Original source URL: http://www.greenleft.org.au/2007/705/36634 Green Left Weekly EDITORIAL Hicks case exposes `war on terror' sham 30 March 2007 After five years of solitary confinement in a small metal cell, David Hicks pleaded guilty on March 26 to one of the two charges brought against him by US military prosecutors on March 1, to finally get out of the notoriously brutal US military prison at Guantanamo Bay. Hicks¹s case has revealed just what a sham the US-led ³war on terror² really is. For five years Washington, backed to the hilt by Canberra, has claimed that Hicks was one of the most dangerous ³terrorists² being held at Guantanamo. He was charged with offences that carrying life sentences. Now, under the plea bargaining deal, his US military prosecutors are talking about him being able to be ³home before the end the year². Indeed, on March 31, Hicks was sentenced to seven years¹ imprisonment, with all but nine months of the sentence suspended. He will serve most of this in an Australian civilian prison. Commenting on the Hicks case, the March 29 Washington Post observed: ³This case so far has been less about who Hicks is or what he did than about starting the Bush administration¹s military commissions Š Commission officials have praised the case as showing a transparent and fair system; human rights groups have painted the commissions as a sham with still-unwritten rules.² It is not just human rights groups that have condemned the military commission system. It has been rejected as contrary to international law by all of Washington¹s imperialist allies ‹ all except Canberra. In testimony before a congressional committee on March 29, US defence secretary Robert Gates admitted that trials at Guantanamo Bay ³lack credibility² with ³the international community². Because ³of things that happened earlier at Guantanamo there is a taint about it², Gates said, alluding to detainees¹ alleges of being subjected to torture. Of the 385 detainees still imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Hicks is one of only 10 to be charged with any ³criminal offence², and the first to be tried by a military commission. By contrast, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged architect of the September 11, 2001 attack on New York¹s World Trade Centre, has not been charged with a crime, though he has been in US custody for years and has taken responsibility for numerous terrorist attacks on US citizens. While much of the Australian media has reported that Hicks pleaded guilty to ³providing material support to terrorism², he in fact pleaded guilty to a charge of ³providing material support to terrorists², namely Saudi Arabian millionaire Osama bin Laden¹s al Qaeda group. The charge sheet alleged that in 2001 Hicks had undertaken military training at an al Qaeda camp in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan, not that he had provided material support for any terrorist act. A secondary charge of ³attempted murder² of US soldiers was dropped after the retired military judge, who supervises the military commission system, concluded there was ³no probable cause² to justify it. In February 2004, PM John Howard stated on ABC TV that ³it¹s fundamentally wrong to make a criminal law retrospective². But this is exactly what has been done to Hicks. The only offence he was charged with ‹ ³providing material assistance to terrorists² ‹ was introduced into US law in October 2001. But it could not be applied to Hicks ‹ a non-US citizen who was captured by US-backed rebel forces in December 2001 after serving as a soldier in the army of Afghanistan¹s Taliban government ‹ until the US Congress passed the 2006 Military Commissions Act (MCA). In direct contravention of international law and the US constitution, the MCA made jurisdiction of the ³material support for terrorists² offence retroactive. Of course, neither the US Congress nor the Bush administration has any intention of using the MCA to launch criminal prosecutions against the US government personnel, including the CIA officers, who helped bin Laden set up his terrorist training camps in Afghanistan in the 1980s during Washington¹s jihadi war against the Soviet Union. The aim of the MCA is to legitimise US President George Bush¹s military commission system ‹ kangaroo courts intentionally designed to convict as ³war criminals² anyone captured resisting Washington¹s illegal 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. This invasion was a prelude to the real goal of Washington¹s ³war on terror² ‹ regime-change invasions to (re-)impose US corporate ownership of the nationalised oil resources of the ³rogue states² of the Middle East, beginning with Iraq, and then later, Iran. From: Comment & Analysis, Green Left Weekly issue #705 4 April 2007. -- -------------------------------------------------------- Escaping the Matrix website http://escapingthematrix.org/ cyberjournal website http://cyberjournal.org Community Democracy Framework http://cyberjournal.org/DemocracyFramework.html Subscribe cyberjournal list •••@••.••• (send blank message) Posting archives http://cyberjournal.org/show_archives/ Moderator •••@••.••• (comments welcome)
