Today's the day.:
Shoddy justice for Hicks
the AGE editorial
December 29, 2007
TODAY the prison gates will open, a man will walk out and a shameful chapter in Australian history will close. Six years to the month since his capture by Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan, David Hicks will re-enter society. The manner in which he is to lead his life, however, is not entirely clear. Last week a federal magistrate imposed an interim control order on Hicks, with conditions that include a midnight-to-6am curfew and reporting to police three times a week. Hicks will be the second Australian subject to such a control order. The first was Melbourne man Jack Thomas, who is facing a retrial on terror charges.
Australians have known Hicks' features only by a few out-of-date family pictures and one of him holding a bazooka while training with the Kosovo Liberation Army. While his visage has been unseen, his case has cast a shadow over the previous government and its neglect of the state's responsibilities to defend the rights of citizens and uphold the fundamental pillars of justice. Hicks' lawyer, David McLeod, has said his client's mental state is fragile after years in detention at Guantanamo Bay. It remains to be seen whether he has the strength to challenge the control order, which is subject to confirmation at a court hearing on February 18.
But, to start, David Hicks is not a hero. His life is not heroic. He may have believed otherwise when he was with the Kosovo Liberation Army or at terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. But the tide in the affairs of this one man was about to go out and not return for some time. The pull on the tide was, of course, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. When the US swooped three months later and rounded up hundreds, Hicks fell into a military, quasi-judicial black hole.
The Howard government responded by sacrificing a once inviolable judicial principle to the interests of maintaining the alliance. In effect, the presumption of innocence was jettisoned. It was argued that key rights under the rule of law are suspended in a war on terror. Guantanamo Bay prison camp was set up for precisely that reason: to deny detainees access to a US legal system that guarantees the same basic rights to all accused.
This month, almost six years after the first prisoners arrived at Guantanamo, the US Supreme Court was still hearing legal challenges to the denial of habeas corpus - the right to petition a court for the state to show just cause for one's imprisonment. The court, which previously ruled that the original military commissions were unlawful, forcing the Bush Administration to redraft the rules, is not expected to reach a decision until June. The number of detainees has dwindled from almost 800 in 2002 to 300 now.
Of all the hundreds deemed "unlawful combatants" by the US, David Hicks is the only one to have been convicted and only after a plea-bargain process that was clearly subject to political interference, which his military prosecutors later confirmed. The terms included an extraordinary year-long ban on talking to the media, which extends beyond his nine-month sentence. Hicks pleaded guilty at a hearing in March to having provided material support to al-Qaeda and of being associated with an armed conflict. He returned to Australia in May under a prisoner-exchange agreement and has spent his remaining months of incarceration at Yatala prison in South Australia, his home state. Fellow Australian Guantanamo Bay inmate Mamdouh Habib, who was picked up in Pakistan, was released without charge in 2005.
Ultimately, David Hicks became a cause celebre not because of what he did but because of what was done to him and to the integrity of the justice system in the prosecution of the "war on terror". Hicks' long detention without trial, much of which was spent in solitary confinement, eventually caused widespread outrage. The Howard government failed at one of the most basic levels of a democratic state's contract with its citizens, which is to ensure that all accused promptly receive a fair trial in a properly constituted court, whatever the circumstances.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/editorial/shoddy-justice-for-hicks/2007/12/28/1198778693419.html?page=fullpage
