This looks an enthralling, warts & all, account & analysis of the David Hicks drama (fiasco) written by Australian journalist, Leigh Sales. I'll definitely be reading it, to fill in the gaps in my knowledge & understanding of what happened & why:
Detainee 002: The case of David Hicks
Gerry Simpson, Reviewer
May 11, 2007/AGE book reviews
Author:Leigh Sales/GenreSociety/Politics, Biography/Publisher:Melbourne University Press
"Detainee was reminded that no one loved, cared or remembered him. He was reminded that he was less than human . . . Detainee began to cry." (Interrogation log on Guantanamo Bay prisoner Mohammad al Qahtani, December 2002)
" 'If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Do you understand that you are alone? You are outside history, you are non-existent' . . . Before he knew what he was doing Winston had collapsed onto a small bed and burst into tears." (O'Brien's interrogation of Winston Smith in George Orwell's 1984)
THERE ARE MANY remarkable features of the strange case of David Hicks but perhaps the most remarkable is that, in the face of public indifference from the two major political parties in Australia, his detention without trial by Australia's main ally has become a cause celebre. Make no mistake, there is now a widespread sense among those electorally all-important "ordinary Australians" that something is rotten in the camps of Guantanamo Bay.
This popular response to the Hicks case is motivated partly by a sense of
justice (locking up a person for five years without trial is wrong), partly by a feeling of
patriotism (it is especially unacceptable that Americans are imprisoning Australians without trial) and partly by
anti-government sentiment (it is infuriating that an Australian government could be so supine in its dealings with the US).
Leigh Sales' astutely paced and absorbing account of the Hicks fiasco tells us how all of this came to pass. Sales' book (in part a story of heroes and villains) describes, also, that most frightening of modern nightmares: what Karl Marx called "rule by nobody" and what Hannah Arendt characterised, irresistibly, as "the banality of evil". David Hicks spent five years in Guantanamo Bay because of a vicious combination of bureaucratic inertia, moral vacuity and political failure.
Amazingly, it turns out that no one really wanted him there. The Howard Government (active and nervous in private, blase in public) sensed a PR disaster quite early on and wanted the matter closed swiftly; the State Department was embarrassed by Camp Delta; the Pentagon was paralysed by infighting; human rights groups condemned the facility; the European Union demanded its closure; a UK Law Lord portrayed it as "a legal black hole" and Tony Blair called it an "anomaly". Eventually, with 71 per cent of Americans concerned about the ill-treatment of detainees, even George Bush declared: "I'd like to close Guantanamo."
Perhaps the story of Guantanamo Bay is best understood as one in which the efforts of decent human beings (including many military lawyers and officials in the US, some camp guards in Cuba, and Australian consular officials) are undone by a monstrous systemic deformity and the moral failure of a few key individuals. Unfortunately, when even a fraction of the elite signals that the unacceptable is now acceptable, the result is inhumane treatment.
Donald Rumsfeld slandered the detainees as the "worst of the worst", John Yoo, a young lawyer in the Justice Department, rewrote international law to allow the torture of suspects (setting the Western legal order back two centuries) and Dick Cheney, in a statement verging on self-parody, recommended working through "the dark side" in response to terrorism.
Compared to this triad, Howard et al are mostly guilty of passivity, middle-power anxiety, evasion and imprudence. Howard himself seems to lack the political skills for which he was so famed. He impulsively activates ANZUS in 2001, he supports the military commissions publicly when he should have, like the British, waited to see whether such proceedings could possibly deliver justice and he spends five years believing, in the face of contrary evidence, that the trial of Hicks was imminent. It is especially embarrassing that, given Howard's slavish devotion to Bush, Blair got his citizens home while another imprisoned Australian, Mamdouh Habib, was allegedly tortured in Egypt and Hicks languished in Cuba.
But what about the other two key protagonists: Hicks and his defence lawyer, Major Michael Mori? Hicks is as enigmatic as the picture of him on the cover of the book: an acrylic blur. Sales portrays him as megalomaniacal, delusionary, weak-willed and anti-Semitic. He is a wastrel from South Australia who ended up in Kosovo and Afghanistan via a moderate mosque in Adelaide. He is the "accidental terrorist" who threatened to derail US-Australian relations and has undermined John Howard's carefully choreographed nationalism. ..<cont>
http://www.theage.com.au/news/book-reviews/detainee-002-the-case-of-david-hicks/2007/05/11/1178390533929.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
