The evidence presented by the BBC in 2020: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-53597137 And apparently Australia had already released their report and investigation of their own behavior: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-55088230 But only the whistleblower and one other were tried and convicted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brereton_Report
Wow, that’s crazy, the _whistleblower_ and one other person were tried and convicted. Essentially just punishing the person that felt bad enough to reveal the crime, not the many that committed it and stayed silent. :(
> the person that felt bad enough to reveal the crime
is considerably arse backwards.
To scratch the surface of that:
McBride had previously raised concerns within the Australian Defence Force about the dangers of increasingly restrictive rules of engagement and the nature of investigations into members of the special forces.
The ABC found evidence of war crimes and published the information in their 2017 publication The Afghan Files.
McBride was allegedly unhappy with ABC's reporting of his documents.
ie. The "whistleblower" disclosed examples of behaviour of the SASR and other(?) special force groups not with the motivation of disclosing "war crimes" but to provide examples of "stuff the lads do to get the job done", behaviours that were being threatened by kid glove thinking and internal policing that might have a bias, etc. During the case, McBride's lawyers stated he acted out of concern about the nature of the Defence Force's “excessive investigation of soldiers” in Afghanistan.
McBride believed the investigations were a "PR exercise" to compensate for earlier public allegations of war crimes.
Justice David Mossop stated "the way you've explained it is that the higher-ups might have been acting illegally by investigating these people too much, and that that was the source of the illegality that was being exposed."
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_McBride_(whistleblower)However his story changed and wandered over the course of time his initial motivation on record wasn't at all that he felt bad about the rules of engagement being disregarded, he felt that such things were being chased down too hard.