a known Taliban insurgent.

We would then prosecute that target, whether it’s detained, kill, capture, whatever it is. And if there is, like you’re saying, if there’s no actual legal evidence, which intelligence can’t be used, if I remember correctly, in the court of law for multiple reasons, one of which is, well, we have to protect our sources. That’s one of them. But also, there is no hard physical DNA evidence, which is what we’re used to in the Western construct to prosecute someone, fingerprints, DNA, whatever we could then charge them with something to prove that they are that person. We didn’t have that in Afghanistan, but we tried to superimpose that system onto the Afghan system. And of course, the insurgents knew that they would only go spend 72 hours, whether it’s for us in TK or maybe go up to Parwan, then be released and be celebrated if they were indeed an insurgent. Their reputation will be strengthened within the Taliban circles, the Quetta Shura in Pakistan or whatever, which myself included at the time was, what are we doing?

Yeah, exactly. And the responsibility of that, you know, lies with the command. And they could have done something about it. And they didn’t want to rock the boat with the Americans. Had we been serious, we would have tried to fix that, at least try. And that’s what I can understand. These things are difficult issues. But we did not even try to fix that. And I was, you know, one of the, you know, I would be happy to see the sort of letters between Australia or America or whatever to try to.

but they just didn’t try. And that for me says volumes. Yeah, they just came along with some German law students and they wrote the new constitution and it sounded very good. And they wrote this. I write about this in my book for those of you who want to buy it, from … The Nature of Honor. And it was particularly ironic because we were there saying to the judges, oh, look, you can’t be corrupt anymore and you’ve got to…

got to do things the Western way. And then at the same time, we were expecting the Afghan judges to convict people on spurious fingerprint evidence, which is probably fake. And they were under no illusions that they were appointed by us. And if they didn’t convict, we’d get someone who would. And so we were bringing in a sort of a corrupt system at the same time as trying to pretend that it wasn’t corrupt. And sure enough.

Because small things like that are important. If people don’t get justice in the court system, they lose faith with the country. And yeah, they actually got, ironically, they got better justice with the Taliban and they’d go away and they’d tell the story and someone else would tell the story and the Taliban judge would make up his mind and it would all be over in a week or something.

But yeah, we tried to, and we should have, that was the problem with just being there for appearances because you didn’t, you tended not to complain about things. You tended not to just say, oh, well, who cares? We’re only here for the next couple of years. And as long as we all keep smiling and taking the Prozac and putting out complicated PowerPoint, everything’s gonna be all right. But yeah, no, it’s interesting to know that I didn’t tweet that you’re intelligence operator,

Yeah, you were like me. It was frustrating to be there at the coal face because there were obviously a lot of very, very good people doing very, very good jobs. Australian military is a very professional force. And it was an…

Absolutely. And also when you’re trying in the absence of clear guidance of what we’re actually doing, people then tend to do the things that was done before. As you said before, I don’t want to be the one that rocks the boat, but also the exit costs are extremely high. Extremely high. And I think you make that point and I think you’re a prime example of that. If you do speak up, if you rock the boat, I’m not saying this is intentionally done, but everybody’s there doing their job. Hold on a minute, just do what you’re told. Just crack on. This is not your place to make that decision. I often say this on this podcast. In Afghanistan, we never fought the war we thought we fought. Us, individual soldiers who deployed there, we never… Well, I’m not that famous, right? Perhaps that’s why.

Yeah, it’s a good saying. I haven’t heard that. May you make me one though. Ha ha ha.

But this is a consistent message that I’m hearing from people who’ve deployed there, who’ve been there, from seniors to junior soldiers. We were doing our job and that’s your job. You’re there six, eight months, nine months, whatever you rotate, and then you can’t wait to go back again because hey, that’s why you join up is to go and do the job. And you believe that those up higher have a strategy and what they don’t, and this is something that I just wanna pick up on a tie to something you said earlier about this celebrating of the particular narrative of the hero, of the one who’s stormed the hill, right? You’re incentivizing the wrong type of behavior. If you’re celebrating the kill count or the X amount of insurgents killed, you are incentivizing that behavior and in the absence of a clear strategy and a mission and a goal, guess what the Australian soldier is trained to do? Is to show initiative, take the fight to the enemy. That’s what we’re trained to do from day one. Courage, initiative, teamwork.

Formally the values of the Australian Army now of course changed, but that’s what we were all trained to do, right? So In my book and the way I’ve kind of talked about us on the podcast those soldiers who’ve committed what are alleged as war crimes I view them as victims themselves and if we just merely throw them out as the few bad apples, as many are doing, we are absolutely denying them the very humanity accusing them of denying their victims because they are human too. They react and respond to various stimuli in their environment. And if you’re being celebrated for being a ruthless killer, taking the fight to the enemy, guess what people are going to do? Exactly that. And I think that’s just one of the time a couple of things that you said. And also now really

Oh, I’m so glad you did. I just want to jump in there because I am, and you can go back, but I wanted to, I want to really totally, I think you might’ve been the only person I’ve heard express it quite like that. And I didn’t know anything about you really coming in. And I totally agree with that. And I would say it’s not too much of an exaggeration to sheet everything back to the commanders because we were rewarded. certain behaviours and what do we expect? They’re gonna go, and as you said, these are clever people and they’re well-trained people. So what, yeah, so I hope you do become famous and I hope you write a book or something. Ha.

Well, let me tell you another irony then that you might find funny. Last year, which was my last year in the Defense force, I was the chief of Defense force research fellow selected by the CDF to research how we get to war crimes or the idea of moral degradation, which I’ve subsequently had to put on pause for my own personal reasons. But I think the reason I was motivated to do that is because there’s this, in my view, perception that soldiers are robots. You are trained to follow orders and you are trained to be ethically and morally sound. But what we don’t talk about is how many times individual soldiers have deployed. What we don’t talk about is the impact of war on our moral compass. We don’t discuss that. And who is responsible for how many times Ben Roberts-Smith or Ollie Schultz have deployed? Who’s responsible for that? It’s certainly not them.

Them like me would be the first one to say, no, send me in coach, I’m good to go. I’m fine. I’ve come back six months ago, I’m good to go again. Trust me, I’m good to go again, because that’s all we’re trained to, that’s why we joined to go and serve the nation. And again, this is something we don’t talk about.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, if you weren’t like that, you’d be no good. Now I love it. I love what you say, because that’s exactly right. And it’s one of those areas with someone like myself, when you’re normally talking to civilians, you don’t really want to raise it. And this is one of the sort of funny paradoxes in my book. I couldn’t wait to go. And even when, even though I found my first tour hard, so you know, on the plane in, you can’t wait to be on the plane out. And on the

You can’t really say that to somebody, but that’s just a fact. You know, if you didn’t feel like that, you’re in the wrong job. I mean, you obviously, you want to do your best for your country and you want to, you know, and your mates and all those kind of things. And it’s just, but what? Yes. And that’s why I take it so seriously. Yeah. And people, this is why, yeah, and that’s my answer. That’s what I was going to get out of. I’ve forgotten, but to say.

And you believe that those sending you have, you know, the actual nation’s interest in their heart. Yeah.

That’s why I take it so seriously. What I’m doing is because if that all rests on the idea that your leaders are halfway decent, they don’t have to be angels, but they can’t be devils because that is really bad and they need to take that seriously.

And this is, I guess, now a bridge and, you know, we’ve been talking for nearly an hour now, so, you know, obviously this is a topic near and dear to my heart. And I’m, uh, very, yeah, well, I’m deeply interested in what then pushed you over the edge, I guess. And then what was the behavior or the action that you then did that made you the Dave McBride that Australia and many in the world have come to know.

And mine.

Ha.

Yeah, I write about it in my book and it’s quite funny. I often describe it as being like married to a serial killer and someone that you really loved and the first time they come home with blood on their shoes and you say, oh, what happened? And they are like, oh, I knocked my nose at work and blood on my, and you’re like, oh, I’ll clean your shoes for you or whatever. And then the second time they’ve got dirty.

dirt in the back of the car, because you really love them. And they go, oh yeah, I know I was potting plants or something, and you’re like, oh yeah, be a bit more careful next time. And after a while, and then you finally find out, you know, they’ve told you that they’re in California, but they’re actually, you know that they’re in New York where this murder occurs. And it suddenly, you just, it hits you. And it was a bit like that. One of these, in 2013,

Again, I don’t really, I don’t want to give all the details because people, they do their own, you know, they think, oh, well, we’re all the same. We’re all, we’re all good on people for having their own, doing their own sort of mental detective work. But anyway, having been in the British Army and I was very experienced guy, I came to believe in a particular investigation into a

an incident that the military, this was coming from the politicians, we were doing a sham investigation for the sake of a media to make the media look good and find a scapegoat. And I was absolutely convinced about that. And that’s when I said enough is enough. I said, you are not going to hang out to dry a decent soldier who was just defending himself

in order to, I didn’t know that there’d been war crime, but I know that now, but I knew that this was some sort of political bullshit, where they were going to make a scapegoat of this guy and having not investigated anybody really, you know, for many, for about three years, four years. And I knew something was up. And so I said, no, we need to apply. And they had the law on the side as well. I said, actually, according to the law, you know, the law, you can’t try this guy for murder because there isn’t any evidence. And you can tell when you’re onto something when the response was just so outrageous, they said they’re going to charge me. But yeah, it was only a small incident, but I could see I was onto something in that everything about the war had become political. And it wasn’t so much the the particular incident, it was clearly what I could see. It was a symptom of a sickness, a cancer, where everything we were doing had become the minister’s play thing. The minister wants a good news story. They’re pinning metal on someone that doesn’t deserve it. Minister wants a tough on crime story. They put someone in jail that doesn’t deserve it. And I am I just said enough is enough. And first, I say this in the book, I was talking to the soldier saying, you’re going to get investigated for murder, you’re going to get charged probably. And he looked at me as if to say, you know, looks can say a thousand words. And he was, I could tell that he knew he knew that there were war crimes going on. But this wasn’t one of them. And he was just.

He was just disgusted. And I said, look, it’s just political bullshit. The typical sort of thing that you would say as a lawyer, just put your head down, say nothing. Maybe it’ll be all right. But it’s a 20 year sentence. And I heard myself talking and he just looked at me. I think he said, isn’t it your job to do something about it? And first I was defensive and I was like, oh you know, I’ve been trying, because he didn’t know that I’d spent the last year agitating about the rules of engagement and saying, what’s going on, something’s going on. And I was like, well, actually, I’ve been trying pretty bloody hard. And then I’m sitting in this tray trainer over there. And then after about a second of me trying to have defensive answers, I suddenly thought, and I said, you’re right. It is my job to do something about the political bullshit, because as I said, and I say it in my book, it wasn’t that particular incident, but I could see the war was becoming distorted by politics. As you said, we were there, we were only there to make the Americans happy, and that meant we were doing things which, the kill counts and the photo opportunities, taking photos of opening schools that may never get used. building bridges to nowhere and getting photo opportunities. And I just thought enough is enough. This has become a political bullshit. Well, whether soldiers are good, soldiers are basically trying to do the right thing. And yet we are being abused by politicians who are just using it as a fucking football for them to win the next election. And so I went back to Australia. We had a bit of a standoff about… Ha ha ha, about a warrant I said, right, if you want to play things by the book, you’ve got to start, you know, you’ll have to start using the law every time you come. And again, because I just wanted to wind them up because I thought, I knew even then, even though it was a sort of vague idea, I said, what you really need is, I needed to be tried because if I was put on trial, then I would be able to sort of put my case out there, but I knew that they have a very good media team and I knew that if you’re just a complainer, you’ll get nowhere. They’ll just sort of say, you’ve got mental health issues and they’ll kick you out. And I needed a trial and yeah, exactly. And hopefully you’ll kill yourself and then they’ll say, oh, what a sad case appears and give your wife a check. You know, they were that cynical. And I

give you meds and keep you quiet.

I went home and I was trying to forget about it, but I knew that it wasn’t over for me. And then I wrote, I spent a whole year, pretty much, or eight months writing a detailed complaint. And it triggers me a little bit reading it, but it’s part of the court case. And I’ve just been reading it a bit recently. And it’s quite well written, very well written, in fact, 20 pages, lots of footnotes, a bit like a legal paper. And it’s basically saying…

I still had a good career and I had very good reports. You don’t get to be the operations legal officer in SOCOM unless you’ve got a very good report. You would be the same. You know, you’ve obviously did a job which was very highly sought after and they only wanted the best people. And so, yeah, I put this together painstakingly and I dug out all sorts of secret reports off the system to say, something is up. I don’t know what, but we’re signing off on all sorts of things which look like war crimes and we’re saying that they’re fine. And then we get things a year later where they aren’t war crimes. And we sometimes we don’t even have jurisdiction like over Americans and you’re looking into them with a microscope and you’re telling the press about it. I said, I don’t know what’s up, but something’s up.

I was hoping that they would say, I was still kind of, because I love the military, like, you know, I was still hoping that they’d say, yeah, we hear you. We may have got a bit carried away with the politics in the heat of the battle and thank you for pointing it out. And we know, good on you. Here’s a sort of a badge for commander’s good conduct badge or something for stopping us going

That’s not the way it happened. They’d sort of turned on me and I became the problem just for even asking these questions. And I guess that just made me dig my heels in more. Again, what you were talking about, soldiers have all got a different thing. We try to use initiative, but when people try to crush us, we generally come back and to say, if you want a war, I’m gonna give you a war. It took me a while. I went to…a guy called Chris Masters, who’s well known. He’s the one that eventually broke the Ben Roberts-Smith story. And he, it was all a bit too complex for him. And he at least listened to it. But he didn’t want to do the story. Because my story was essentially a bad government story. It was a bad leadership story. Like you said, while war crimes would have happened, I think that in my…in my case theory, they could be traced back to poor leadership and the rewarding of dishonesty and et cetera. And it wasn’t my role really to point out individual war crimes because I couldn’t tell unless you witnessed it, you can’t really tell. You can say this report is very strange, this report should be looked at, but you can’t really say that’s a definitely war crime. I mean, unless you witnessed it, you don’t know. But I did say a lot of these reports don’t make sense.

And certainly the leadership has got the problem. And that’s still the problem today. That’s why I love speaking to people like you. You’re only in independent media will they allow you to really put that message out there to say the problem starts at the top or at least it’s in both places. It’s not just a few bad people at the bottom who’ve gone crazy. It is, at least we also need to look at people, by all means look at people at the bottom. I’m not defending anybody that took it upon themselves to blow the brains out of someone with handcuffs on. But I don’t absolve the leadership from any kind of resp… Well, I don’t absolve them from at least being asked questions as to what they knew and when they knew it. Maybe they’ll come out with.

Also ask the question as to how did that soldier, some of our most highly trained soldiers, some of our best people, how did they see these actions as a solution to a problem? How did they get to being a hero to a villain? There’s a process. Nobody’s born a war criminal. We don’t talk about that. That’s not something we talk about, which is not to defend it. This is not to defend.

Yeah, yeah, no, you’re right. You’re right. It’s good. It’s good. You’re, you’re, no, I know. No, I totally, I totally agree with you. I’m just laughing because it’s been 10 years and I haven’t, I don’t know if I’ve spoken to anybody with your level of understanding. I totally agree with that. I’m just used to, you know, people not getting it, you know, that they

what’s happened right but we need to understand it yeah. That scares me.

That scares me.

who want to look at things like that, that deeply. But of course it is, of course, we, that’s, you know, we, we training and we know that there’s, you go through quite a lot of training in the defence force, whether you’re just a private soldier or you’re a specialist like yourself, and we know that training matters and lead the people that our role models matter and it’s not just, you know, everybody for themselves. We do know it’s in documents that these kind of things matter.

And we have lots of psychologists and lots of special, I don’t know how many specialist lectures I went to. I got a master’s while I was in defence, master’s in international law. Yeah, we act dumb now, like, oh, we didn’t know. You can’t say, oh, really? You think maybe some sort of responsibility, the organisation, we’re acting all dumb. Yet, yeah, there’s a lot of very smart people and everybody’s, a lot of people with PhDs like yourself are doing them.

They’re not so dumb. They know that these things do. That’s fact. That’s not airy-fairy. It’s fact, all those concepts you were just talking about. But yeah, trying to get a bad leadership story up is hard. Mainstream media just don’t want it. It’s too difficult. They can’t sell it or they support the government. The government, yeah.

Well, it’s more than 24 hours. It’s more than a 24 hour cycle. It doesn’t have a nice neat headline that captures.

Yeah. And I grew up in this sort of era of Watergate, so I thought that it was possible. What I really needed was a… I needed a partner, people who were going to find out what the emails from the minister’s office said, a bit like we saw in Robodebt. I think the email trail, I think it would have shown, even if it was all in code, not real code, but…

euphemistic sort of code that they knew what was going on and they would have been, as you said, encouraging kill counts, encouraging heroes, encouraging certain things and then suddenly panicking and discouraging and you know like, oh my god, this could affect us. And I would love to see what was going on behind the scenes and I really needed, I didn’t have any, you know, I knew I had all the defence records but I didn’t have any of the political records.

And I think if they did do a deep dive on all the sort of communications, it would be clear that people had some idea about what was going on. And they encouraged it for as long as they could. And then when they saw it was going wrong, they tried to discourage it. But I would like to see those trials. It took me a while anyway. It took me a while to find a journalist was even going to take it. And when the ABC, it was like two years, we had a very long two years as well, in the sense that I was psychologically, mandatory psychologically reviewed a couple of times. And the third time in 2015, I was like, well, why? Suddenly, I had a light bulb moment. I thought, why am I fighting this and trying to prove that I’m not crazy? I may as well be crazy and then, or, you know, may as well go off sick mental health issue because then I’ll be able to, I’ll get paid, I’ll be on full pay and I’ll be able to continue doing my investigation. So eventually I did go off sick and I didn’t realise the time but it was obviously affecting me. Again, a soldier will understand this. You lose your sort of your peer group, your sense of purpose and it is very hard when you, no matter how justified you may feel when you have to fight your own organisation, it’s really damages you and throws you. So it was hard mentally. I drank a lot, I used prescription drugs, overused them, simply because of the pressure. And eventually the ABC saw me. They seemed to be onside. Again, it was probably a little bit too complicated for them. But I needed, I wasn’t going to achieve anything without media. So you have to eventually deal with the devil sort of thing. I think in the long run, it all turned out well. They didn’t run the story that I wanted because they ran a sort of bad soldier story. And they sort of served my purpose in that it got the wheels moving. But it was very much, oh my god, these soldiers are all so bad and the commanders know nothing about it, which I think was wrong.

They drew certain conclusions and they talked about things like a warrior culture, which annoyed me because I was like, well, you know, warrior is just another word for soldier. What sort of culture do you expect these guys to have? They’re fighting the Taliban, the most feared guerrilla organization in the world’s ever known kind of thing. Of course, they’re going to have a warrior mentality.

Because they were just kind of, I think they knew something was up as well, but there wasn’t actually any clear evidence, as I said, in the documents. But there were certainly big question marks as to whether our narrative really matched up with reality. But the good thing was that seemed to start the ball rolling, and then there was other people came forward, and there was the second story, The Killing Field, which I had nothing to do with, but they did then have a few whistleblowers

Dusty Miller, the medic, and Braden Chapman, the SIG guy, and who said, yeah, no, look, we saw this guy basically get kicked to death. And that, and there was also the video footage of Oliver Schultz. And so then things really started to roll, and then Brereton came out soon after, I think.

That was, you know, again, the problem with that is it just said that there’s no leadership culpability, which I disagree with. But saying that is probably a step that you would have thought it’s a step, but it was obviously quite fastidiously done over four years. But it also seems to have caused problems because there’s been no prosecutions either. It’s like, well, how long are you going to wait?

You really want the army to get back on its feet now. And at some point, you’ve got to get closure on these things. And you’ve either got to have trials. And if they don’t get convictions, they don’t get convictions. But you just can’t keep it hanging over everyone’s head forever. And you’ve either got to get on with the trials and some will get convicted, some won’t. But we need to allow the whole organization to move on. And I think we’re getting to the stage where it’s…

Yeah.

We’ve got all these sort of allegations hanging out of people’s heads, but we need to actually sort out what’s just allegation and just concentrate on the most serious ones and do something about it. I think that I’m still disturbed about this. I said back to the very beginning in the Robert Smith one where they talked up his, you know, the one shepherd boy turned into a Taliban force trying to outflank them.

I want to see some responsibility for the guys that wrote that medal citation. I want to see them looking into that because it’s not really so much about the last war, but it’s about the next war. We need to know that if the military put out public statements about what something went on, that it’s actually true and that we don’t just…

you know, pretend that the Chinese have attacked us if they haven’t attacked us and all, pretend we have to do this. It’s a very dangerous game to play where false statements are, you know, are regularly put out in order for a political end. And I think that that’s really my enemy. As for the viewers who don’t know, I’m awaiting a trial. I had

Absolutely.

it was clear that I gave the documents to the ABC and I didn’t nor did I deny it. The soldier in me wanted to. So when the police arrested me, I said, yes, look, I did give the documents. I made a statement against my lawyers judgment. But to say I believed I was justified, I believe that there was something very wrong in the leadership and obviously at the bottom as well. And

And I wanted that to be looked at in the trial. We’ve had a whole lot of national security things that I can’t use. Some of the documents I gave had nothing to do with Afghanistan, they were to do with Syria. And I was using them to say, you know, something’s up in the way we deal with information to the public. And they weren’t able to be used, they were considered too sensitive. And so I haven’t really got a fair trial, but the judge made a ruling

The judge said, there’s no exceptions. You can never give classified information to journalists no matter what happens, war crimes or pedophile rings or even the CDF selling secrets to the Chinese. So it meant that I had to plead guilty if there’s no exceptions. Cause I was hoping to be able to go to the jury and say, well, this is what I saw. I think it’s clearly illegal activity or cover-ups.

which is also illegal, and that would justify me going to the media. But the judge said, no, it won’t. And so once the judge said that, I pled guilty. And now I’ve always said I’m a law-abiding citizen. If that really is the law, it’s something we might appeal. But if that really is the law, there’s no exceptions. I’d already admitted that I gave the documents to the ABC. So I am.

I said I’ll plead guilty and I’m now next, it’s been delayed a few times, but now next 6th of May, 10 days away, I’ll find out whether I’m going to go to prison or whether or maybe I’m going to get home detention, but I’m going to get some sort of prison sentence, I guess. And now I don’t mind about that being a soldier, if you’re prepared to die for your country, you’re not that afraid of prison.

It’s a mental game now and a lot of that appears, it depends on public appearance. It’s not entirely, but I have to sort of reassure myself that I feel okay about what I’ve done. I’m not a bad person. And I still would like the issues to be looked into. And that means I also need to have a fair amount of public support. You don’t need everybody on site. I’ve got plenty of haters, but.

You do need some people on side that say, look, he’s a decent person who stood up for what he believed in. Maybe we need to look into those issues. And so, yeah, I feel okay today. I go down the street and people come up to me and shake my hand, which is good. As I said, I’ve also got haters, but you go up and down. I don’t wake up happy each day. I go to bed happy. And normally…

And it’s good to talk to you because it makes me think that there are people who are smart and who have been soldiers and are thinking about these issues. And it’s great to have them talked about in the public space. And you’ve spoken to quite a few heavy hitters, which is quite amazing. This The Voices Of War.

Maz (01:22:40.658)

I haven’t. And even just by, yeah, and just by through those conversations, I mean, I’ve touched on all of these topics and a lot of seniors, our generals included, have spoken to these points as though it’s a problem. But unfortunately, you know, we’re not seeing that as a sufficient momentum or inertia to get some momentum behind people opening their eyes and seeing the problem for what it actually is as opposed to

you know, what you have done, what BRS has done, what Oli has done, et cetera, et cetera, right? Because this is, we are all, we are all, we’re all products of this ecosystem in our world called Afghanistan, which was, you know, our longest war. And, and, you know, it’s, there are many, many stories that should be told about that war rather than the ones that are being told. But just before we get bogged down too much in something else, I really want to pick up on the point about the idea that

Yeah, I agree.

duty, the definition of duty, as you alluded to a second ago, became a critical point of your, well, I guess, trial. And also the fact that there are no exceptions. So if I understood what you’re saying is that there is no wrong that the government or the military can do, that you and I, you and I as soldiers, can and should leak to the public. Is that accurate?

Yeah, that’s the ruling. Yeah, and we think we can pull that. But I mean, it’s yeah, it’s quite astounding. And again, there should have been more interest in that to say, is that really true? I mean, the Holocaust, some of the things that happened in Yugoslavia. I know.

I mean, is that really true? I mean, that’s scary. That’s, that is basically, I mean, I don’t know if people realize how scary that, basically, if you’re a witness to grave abuses of humanity, you are not allowed, in fact, you’re discouraged at the risk of going to jail for a very long time, potentially up to life in prison, if you let the Australian people know,

Yeah, it’s…

on whose behalf we are in these foreign lands fighting. Is that accurate?

Yeah, that’s accurate. And that you would have thought there’d be more attention to that. It was, yeah, that was the that’s why we didn’t even go to the jury. The judge said, it doesn’t matter what you’ve got to say. There’s no exceptions. I was like, well, wow. Yeah. And and to get to the judicial because by I wish that the court cases are a bit like football games and you if you really if you got to re replay them, you might do them differently. But

Yeah, my lawyer was very good. He said that there must be, when you swear on the oath, when you put your hand on the Bible or the Quran or whatever your holy book is, and you say, you know, I’m going to do the best. I assumed that meant the best for Australia, but he said, no, you’re swearing to the king and you have no duty at all to the Australian people think again that that’s sort of appellable to say, you can understand that if it was 50-50, you do, or even 80% to the King and 20% to the Australian people, but the idea that you have no, whatever, you know, whatever’s right, doesn’t have any bearing on, I think that doesn’t sit right with me. And, but that’s what he said. And

So it’ll be interesting to see. And people have contacted me, someone’s contacted me and said, my son was going to go to ADFA and doesn’t want to join the defense force anymore when they heard that, because it’s just too extreme. To think that, you know, if you’re command, we all know that there are a lot of great people in the defense force, but there are a lot of bad people as well, and the idea that if you’ve got a bad commander, they can just tell you what to do.

Even if it’s extremely obviously wrong, you don’t have any choice. And I wish we’d said, well, I wish we’d argued about it legal orders, because I don’t think any sort of national security order that says, you can’t release information to the media. And this is what I said in my police interview. I said that can’t be legal to say that you can’t talk about the Holocaust. And

But we didn’t argue that. Because that’s one of the problems of being in a civilian court when you’re talking about military concepts. Lawful orders, general orders, both lawyers are sort of civilians. And they’re getting confused about the terminology about what’s a lawful order. And something could be a lawful order because your commander gives it to you. But it’s not necessarily lawful. Funnily enough, it’s very topical with Oliver Schulz’s case.

And those who are familiar, he’s standing in a wheat field and he says to his patrol commander, should I shoot this guy? And he obviously gets an affirmative answer while he can’t hear it, hand signal or something. And according to the judge’s judgment in my case, he has acted legally because he’s taken an order and he’s done it. In fact, he could have been charged for not following that order.

So he’s got a defense, if he can quote my judge. And so it’s sort of strange. Not that I deny him a defense, but most people would be surprised by that, to say that there are no exceptions and if you get an order, that’s all you need. And you don’t apply any. Yeah, so what’s a lawful order and what’s not? But a legal officer might have some sort of idea about what’s going on.

I was just going to say, but we’re also told in the military, we’re also told that we are not obliged to follow an illegal order. In other words, that we ought to have the moral courage or physical courage to stand up against an illegal order. So where does that leave a soldier who says no to an illegal order? Which is the example of Oliver.

Well, that’s right. And how do they know it’s illegal? I mean, we shoot people all the time. And a lawyer like myself might have a chance of working it out. But it’s not always going to be as obvious as that. And according to the judge in my case, you’re not really meant to try to apply your mind to it. Because if you apply your mind to it and you decide it is illegal and you do something about it, you’re in the frame for the same way I’m in the frame. So.

Yeah, lots of big question marks over it. And I guess that’s why I have achieved something and that hopefully in the appeal process or hopefully if there’s a bit of outrage about what happens to me, these questions will be looked at because that’s always been my aim and you will get this as a soldier, civilians don’t, but I’ve always been about change. It hasn’t been about me avoiding jail.

And this has been frustrating for my lawyers sometimes because I’m saying, I’m not going to say this. I could have probably, I could have pled mental health issues and pled guilty five years ago. But I didn’t want that because it would have, I wouldn’t have got the issues looked at. And it’s not about me going to jail and it’s not about me avoiding jail. It’s about bringing these issues into discussion, national discussion so we can get, I believe when they change it, but at least we can go with our eyes open into the future.

Are you seeing any changes already based on what you’ve gone through and what you’ve exposed and what’s, you know, some of the things that you’ve just highlighted?

Yeah, I think, yeah, it’s hard to know. You’re always, you’re a little bit negative about, I think that the, I think that, yeah, I think there is change. And when you’re, when you’re fighting down in the weeds, you always think that the, your focus on the enemy, you think they’re doing better than you. I think the fact that the government is trying quite hard to crush me means that they, they can see that I’m a threat. And, and the

At least people are thinking about the government’s role in things and the general’s role, the leadership role in things. And I think that that, I like to think that it would be harder for the defence force to carry out bullshit operations from now on because it made them, I’ve given them a bit of a scare to say you might get another McBride who…

who sort of says no and leaks documents. And we need to make sure that at least stuff that we do has some sort of basis in fact. Yeah, I don’t know. It’s hard for me to know, I guess, because, you know, again, soldiers were pretty perfectionists. I haven’t seen enough change that I would like. I’d like to see a general in the witness box answering a few questions, but I…

I probably haven’t done too badly. It’s sort of a bit of a draw at the moment. I think that I’ve made them think twice about certain things and they’ve had to fight pretty hard to defeat me. But yeah, no, that’s the kind of big question. I guess other people have to answer that. When you’re, like you would know when you’re down in the, when you would have been doing operations and with intelligence, you probably always think you could have done things slightly better, but other people would say, actually you did a good job in that.

We achieved what we needed to achieve, even if it wasn’t perfect.

Hmm. Last question, conscious of our time. Tomorrow’s ANZAC day. How do you feel about ANZAC day? What is ANZAC day to you, given what you’ve gone through?

Yeah, it’s a good question. For many years after getting back from Afghanistan, I didn’t celebrate Anzac Day because I thought it epitomized everything that had gone wrong in that it was a window dressing day. I mean, in 2013, I think, or it must have been 2015, 200th anniversary of, 100th anniversary of Gallipoli. And

and made a big deal of it, but all the people in the front row were not those linked to soldiers, they were all sort of top brass who probably, you know, most of whom had never seen operations and politicians. And I disliked, even though I was heartened by the fact young people in Australia celebrate Anzac Day today more than we did when I was younger.

But it had been overtaken as a sort of political window dressing exercise. And there were plenty of unhappy veterans back in Australia and miserable, lonely veterans sitting in nursing homes. And I thought, if you want to go and really honor a veteran, don’t go to a cenotaph or there are no veterans, but go to a nursing home or a public hospital or see a homeless person and have a cup of tea with them.

So I was a bit, and also having been at two operations and then it had taken a fair bit out of me, I thought I really don’t wanna spend another morning away from my family. I’m gonna, you know, if I’m gonna do anything, I’m gonna go and snuggle my kids and sit on the sofa with them and celebrate the fact that I’m back. A lot of people didn’t come back. So.

Yeah, I had to, I’m going to go, I’m making a documentary or I’m not making a friend of mine is making a documentary about the whole episode and I call war criminals and he probably he you might be a good person for him to interview in the sense that he’s looking at the wider, the wider picture of everything. And he’s interviewed me at length. So we’re going to go to Waverley cemetery tomorrow. I’m going to talk about it. My grandfather was an Anzac.

He was no great hero, but he was there on the Western Front as a stretcher bearer. And so I can remember him and his buddies and the people that we know a little bit closer to home, I guess. But as you and I know, you’ve got 365 days to do that. You don’t have to do it one day. It’s a bit like the sort of military equivalent of Valentine’s Day. You know, if you really love someone, you don’t need one day a year to do it. You can honor them every day. But saying that I’ll be at the cemetery tomorrow and we’ll film a little bit and we’ll talk a little bit about what it means. But yes, it’s divided for me and I just, I wanna see real care for veterans rather than phony care, I guess. And the ANZAC Day embodies both. There is plenty of real sentiment, but there’s, and it’s good to see so many people turn out for it these days.

But there is also a fair bit of political window dressing at the same time. I don’t want to see any politicians laying wreaths, although I’m happy to see the families of the fallen there.

Maz (01:36:15.194)

Hear, hear. I mean, as somebody who’s torn about Anzac Day, much like you, the amount of times I’ve shaken my head and walked off dumbfounded when people see me on Anzac Day, which I’d go to now mainly because of my kids, but they’d shake your hands and say, thank you for your service. And the amount of times I’ve wondered, do you even know what we were doing? Because we don’t. So, you know, maybe tell me. And I think that’s an irony that most people, they think they’re doing the right thing. And I applaud the public and the civilians for embracing the veteran and the veteran culture so wholly, but I tend to agree. And I never heard it described that way, like Valentine’s day. I agree. That’s spot on. But from me as a veteran to you as a veteran, I want to say thank you for your service because I know what you’ve done and I respect what you’ve done despite the fact that you have paid a far too high price already and chances are you’re likely to pay the bigger price in the near future. But I do think you’re a service for our soldiers and for our people.

Oh, I want to thank you, brother. I particularly thank you for your brain and this podcast, because it’s like water in the desert for me to speak to someone like you who gets it and considers these big issues and is out there interviewing generals fearlessly. And I just, that’s like a light on the hill for me. And it’s

Well, you could only do it if you’re a veteran, but it’s doubly nice that you are a veteran, and particularly that we shared some experiences of being in the kill chain overseas. Yeah, so what a pleasure it is to meet you. I spoke for a lot longer than I expected, but I really enjoyed it. If I didn’t have to go to lunch, I would have stayed longer. But yeah, I look forward to watching the podcast and sharing it.

Absolutely. And it’s unsurprisingly coming out on Anzac Day. So thank you very much for your time, David.

Good. Yeah, thank you.