David Hicks “only Himself to Blame”

By Jason Phelan

Australian Guantanamo Bay inmate David Hicks has been hung out to dry by the Australian Federal Government.

Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard met with the U.S. Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld on Monday. After this meeting he had this to say about Mr Hicks’s unlawful detention ; “The circumstance delaying his trial by military commission is a legal action [initiated by Hicks’s lawyer] in the American courts … . Until that is resolved the military commission trial can’t go ahead,” Prime Minister Howard said. “We do not want him to come back to Australia until he’s been tried before the military commission.”

Hicks was detained in Kunduz, Afghanistan in December 2001 and was interned at the US Navy’s camp x-ray in Cuba. He was not formally charged with a crime until 2004. It is not alleged by the U.S. that Hicks engaged in any actual acts of terrorism, nor that he killed any U.S. or Coalition soldier whilst fighting in Konduz. Hicks was formally charged by a U.S. military commission, on August 26, 2004, with conspiracy to attack civilians, attempted murder, and “aiding the enemy” whilst an “unprivileged belligerent”. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

The Australian Federal Government is so keen to let him languish in prison that Hicks has had to turn to his mothers home country, the United Kingdom for assistance. Hicks’s military lawyer, in regard to the affidavit filed by Hicks with the U.S. appeals court claiming abuse and torture said “If the military commission process was fair as [Prime Minister Howard] likes to say it is, then the US courts would not entertain any legal challenges.”

The result of this claim was the U.S. Appeals court accepted the prosecution claim that Hicks and others, could be tried by a military tribunal because “the President of the United States issued a memorandum in which he determined that none of the provisions of the Geneva Conventions “apply to our conflict with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world”