verging_on_random

David Hicks

February 21, 2007 on 8:51 pm | In Uncategorized |

Yeah well the title probably means nobody will even read this post, because there is surely nothing left to write about David Hicks and his continuing incarceration at Guantanamo Baythat hasn’t been said 100 times already. Nevertheless it seems to me that the man’s becoming some kind of national celebrity and in the rush for people to fall into two opposing teams as seems inevitable in this country’s public discourse, the issues that make his case one worth getting concerned about have largely been forgotten. So for what it’s worth, here’s my take.

Number one, Hicks has done absolutely nothing admirable or heroic or deserving of sympathy. On the contrary, he’s almost certainly a thoroughly nasty piece of work. This idea that he was just an innocent abroad, a wide-eyed young idealist out for a bit of adventure, is bullshit. He was in his 20s for god’s sake with two kids. He went overseas to hang out with some shadowy organisations for one of two reasons: he was driven by a powerful ideological sense of mission or he’s more than a little deranged. Either way I’m not about to start writing “Poor David” posts.

Even in the unlikely event that he was just seeing the world and having a bit of fun, he would soon have realised what kind of people he was hanging out with. Even the thickest plank in the wood pile would quickly have grasped that Al Qaeda consisted of a lot of freaks who wanted to kill people of Anglo-Saxon appearance, including Hicks’ friends and family back in Adelaide. So this crap about how he didn’t understand what he’d got himself into until after September 11 and then all he wanted to do was get away doesn’t wash with me.

However, and here’s the vital thing, our society has a few bedrock principles. One is that the State, generally meaning the government, can’t lock citizens up without having a lawful reason. What’s more, because it’s obviously unacceptable to let the State decide whether or not there is such a lawful reason, any citizen who gets locked up has the right to challenge that detention before an independent court. It’s a fundamental right that was won hundreds of years ago in English-speaking countries, and people have had to fight for it over and over in the centuries since.

That’s the principle involved in the Hicks affair - it’s got nothing to do with whether he gets enough sunlight or he’s going crazy or his lawyer seems like a real good bloke. The grievous wrong that’s been done to our society is that we have acquiesced in our closest ally, the USA, locking up hundreds of people including one of our own countrymen and denying them the ability to have their detention reviewed by an independent court. Once we concede that it’s OK to do that, we open the way for arbitrary arrest and imprisonment and concentration camps and all the other foul things that are associated with authoritarian governments throughout history. Our cry should be ‘close down Guantanamo Bay’, not ‘justice for Our David’.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking this is alarmist scare-mongering and it couldn’t happen here. Governments of any persuasion can always invent plausible reasons why it’s in the ‘national interest’ to lock a few people away for a while. Once they get used to it, it becomes the standard response to all sorts of problems. It’s not governments being evil, it’s just ordinary people trying to make their jobs easier … and nothing makes you job easier than getting rid of troublemakers who keep giving you a hard time.

In most developed countries, people who are detained by the State are entitled to be given a reason within a very short time - usually a matter of a day or two - and to challenge that reason if they choose. Our close ally the USA is trashing that long-standing principle on a grand scale at Guantanamo: it’s admitted that most of the hundreds of detainees will never be charged or face a military commission. They’ll stay there as long as the administration damn well feels like it, and if that means for the rest of their lives well so be it. In other words let’s call the place what it is, a concentration camp. The Brits had them in South Africa during the Boer War, and they were subsequently held to be a shameful moral stain on the British Empire, just as Guantanamo Bay will be on the American one.

These don’t seem like complex arguments to me but for some reason they don’t appear capable of holding the public’s attention, at least if the media coverage of Hicks is any indication. The government’s tactics are obvious: convince everyone that Hicks is guilty of serious offences. They’ve been at that since they announced he was in custody and Peter Costello was still at it over the weekend. Unfortunately most people seem happy to debate on the government’s chosen territory, which has now turned out not to be such a great choice for the government since it’s getting harder and harder to come up with things Hicks has allegedly done that would even justify the punishment he’s already undergone. But important as that no doubt is to Hicks and his family, it’s a lot of noise about the wrong things.

The trouble is that all this argument about whether Hicks deserves his treatment is a distraction from the important issues. It’s turned into a party-political shit-fight and we all know where principle ends up in them. If Howard and Bush succumb to political considerations and find a way to repatriate Hicks without a trial it will be widely hailed as proof of his ‘innocence’ when in fact all it will demonstrate is that a man’s freedom has become the absolute plaything of politicians. If he faces trial and is convicted (which is almost certain I would have thought, given that they invented the crimes after they knew what they could prove he did), he’ll be some kind of martyr. Either way it’s been reduced to a petty argument about one bloke instead of a defence of one of the fundamental rights that we all should have.

So far in the ‘War On Terror’ there have been fewer total casualties in the liberal democracies than occurred in a typical month in the Second World War, but out of fear or apathy people have sat without protest while their governments imposed more restrictions on their liberty than was ever the case in a proper war. They are the issues that we should be debating vigorously in public, not how many times David Hicks met Osama bin bloody Laden.