On the street outside the courthouse immediately afterward, Davis told reporters: “We received the decision just this afternoon, which was in essence to remove evidence from the defense. … The Crown, the government, was given the authority to bundle up evidence and run out the backdoor with it. He is no longer able to put it before a jury.”
McBride said: “I stand tall and I believe I did my duty and I don’t see it as a defeat, I see it as a beginning of a better Australia.”
McBride’s lawyer Davis said outside the court:
“It was the fatal blow made in conjunction with the decision made a few days ago that limits what we can say to the jury on David’s behalf in terms of what was his duty as an officer was on the oath he took to serve, as we say, the interests of the Australian people.
Well the ruling was, he doesn’t have a duty to serve the interests of the Australian people. He has a duty to follow orders. That is a very narrow understanding of the law in our view that takes us back really pre-World War II. We all know how military law has been judged since then in terms of compliance to follow orders.
So facing that reality, we’re limited in terms of what we could put to a jury in term’s of David’s duty … together with the removal of evidence makes it impossible, realistically, to go to trial. It is a sad day and a difficult day for us to advise David on his options this afternoon and he embraced them.”
McBride said: “I stand tall and I believe I did my duty and I don’t see it as a defeat, I see it as a beginning of a better Australia.”
You hear that, defence forces? The government says you’re goons for the ruling class, not defenders of the people.
They have also implicitly admitted that the interests of the ruling class are at odds with those of the people.
Any sense of moral duty you have in your jobs is unfounded.
To hell with the Nuremberg Principle. Just follow your orders!
And in case anyone wants to split hairs about how they are only required to follow lawful orders, I’m pretty sure the Nuremberg defendants were also following lawful orders. Plus I don’t know how you follow lawful orders to either commit or cover up war crimes. Sounds like that sort of thing should be unlawful.
I bet if the govt hadn’t pinched their evidence and it had actually gone to trial, that would have been one of McBride’s arguments; that it wasn’t a lawful order as evidence of murder can’t be classified. But that’s what Dreyfuss’s lackeys did with the approval of the judge.
How can you have a trial when the relevant evidence in defence is suppressed. You can’t.
