 We're here today with the Afghan files whistleblower, David McBride, who is facing a lifetime in jail for doing the right thing by exposing war crimes by Australian troops in Afghanistan. David, thanks for agreeing to chat with us. Can you give us a bit of background to start on what you're actually facing in terms of your prosecution at the moment? Well, you're right, they said. I'm facing a possible lifetime imprisonment. There's actually an unlimited upper limit, so I could die in jail. I'm in my late 50s now. Even if they say, well, you could have got 200 years, we're only going to give you 20. That's obviously, it's a big thing. It's something that I'm not complaining about though, and I like to emphasise. I don't feel sorry for myself. This is something I've gone into with my eyes wide open. I believe it's an issue that needs to be sorted for Australia's future. And I'm proud to stand up what I believe. And if I've committed a crime, I'll go to jail. I'm all about the rule of law. So I'm not trying to get sympathy. I'm trying to get justice. And your situation in some respects mirrors that of a number of Australians who have acted on principle and have come out and said this is wrong in their various professions and have been persecuted for it. We have witness Kay and Bernard Kaleri. We have, of course, Julian Assange, the most globally recognised of this type of prosecution. We have Richard Boyle who took on the ATO. There are a number of Australians. How would your situation, do you think, differ from theirs? It's very similar, and there's more similarities and differences. And the key thing, this is why my case is so important. We need to work out whether it's OK, whether the government can say it's illegal to report government crime. Now, they have a bare majority. They can do that. I believe if they can do that, there's no reason why they can't pass the law to say it's illegal to vote for anybody but us. I think that's wrong. I think it doesn't matter whether Parliament has passed a law legislation. If it's fundamentally goes against the spirit of democracy, it cannot be law. I don't think you can ever make it illegal to report government wrongdoing. And that's what my case is all about. So, can you tell us, just give us a background, a bit of a briefing on the timeline and what actually happened in terms of your involvement in the armed forces in Afghanistan that happened subsequently that brought you to this position that's been going on for a decade? One of the similarities that I have with the ATO whistleblower Richard Boyle and Bernard Caleri that were the cases that you mentioned, and in fact, Jeff Morris, the Commonwealth Bank whistleblower, is that we were all actually relatively conservative-minded people who believed in the rule of law and believed in doing our job. That's one of the misconceptions that whistleblowers are activists or bomb throwers, generally where people very much believe in doing the right thing. We believe the propaganda that actually the government is good and the government files a law. And when we see something wrong, we think that it's actually our job to speak up. I have a very sort of blue-chip background. I can't deny it. I'm from a wealthy family. I went to a good school in Sydney. I joined the British military first. I went to Santerst. I went to Oxford University. I was never like Julian Assange. I was never sort of against the Americans. I was never against the British. I really believed in the rule of law. I did a tour of operations in Northern Ireland. Looking back, I was a barrister in Sydney and I joined... I found the law a little bit too... It lacked the public service that I wanted. And I rejoined the Australian Army at my wife's suggestion. But this time as a lawyer, before I was just a soldier, but as a lawyer. And I found that the perfect combination of what was important to me, I was half lawyer, half soldier, half defending the country, using my legal brain. I had a good career. I did two tours of Afghanistan and not everybody gets elected to go to Afghanistan. I became increasingly concerned that we were talking the talk and not walking the walk. We had a case in 2009 where we killed five children. And there was a trial, but the trial was axed before it got to court. And I think as a result of conservative pressure, I began to realise or suspect that polling and public perception was really running the war in the sense that even if someone had murdered five children, in this case, if it was... You were going to lose votes by having a trial, there would be no trial. And that's been borne out in England. And increasingly, the war was being run like a crooked real estate operation where we were putting out false information all the time. We made heroes of people who weren't heroes. We made villains of people that weren't villains. And that's one of the important things. While I'm known as the sort of war crimes whistleblower, it first started because I could see that good soldiers were being scapegoated for just doing their jobs because the political winds had changed and they needed scapegoats. So they found some scapegoats. It's a bit like the NRL analogy where some famous players get into trouble but you don't want them to go down because the club is going to go down. So you find some 19-year-old new recruits and you make an example of them because that won't affect the club's bank balance. And there was more and more of that going on. I think one of the best illustrations of what I was talking about happened recently when the Afghan nation that we built or the government that we built collapsed in a heap days after Americans left. And that showed what a liar was. For 20 years we said it was going well publicly. Everyone in the military knew it wasn't. And it showed that we were pumping out things that had no relation to the truth. And that in itself was a crime. We were fooling the Australian public. We were lying to the Australian public saying everything was going well. Our allies were often criminals, drug dealers, pedophiles. But we pretended that they weren't in order to sell a good news message. It was a bit like, and your viewers will understand this, it was a bit like the war was a huge military enron and that we were putting out good news information and things that were going well. But it was a house of cards up a Tenton village which was about to fall down. I could see that in all sorts of levels. We were putting out PowerPoint to say, oh, look how well we're doing when it had no bearing on the truth. We were showering medals on people who were murderers. And we knew that. And occasionally we'd make a scapegoat of someone who was just doing their job. So it was a big problem. It was hard to get people interested because it just sounds too big and you would have this as well. I mean, if you start to talk to someone about it, especially when I was a true believer and I believe the whole stuff, I still do. I still do believe that democracy is good and we should be fighting for freedom. All of that stuff is good. It sounds good. But when you began to see the seamy side of it, it's a bit like a police force which has become corrupted. You become quite revolted. And it was hard to be taken seriously because people didn't want to believe that it was so rotten and at such a high level because you look like a conspiracy theorist and you look like you sort of hate on everything. But I don't. I love the American people. I think that their government and our government have been hijacked by some of the most cynical people and they use patriotism. They use words like freedom and democracy in order to sell a product which is not the product that we're actually getting. Talking about the selling products, the opium trade obviously didn't stop so that was still a huge source of income and the spectacular collapse and the Taliban coming back after 20 years and then as you say, it evinced the failure of the nation-building thing. But just on that opium trade thing, was it interrupted during the time or was it just allowed to continue? I'm glad you mentioned it. Has there been any change? This is one of the things which illustrates how topsy-turvy our worldview was or the propaganda. I was privileged enough to go to Afghanistan in the year 2000 when the Taliban were running. I travelled all around. We were making a travel documentary. And being a former soldier, even though the Taliban were already demonised around the world, I had some sympathy for them. I knew that they were an amateur government and I knew that they were a product of the Civil War and the Russian in 20 years of terrible things. So the Taliban actually destroyed the heroin poppy because they decided, Mullah Omar decided it was un-Islamic and that people with addicts were bad, Afghan addicts were dying. And he probably didn't think it was good for American kids to be dying either. So they actually destroyed it. They were desperate for money. They had thousands of people dying of famine, but they still destroyed the poppy. And I know that because we drove around and we saw all the fields and they were the sort of people, if they said something, they did it. They weren't like us. And yeah, when we came back from 2000, the terrible thing was we put in Hamid Karzai's brother and family and they started growing it again. And because they were anti-Taliban or on our side, they were allowed to grow. But we also had terrible wheels within wheels where we killed a lot of poppy growers. I mean, we just killed them dead. And that was against international war. But the Americans just decided, as they do, with their very questionable interpretations of international war to say, if you're growing poppy, you're going to give the money to the Taliban. Therefore, you're Taliban and we're just going to kill you. That's wrong. And that was actually murder. But the Australians were involved in a lot. This is one thing that hasn't come out yet. We're involved in what they called a lot of anti-Nexus operations where we just killed poppy growers and it was illegal. And nobody within the Australian, rather, had enough backbone to say, are we sure we can just kill people for growing poppy? And it's particularly ironic and disgusting to me because I did years and years of training both at law school in Oxford and in the military. And I knew that that wasn't right. I knew that you couldn't kill people for being even involved in organized crime. You couldn't just make that connection and say, oh, well, you must be part of an insurgency, not necessarily. And they don't, you can't just do the death threat. But they've got away with that. And the poppies come back. And there is credible evidence that the CIA are involved growing of the poppy. So it's become so disgusting. We try to paint the Taliban as these evil people. And there was a lot of propaganda that said they were behind the poppy and whatever. Actually, the opposite was true. For all their kind of medieval ideas, they didn't, they killed the poppy. They thought it was kind of evil. And when we came back, it was their toxic nationality that we were right and they were wrong, meant that we grew poppy. We used the money for ourselves. We got allies who were openly pedophiles, openly murderers. We would engage with anybody as long as they would be on our side. And it made me, it still makes my skin crawl now as I'm saying it, particularly for someone who grew up as such an idealist. I began to see that we were the bad guys. We were full of it. We said the stars and stripes and we talked about democracy, but we were drug dealers. We were poppy growers. Well, we were murderers. We did Abu Ghraib, which had no, no one high up got punished. We cynically did Guantanamo Bay. And they actually came, they said, oh, well, if we bring these prisoners back to America, they're going to have rights. Even if we hit them in Afghanistan, they're going to have some rights. But if we bring them to some place which has a questionable legal status, we can torture them. And the rendition was the same. We can't bring them back to America and torture them. We'll take them to Kazakhstan and we'll pay them, you know, a couple of billion dollars so we can torture them in Kazakhstan. That's our allies. That goes against all the training I had. And I was repulsed by it. And the more I looked into it, I actually started it relatively small. And this is a point worth making as well as I didn't go straight to the media. I wrote a very diplomatically worded 20-page document with 400 attachments. This was in what year? This was in 2014. After my 2013 deployment where they threatened to arrest me because they said, you know, I was obstructive justice, but I was actually standing up for some soldiers who were being made scapegoats. I said, you've got to apply. Simply, I just said, we have got to apply the law in investigating SAS people. By this stage in 2013, the winds had changed and they were looking for some SAS scapegoats, I believe. And they were trying to put some people on trial for murder who had simply just done their job and may have shot someone by mistake in the heat of battle, but they had not committed a murder. But the military brass was so cynical, they needed someone to go to jail and they were looking. And I stood up for this guy and said no. I didn't say he was innocent. I said, we just need to apply the law. And they tried to put me in jail for that. And that made me think this is a strange thing. What charge did they try to make? Obstruction of justice. And that was never going to work. I just laughed. They had a bit like you did with your defamation. I was like, how can a lawyer be guilty of obstruction of justice by giving a legal opinion? You know, you might have a different legal opinion. But if you don't want a lawyer to give a legal opinion, why do you send them to the battle space anyway? But I began to see the reality of the military structure. And it wasn't about... They have lawyers just for show. It wasn't really a... They didn't expect me to follow the law and help SAS soldiers. They wanted me to follow orders. And if the politicians wanted a scalp, they wanted me to bring them a scalp. And I didn't like that. And when I got back, I wrote a 20-page complaint. Internal complaint, not even a complaint. Because, you know, it's a very hierarchical structure. And you lose your job for being rude to a senior officer. And they can actually... It's something called insubordination, which just means having an attitude and put you in jail. So I couldn't have an attitude. I wrote this thing and I did it in my spare time. And it took me months and months and months. And now even when I read it back, I'm quite impressed by it. I even saw the AFP. I contacted the AFP hotline and I said, I think there's something wrong in the defence force and that we don't follow our own laws. And we do it deliberately. And if nothing else, it's a spending offence because you're only meant to spend money on legitimate goals of an apartment. That is fighting the war. But we were spending money on false media messages, which is not fighting the war. And we were spending money on scapegoating people again, which is not fighting the war. And it was because they've worked out that if the electorate likes the military, they will tend to reelect the incumbent government. And so they were important. It was important for them to the electorate to like the military. So they were spending money. It was a way to get around election advertising or spending a lot of money on making the military likeable, regardless of the facts. And so I said, even if it's just on a pure spending law, we need to have a look at this. So the AFP fought me off. They said, if the government doesn't, it can't be illegal, basically. And they said, anyway, you've got your own military police and if there's anything wrong, they will find out. So the military police work for the generals. They're not going to investigate their own generals. So don't expect them to do anything. And they were like, yeah, they were quite good. I mean, they weren't evil, but they were just like, yeah, that's a bad world we live in. The government can do what they want. So anyway, I wrote this long internal complaint and I was trying to say that we need to follow the law. We can't just scapegoat people one day, lionize people the next. If there's an allegation of murder against a famous person, well, you have to look into it. We've got to carry it. And at that time, I was still a true believer and I was hoping they'd come back to me and say, with a deep breath, they'd say, look, you're right. We're fighting a war. We've got to carry away. And yeah, we did start to run a bit fast and loose with things. So I was trying to draw the analogy to say, if the military are allowed to continue in life and murder for political purposes, where's it going to end? Am I going to fucking kill the Labor Party guy and say it was a suicide? You know, there's no difference. There's no legal difference between doing those things. We can't mislead the Australian public and it's all very well to say, oh, we'd never do that. But the military don't think that way. And if you say to them, it's all right to kill people and lie about it, they're going to continue to do it until you tell them it's not. And it was a worrying thing. So I tried to make this point as diplomatically as I could. I still had a career at that stage. And although it was rapidly that was going down the tubes because I was seen as a trouble, you know, people couldn't, I was surprised, and you might find this, I was surprised how many people ran for cover and couldn't believe that I wanted to make trouble. Even at this stage, it was just a relatively polite letter saying, you sure we don't want to have a second look at this. And at the time I was prepared for them to say, yeah, yeah, I can see your point. And I thought I might get a pat on the back and maybe who knows, maybe even a promotion for doing what, taking that hardcore. It happens in corporations too. Precisely this slide is to be somebody being deemed to be not part of the team. But yeah, a troublemaker, of course that can, either they buckle under and put up with it or, but in your case, of course you didn't. You continued to do what you thought was the right thing. Well, it took them a whole year to decide and they eventually came back with it. As I expected, this is one of the frustrating things about being a military lawyer, is that one of your bread and butter jobs is putting down complaints. So I kind of knew how they were going to handle it exactly the way I would have handled it, draw it out, write a very long response and say, on balance, we've decided he's got no case. Which of course is what they did. But I still had to go through that motion. I knew I wouldn't get any sympathy if I went straight to the press and I didn't really want to. I was still very much, I wanted to stay in the military. It was the perfect job for me. Half lawyer, half soldier. So it was quite, it was a very hard time for me. I searched for what I was going to do. I did, in 2014 I spoke to Chris Masters. I chose, well it's a little bit of the universe. I didn't know his full history when I chose him. I knew he was a relatively conservative guy who wrote positive things about the military. He'd been to Afghanistan. So I thought he would care. I thought he'd say, look we escaped getting SAS people when they don't deserve to be. And I think that the reason we're doing that is to cover up some really serious crimes by his famous people. He seemed to get it. And I'm not ashamed of speaking to him. I might go to jail for speaking to him. But I'm not ashamed of it. He was a bit like the Watergate affair and it wasn't going to fix itself without the media. I tried to ask the military to fix themselves. They weren't going to do it. You went through the proper whistleblower channels. I went through the channels. And actually under the act, the Public Injustice Disclosure Act, you are allowed to go to the media if you make a complaint and then the complaint is filed off. And I waited over a year and they filed it off eventually and got no grounds. And then I started going to people like Masters who were very responsible. And this is one of the annoying things. It's not like I went to the Chinese. I got a sold secret. So I had a top secret security clearance. Access to a lot of things. It could have got me a lot of money if I wanted that way. I didn't want that. I went to a very responsible journalist who I thought like Bernstein and Woodward could really start asking more questions and get some action, which is what I really wanted. The problem with all this, it's not about me having attention about them not doing what I wanted. If the military is corrupt, if the military doesn't do what it says it's doing and doesn't spend money the way it's meant to, Australia is not protected. And that bothered me. As a lifetime soldier, that bothered me to say, we're not even protecting the country. We're pretending to protect the country. But if this present government fought the Chinese as they seem determined to do, they would consider it acceptable if Darwin was totally bombed by getting a green screen of Darwin, Dutton, and standing there going, Darwin is safe. Get some soldiers. That's how they fight wars with phony stuff. I don't really care about what happens. I don't care whether you... I don't think they care how many civilians got killed as long as no one found out. It was all about public opinion. And that bothered me. That really bothered me, because not only was it wrong, we weren't going to win your wars. Did you know, though, what sort of apprehension did you have? What sort of feeling did you have that you're taking this next move to release the information more broadly in the public interest and the national interest? Indeed, would end up... You must have known the risk of rolling the dice on this. Yeah, I did. And that's why I don't want sympathy. But it never occurred to me. I never had any fear. The journalists always said... They were to be fair to me. They always said, you understand that you've been the frame for this. And I can understand... I guess that shows you the sort of disconnection between being an investigative journalist and their brave people. They do a good job and actually being a soldier. They didn't really want to go to jail for doing their job, which is fair enough. They're exposed to career-wise. Yeah, they're exposed. Yeah, and I get that. But I was a soldier and I was... The reality... It's not been melodramatic, but the reality of being a soldier is that you might have to die for your country and you can't. If you don't like that, you shouldn't be a soldier. And I was so angry by what I saw as the absolute trashing of everything we were meant to stand for. But I was like, bring it on. You know, I don't care about going to jail. I just want justice. It was a bit... I was a bit like Rambo in the sense that I was so angry about what we'd become. Because even from the early days, I saw the hell... They said, you know, I said, look, I'll do a bloody public appearance in my uniform if necessary, if I think it's going to achieve something. Oh, I don't want to self... The only reason I needed to sort of stay out of jail for as long as I could is I needed to win the case. And I wasn't going to win the case of a jail cell. But I certainly was never afraid of that. And that's because I was a true believer in Australia. I was a true believer in democracy. I was a true believer in America. And I was so angry when I saw that it was... We were increasingly becoming a nation of car salesmen and it's unfair to car salesmen. But the worst kind of con man... And I was angry. I wanted it fixed. And that conviction, the rule of law, stays today doesn't, because you're not contesting that if they want to hold these trials, the David McBride trial in secret, in camera, you're not contesting that. You're saying, well, if that's the case, you've still got a reasonable view of the judiciary and that they will come up and make the right decision in the case. Is that a... Well, that's the case. I wasn't even going to get lawyers to begin with. I'm satisfied. I've been treated very fairly by the AFP, by the Crown prosecutors, by all the Canberra judges and magistrates I've appeared before. I can't speak highly enough of them. They've been so good. I've got no fear of the judiciary. And if we have to have a secret trial, a judge-alone trial, I say that's fine. I'm about... From the very beginning against all the legal advice I had, I spoke to the police. I said, yes, I gave the documents over. I don't want the case to be run about whether I gave the documents. I did. I did it because I was justified. I did it because I think that in certain circumstances, like a holocaust or whatever, you must be justified in speaking to the press. And it'll be a question of fact about whether the circumstances were bad enough. But I'm happy to have that issue ventilated and happy to have that issue judged. But you didn't pass on operational things. So there's no operational things at risk here. This was about historical things that had happened about breaking the law, basically. The government, and that's where I get angry. All the judicial people have been fantastic. The government has been totally disgusting in that regard. And they know there's no operational... You know, if someone murdered someone on a hill in Afghanistan 10 years ago, that's not national security information. That's just a crime. And the idea that that would somehow endanger us to the Chinese, it's just disgusting BS. It's not national security information. That a crime occurred and a child was murdered and it was covered up by a government official. That's a crime. And people need to speak. And no matter... They could execute me. But I will never say that it's OK for the government to stop people talking about murders of children by soldiers because the government say it is. You know, that's wrong. Just another issue here in the aftermath of Afghanistan since the withdrawal. Of course, the people that are sticklers for in there in the first place and our conduct was fine. They're basically the people, the promoters of it. They're now saying that women are in danger. Now, is that the case? Because this is the...obviously, you know, from the conservative side with Vietnam or the refusal to embrace the fact that it was a complete farce and that many people died unnecessarily. In that case, millions. And then Iraq, of course. Organis, of course, continue to find justification. And it seems to me that the central justification is now that we are trying to do the right thing for women. The Taliban are going to be bad for women. In fact, they haven't got a great track record on women and masking. What is your view about the Taliban women? You must have got a reasonable feel for it while you were there. That's all a crock. The only reason they even say that is because they know it's likable. One of the things I used to do as a military lawyer was sign off from what they call information operations, PSY OPS operations, which is false information we put out in order to win the war, whatever that might be. Of course, it's a bit like the murders and covering up. It's been abused. So it's like you might have seen in the Syrian war when fighting ISIS there were things on social media about here's pictures of ISIS killing a gay person. They're throwing a gay person off the roof. And as someone has been involved in those, you can see that that's a fake photo. ISIS make your gay people, but that is not a photo, a real photo. It's convenient to win the progressives over to the war. We will make up stuff to win progressive votes or win conservative votes. And indeed, just to get consent, national consent for the war. And if you asked an Afghan girl what they most want, they would say, not to be killed by an American bomb. Thank you very much. I mean, we killed thousands and thousands and thousands of young girls with our fucking bombs. So it's disgusting to hear George W. Bush say, with his wife, oh, it's all about Afghan women and girls. He doesn't care about Afghan women and girls any more than he cares about Texan women and girls. He cares about saying something which will touch a chord. We killed so many Afghan women and girls and we continue to. And there's no justification for starting a war because you're worried about the human rights. That is, it's a whole new level of cynicism to show that we weren't in the war to help Afghan women's war. We were there for all sorts of reasons, mainly for revenge, mainly to win elections. We didn't care how many people were killed. And Afghan women and girls, if they're honest, can't stand George W. Bush and his phony sentiment and anybody else that kind of says the same thing. They know that we don't really care about Afghans. That is something that we used to sell a product, which was a war, which was run for political purposes. So tell me we're up to exactly now. Now, you've had the proceedings delayed for another year or something. You've got this hanging over your head until the kickoff isn't even until another year or something. It's not even really kickoff. It's pre-season in the sense that there's a first, there's an original trial, a pre-trial, about whether or not I'm protected under the public interest disclosure rate, which is an act which you would expect, judging by the name, is out there to protect people who do public interest disclosure. And they've already admitted that there was a public interest because they've dropped the, well, they've decided not to continue with the charges against the ABC journalists. And the reason that they gave was because it was a public interest story and they don't prosecute people for public interest stories. Right. Okay, so that's on the record that they know it was a public interest story and you think I'd be protected by the act. But the public interest disclosure rate is a bit like the Fair Work Act. It seems to be the opposite to what it actually proclaims to me. So first we've got to decide whether or not that I don't know, I'm not actually confident that that act's going to protect me only because the act is so ridiculous. And not even now we've got this ridiculous Kafka situation where the government has admitted the act is pretty hopeless and needs to be rewritten, but I'm still going to go trial under the old act. Go figure. You know, taxpayer money, not their money, why not? And I would rather just go straight to the jury trial. It's going to be a jury trial. God knows how they're going to have a secret, top secret jury trial. Imagine everybody in the jury might be... They've all got security clearances. It might be a very conservative pool, as you might say. But they need to have security clearances. Well, it's all... If the government... The government are going to be hoist on their own patata, certainly, one hand they're saying, this is all super, super, super, you know, information. And the other hand they're going to have to find 12 people who can hear super-duper information who don't work for the government or maybe they do. So the jury selection process is interesting, wouldn't it? It's going to... And they're going to... Even if they get people from the street, they're going to have to... They're going to have to give them security classifications. And it's going to make them a mockery of the idea that the information was that secret, if they're going to pick people out of suburban cameras. The security clearance to get to my level takes two years. You have to ask all sorts of questions, look at your bank details, find out about the sexual past, find out about the hotel you're spending. So it's just a ridiculous idea. And of course, but the government don't want to have to admit that it's really not. The information wasn't really, you know, it was about murders, it was about crimes. It's not actually about our secrets, you know. So it seems that the government's playing a drag it out type of game. Yeah. Yeah. It's so often the case with whistleblowers that they like to make an example of a lot of problems in somebody's life and the life of their family and their children and everybody. Yeah. That sets an example. Don't go blowing the whistle. Just shut up and do what the government wants you to do. Yeah. And we touched on it. And they like to think, and this is my message to the people who worked for the Attorney General's Department and the Australian government. So I says, you know, you are the bad guys. My mother was 92 and she was trying to hang in here for the end of my trial. And she's recently passed away last week. She died and there's no doubt that my trial contributed to her death. You know, she was a sick woman and it was an extra bit of anxiety and pressure to have her son maybe go into jail for life. So to the AGs, and you are the bad guys. My father died after I was on the run when he died. It wasn't actually charged. I couldn't go to his funeral because I knew I'd get arrested. You know, we are basically a pretty good Australian family. The government would like, they would like to see me commit suicide. Then it's not like two equally matched sporting teams fighting each other. They are pretty bad. And if you work for the government on this, they wouldn't say it out loud, but they would be happy for my children and for myself harm, for me to self harm. They really want to destroy me and they think that that's part of the job. Now I say it's not. That's not the Australia I grew up in. Well, it's certainly the case with Assange who's effectively been tortured via his incarceration, isn't it? So it's part of the playbook. There's no doubt about that. It's part of the playbook and they think that it's clever but it's not great. No, but it's extreme pressure on people. It certainly seems to be part of the playbook. Now what about the other proceedings then? What are the other acts that they're pursuing you on? Well, there's a whole lot of acts. I don't read them too much. One thing that's in my favour is it's not a pure official secrets act and it's not like the simple act of giving documents to the ABC is not enough. There's a gap in legislation. I'm charged under the Defence Act with an oldy-worldy thing which says I gave information to people that weren't entitled to it and it wasn't my duty to do so. Now I love that flash phrase because I want to run the case on the idea that it exactly was my duty. I had a practicing certificate as a lawyer. I was a military officer who went to the military schools where they talk about honour and ethics and moral courage. You meant to have moral courage. It's one of the sort of touchstones of the Australian Defence Wars and I reckon I did exactly what I was meant to do. Which you'll be able to say in court. I want to have that judged in court. Did he do his duty or did he not? What is a public servant's duty when they see the wrongdoing? In a public sense, the media coverage of this and the fact that you went public intrepidly gave you positive coverage generally. How have you seen the media cover it since then and you've decided to keep it in the public domain rather than keep it lawyer-to-lawyer because you feel that you've got a better chance of justice or because you're doing the right thing by talking about these issues publicly? It's always a gamble and I have a lot of Archie with my lawyer who is an ex-newsman. He knows a lot about it. My attitude is I have my fingers burnt a few times and my attitude is I'll speak to anyone at any time. That's a bit of a gamble and I've had a bit of beginner's luck. I got set up once by a piece in the City Morning Hell and I think the guy had been he was a defense writer and he was quite clever and this is what it was quite a good illustration about a clever hatchet job. He said a lot of sort of relatively hard paragraphs but he put the boot in and if you file paragraphs if a judge or someone was reading it he implied that I was a little bit unbalanced that I was a little bit wound up a bit too tight and just did it subtly so I got my fingers burnt on that one. Luckily people don't read things very closely even though I was very angry about it most people were like good article and he came across very well and there was something in there about me biting someone's finger off and they were like that's fucking great but it's interesting how people don't really read stuff but I think it's been helpful the Twitter has been really good for me I need to sing your praises because the independent media is so powerful and you could easily be the best intention person in the world to be drawn pretty quickly because there's no guarantee the mainstream media will help you and they might and I haven't been treated particularly badly but they there's a lot of sensitive to government sensibilities well I think certain journalists mention the particular papers but I think certain journalists have a lot of personal sympathy with me the government is a huge advertiser in the Australian and they don't want to piss the government off the first time it was covered I spoke to a journalist in a very positive fashion and all said I was charged with theft famous lawyer charged with theft and even though we talked about all the major issues and they have done some very good things for me they have covered what I you can't get everything I mean there's so many wheels in the wheels the Australian have covered the fact that the leadership have got questions to answer which I like and I'm very grateful for them doing that because that's my key thing obviously the the nine newspapers are covering the war crimes trial which I think is really good and the substance of your work has ended up before the Broughton commission as well so that's being tested in another domain and that was covered well I was happy with that and I got good press after Broughton came out and that was very good I can't certainly can't complain about that as a lot of people have said to me it's funny how and you've seen this you would see this and the Trump and Brexit there is a disconnect between the mainstream media narrative and what a lot of people actually think and people often say to me we can't believe Broughton's conclusion that no general knew anything it's just totally improbable and so people say that to me and that's my one complaint about that is to say we need to look at the leadership this is not just a problem of a few people at the very bottom I mean if it was putting those people in jail would solve the problem but it won't and I'm more worried about the next war than the last war and if we have shonky people at the top we're not going to win it this is one of the things I say to the conservatives the theory of being conservative and freedom was all very well but look at what happened in Afghanistan I mean it was a failure it was an absolute $6 billion failure so if your team of that good we would not have been beaten by a part-time insurgency and this is what I laugh about the arms manufacturer and lobbyists if equipment was enough to win a war we would have won the war but we couldn't even get the Taliban with all this fancy drones and supersonic jets so it's hard so much we need a bit more than that and we saw it in one of the things this is as I was becoming one of the things it's a very good plane that they used over there it's a cold war 50's design called the warthog fly slow got a big cannon on it and it was perfect for fighting the Taliban when you're stuck down and they're surrounding you and this slow plane comes in and it goes bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang you know you're going to be alright anyway they had plenty of them they bought in the F-35 $6 billion which wasn't even as good because it flew so fast you couldn't just hit the targets on the ground you have to come back for another one by that time everyone was dead but because Boeing or McDonnell whoever was pushing them in Washington they were getting the orders for them I think this is one of the reasons it's very cynical but I'm saying that I've talked from an insider who's seen a lot of secret documents I think one of the reasons that they're pushing China and Russia again is they're much more lucrative war markets and that if you're fighting China you can sell thousands of F-35s and new aircraft carriers the problem with fighting the Islamists is that you couldn't justify new fighter planes and aircraft carriers and that was a problem but the reality of course is that you can keep the walls going for a long time what would happen if China did actually decide to have a crack at Australia or we did get involved in a war with China? This is the thing as I say I really speak to your conservative viewers here our team are so rubbish in the sense that our leadership are so idiotic our military leadership we couldn't beat Fiji in a war it's not like we don't have the equipment we just don't have anyone with any backbone we would never tell it like it is we need people who tell the truth if things are not going well we need to say we lost to the Taliban they weren't that good we lost to them over 20 years one of the things that is good we're having a Senate inquiry I hope there's a Royal Commission I can't find out what happened we need a Royal Commission in the Defence Force to find out whether they are phony I don't know what they're doing I've got a view on that and I'm happy to have a judge look at it but it's a bit like the banking thing I suspect there's enough evidence to suggest we don't know what we're doing in the defence space and there's a lot of lobbyists and there's a lot of careerists who tell you the right thing but anyone that actually tells the truth ends up like me, shunted out and that's a problem we need to be defending Australia and everything we believe in for our children now our children's children and if bullshit will not defend them we need people who actually talk the truth and again it's an disgusting development that they're putting people who tell the truth in jail and again an even worse twist a lot of things went wrong in Afghanistan there is one person in Australia who's going to go to jail for Afghanistan and that's me the guy that's telling the truth and they've never proved that I haven't told the truth even my haters say you shouldn't have released a document no one's ever said I've made them up printed them in my garage and it was all wrong it was real documents and how darely you let anyone else read them my god, if the Australian public you know what we're actually doing it doesn't make sense but psychology is an important thing a lot of people hate me and say he broke the rules he broke the rules I think the military broke the rules and I think someone needed to stand up and be counted do you have background silent support from people in the establishment that would be too scared to say anything publicly but would feel that you were doing the right thing I think so I think people I admire know that it was a hard road and I did a lot of frustrated people in the public service support me because they know the public service has been completely politicised and that now they've got the senior executive officers that get huge pay rises for basically doing what the government wants and not actually helping Australia they're all very frustrated because they know they have to do what they lose their job and I was thinking about the last guy in Canberra who didn't get the memo that you don't really work for the Australian people you work for the government and that's wrong but I'm going to fight that so a lot of people support me in that but people are quite scared I do get whispers to say what we support you I don't own the defence force they would be in trouble even for having my phone number such as the sort of witch hunt I like to think what I love is a lot of everyday Australians right to me you know farmers and the tired cops and things like that and they say we're great nomads now we think what you've done is great here's $10 whatever I love that I think the average Australian is a really good person what has disappointed me is the intellectuals I don't think I don't know that they're doing enough anyone that scratches their chin and goes it's a grey area they don't really help that's a bit of a failure of the private school system the people who really should be standing up for what is right seem to be more interested in counting their job keeper millions and building a new house in a palm beach of our moral and that's a shame but the average Australian is good they get it and they can see whenever you tell your story to someone in the pub or whatever they say that sounds bad so you try to do the right thing about war crimes and they're trying to put you in jail now yeah so I'm hopeful about Australia's future but we need to win this case and I don't see winning the case as necessarily being acquittal it's not about being I could go to jail but as long as people hear about it and they know about it and they say that guy went to jail for what he believed in and he believed that the government can't break the law and just say it's not a crime because the government doesn't that will still be a victory I will come out of jail a bigger man and I've got teenage children so it will still be hard but I'm not afraid of that if that's what it takes to make Australia the place it should be well thanks very much David and for viewers you can support David at the link below