The final recommendation made by the Senate inquiry report into freedom of the press was that the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions “urgently reconsider, on strong public interest grounds” whether to continue the prosecution of former military lawyer David McBride.
The press freedoms inquiry was sparked by two June 2019 AFP press raids, one of which saw the execution of a search warrant at the Sydney offices of the ABC over the publication of the 2017 report The Afghan Files, which detailed Australian special forces operations in Afghanistan.
The information in the ABC's report was sourced from classified Australian Defence Force documents leaked by McBride, who'd already exhausted every internal avenue to raise concerns about how our nation's special forces were operating in the Central Asian nation.
