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The Hicks Fix

June 7, 2007 on 2:11 pm | In Uncategorized |

The deal under which David Hicks copped a plea bargain and was sent back home is starting to stink to high heaven.

Throughout the whole episode, we have been assured over and over that Hicks’ fate was nothing whatsoever to do with the Australian government. Purely a matter for the Americans, huffed Ruddock, he hadn’t even read the prosecution brief. Howard stamped his little foot and said how angry he was that it was all taking so long and how by golly he’d said as much to his bff The President but he also stressed that he had no influence at all over the way the military commission process worked. None.

Nevertheless the way events have developed suggest that Howard and company were anything but detached observers. Consider that:

• Out of all the hundreds of concentration camp inmates at Guantanamo Bay, Hicks was the very first to be put on trial under the military commission process approved by Congress last year
• Hicks’ plea bargain deal was finalised in extraordinary fashion, with the tribunal reconvening after everybody thought proceedings had finished for the day and his parents had even left the island because they thought nothing would happen for a while
• The sentence subsequently handed down outraged many staunch Bush supporters for its perceived leniency.

Now, the next two inmates have been brought before the commission and have successfully challenged the lawfulness of the process:

Congress is taking a second look at guidelines hastily enacted last year for trying detainees in places such as the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Just three of its nearly 400 detainees have been brought to trial under the so-called Military Commissions Act.

Earlier this week, military judges threw out two of those cases. And other provisions in the law are also raising red flags. The White House got the Military Commissions Act it wanted last year from a Republican-run Congress. Since then, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has been pushing to revise it.

Leahy chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee; he says the military judges who dismissed the two Guantanamo cases Monday did the right thing, because the defendants were not classified as “unlawful enemy combatants,” as the law requires.

Legislation restoring the rights of those held to challenge their detention in civilian courts is set to be passed out of Leahy’s committee Thursday.

At a recent hearing, ranking Judiciary Republican Arlen Specter called the absence of habeas corpus guarantees “atrocious,” noting that his own push to restore them last year in the GOP-run Senate lost by only three votes.

Why didn’t Hicks’ defence team raise the same objections as those successfully used by these inmates? They don’t seem to have required any especially abstruse legal training, just a straightforward examination of the words in the law. Well perhaps he just wanted to come home but if Congress is about to change the rules (and this was foreshadowed last November), wouldn’t it have been worth hanging on for another few months for the chance of being acquitted, or released without charge?

Imagine how embarrassing that would have been for Howard, Ruddock and the rest of them. Embarrassing enough for them to have begged Washington to sort out the Hicks matter by giving him a token sentence … just until the next election was out of the way. Embarrassing enough for a drastic change in the tone of their rhetoric about Hicks … suddenly he’s no longer about as dangerous as a man can be in modern times and of course he and his family don’t have to obey that silly condition about not talking to the media.

The whole episode smacks of an expedient fix to accommodate Howard’s local political objective to neutralise Hicks as an election issue. What remains unknown is the price that Howard agreed to pay for the Americans’ co-operation, because the way they handled Hicks as a special case must have put a lot of noses out of joint amongst the Rumsfeld/Cheney faction. So what could Howard do to seal the deal? More troops for Iraq? Some public criticism of Barack Obama and the Democrats? More troops for Afghanistan?

American public figures seem incapable of keeping anything secret for long so one day soon, the truth will hopefully be known.