Army leak lawyer: I did the right thing

A former defence lawyer who could spend the rest of his life in jail for leaking secret army documents says he has no regrets.

David McBride.

The man at the centre of the leak that triggered the ABC raid — a former military lawyer who served as legal adviser to Australia’s special forces in Afghanistan — said yesterday he had hoped the national broadcaster would produce a different story.

David McBride told The Australian yesterday that the secret documents he allegedly leaked to the public broadcaster exposed a much larger story, which he likened to an “Australian Watergate”.

But he said the 2017 ABC story based on documents he provided, which contained allega­tions of possible unlawful killings by SAS soldiers, was a “different story to the one I wanted”.

“They (ABC) published something about SAS soldiers shooting people by accident, which I found disappointing.”

The former Defence lawyer, who could spend “the rest of my life” in jail for leaking documents used by journalists to expose the possible misconduct of special forces in Afghanistan, said he had no regrets.

Mr McBride — a former major — said he “did the right thing” in leaking the top-secret material to journalists Dan Oakes, Sam Clark and Chris Masters.

“I think I did the right thing and the government has done the wrong thing,” he said. “I’ve entered pleas of not guilty to all charges.”

Mr McBride, arrested in September at Sydney airport trying to go to Spain, said he acted as a legal officer for the Australian special forces on his second tour of Afghani­stan in 2013 but became suspicious of what he saw. He had already become sceptical of the Australian war effort during his first tour of Afghanistan in 2011.

“I became concerned it was an Instagram war,’’ he said. “We were pretending to fight terrorism but really it was all pretend. There was no plan.”

Mr McBride, who is on bail, hoped his case would go to trial in the ACT Supreme Court as soon as possible. “I’m going to argue it was my duty to release the documents. That’s where we are at.”

He said he made an internal complaint about things he saw in Afghanistan in 2013, but it triggere­d a “firestorm against me”.

“I started snooping through all the secret documents I could find to try and prove my allegation,” he said. “I found enough which I thought proved the case and I went and found a journalist.

“Chris Masters was the first person I spoke to. And he agreed with me. And we spoke for a while. For whatever reason, he decided not to publish and eventually I found the ABC in 2016. I went to the ABC and I went to Dan Oakes.

“As far as I knew, he got what I was talking about, but it took him the best part of a year before they final­ly published something.”

Mr McBride said he went to Spain to live in January 2018 but returned to Australia in September for a father-daughter dance.