Kym Staton. Wrier and director of The Trust Fall film about Julian Assange, ha written this about McBride, who now has to contend with lung cancer (treatable mercifully), coming out of jail:

It makes perfect sense in our flawless Western democracy that the man who exposed the murdering of innocent civilians was kept in a cage for 2 years, while the actual murderers are probably enjoying a taxpayer-funded pension.

We should clearly thank the Australian government for ensuring that pointing out war crimes is treated as a far more heinous, unforgivable offence than actually committing them.

It’s such a relief that the moral arbiters of the West have successfully contained the dangerous truth-tellers while letting literal genocide in Gaza unfold on a 24/7 livestream.

Rather than prosecuting the war criminals, in 2023 the ACT Supreme Court upheld a Commonwealth intervention to withhold crucial evidence that could have vindicated McBride, claiming the truth would jeopardise Australia’s security.

The disgraceful prosecution of whistleblowers like McBride demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that Australia’s whistleblower laws are entirely broken and in desperate need of urgent reform, meaning we desperately need robust, enforceable protection for whistleblowers.

The relentless jailing of truth-tellers by Western regimes proves that their primary objective is to shoot the messengers and suppress any accountability for imperialist violence.