Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email <\/a><\/p>\nMcBride released a statement after the decision, thanking Rowland \u201cfor sparing us another long fight over the question of parole.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter all we both want the same thing, a better Australia for our children, so it seems a waste to be fighting each other, rather than working together,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He said he would make a more comprehensive statement at a later date and acknowledged his family, prison officers and his fellow inmates.<\/p>\n
McBride also revealed he was diagnosed with treatable lung cancer, currently in its early stages. He is expected to undergo surgery imminently.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany thanked me for allowing them to believe in this country again, in turn, I thank them for showing me there are so many good people in the world worth fighting for,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
McBride collected mostly secret military information over an 18-month period in 2014 and 2015 and handed it to journalists at the public broadcaster. The material was used as the basis for an investigative series exposing war crimes committed by Australian defence personnel in Afghanistan titled The Afghan Files.<\/p>\n
The court heard a total of 235 documents were taken by McBride from defence offices \u2013 mostly in the ACT \u2013 between May 2014 and December 2015 with 207 of them classified as secret and some marked as cabinet documents.<\/p>\n
Former independent senator and transparency campaigner Rex Patrick said McBride would walk away from prison with his head held high.<\/p>\n
\u201cDavid served Australians, both in the Army and in his brave act of blowing the whistle on war crimes that took place in Afghanistan. It\u2019s so good to see the end of an awful saga that should never have happened.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Information Rights Project founder, Gabriel Shipton, praised the government for the decision, as well as for assistance provided to his brother, Julian Assange.<\/p>\n
\u201cDavid shouldn\u2019t have gone to prison in the first place, but freeing a whistleblower will not go un-noticed,\u201d Shipton said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s real-world outcomes like these that make a difference to the lives of courageous individuals who blow the whistle. A massive shout-out to all those who supported David through his epic battle for justice.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"David McBride, the former army lawyer jailed for his role in stealing secret defence documents about the Afghanistan…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":853345,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-853344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=853344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853344\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/853345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=853344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=853344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=853344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}