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Author Topic: David Hicks - first victim of the Guantanamo show trials
M. Spector
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posted 31 March 2007 04:11 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
It is appropriate that a person from Australia, home of the kangaroo, should be the first one dragged before the kangaroo court at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. David Hicks, imprisoned there for more than five years, pleaded guilty Monday to providing material support for terrorism.

The case of Hicks offers us a glimpse into the Kafkaesque netherworld of detentions, kidnappings, torture and show trials that is now, internationally, the shameful signature of the Bush administration. Hicks’ passage through this sham process affords us all an opportunity to demand the closure of Guantanamo and an end to these heinous policies. Conditions may soon exist to shutter the prison, with George Bush’s lame-duck status, the Democratic takeover of Congress, the possible departure of Guantanamo’s arch-defender and architect, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and, if recent reports are true, a desire to close the prison on the part of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. These bogus military commission trials amplify global contempt for the Guantanamo prison.


Source

Hicks will likely be returned to Australia to serve his sentence, thanks to pressure from the Australian government.

Canadian Omar Khadr, however, can expect no such treatment when his trial comes up, because Canada's New Government™ is quite happy to let him rot forever in a US prison.


From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
trippie
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posted 31 March 2007 11:23 PM      Profile for trippie        Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
here is another analysis of this event...

quote:
The sham trial of Australian detainee David Hicks at the Bush administration’s prison camp at Guantánamo Bay is drawing to a close. Yesterday presiding judge Colonel Ralph Kohlman formally convicted Hicks on one charge of “providing material support for terrorism”, and released the details of a plea bargain that will return Hicks to Australia to serve his jail term. The deal provides for a maximum of seven years, but all but nine months have been suspended.

The strenuous efforts to dress up proceedings cannot disguise the fact that the entire affair is a legal charade designed to justify the Bush administration’s phony “war on terror.” The plea bargain itself smacks of a dirty deal between Washington and Canberra. One of its key aims is to bolster the fortunes of the Howard government in upcoming national elections later in the year by wiping the issues of David Hicks and Guantánamo Bay off the political agenda.

Hicks is the first Guantánamo Bay detainee to be charged and tried before the newly constituted US military commission. His case has been fast tracked in order to accommodate Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s calls for an early resolution. Howard, who is directly responsible for Hicks’s protracted detention, only began calling for a speedier trial when opinion polls began recording overwhelming popular opposition to the flagrant abuse of Hicks’s basic democratic and legal rights.


http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/mar2007/hick-m31.shtml


From: essex county | Registered: Feb 2006  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 01 April 2007 12:25 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
After five years of "dead time" in Guantanamo, Hicks was sentenced to seven years, but will "only" serve nine months because of a plea deal. He will be returned to Australia to serve his sentence.
quote:
Prime Minister John Howard is protected from embarrassing comments from Hicks because, under the plea agreement, Hicks is banned from speaking to the media until March 31, 2008, a convenient date because it falls past the election.
Source

From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 01 April 2007 05:18 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
The secret agreement that resulted in David Hicks facing only nine more months in prison may do fatal damage to an already discredited system of dealing with terrorism suspects, legal experts say. The combination of a sentencing deal arranged behind closed doors and the conditions imposed on Hicks, including a year-long gag order and a declaration that he was never tortured, has shown the process to be a political and not legal one, Australian and US observers say.

Robert Richter, QC, one of Australia’s most experienced criminal lawyers and a Hicks supporter, said the trial was a sham that had wholly discredited the Pentagon’s war-crimes process.

“The charade that took place at Guantanamo Bay would have done Stalin’s show trials proud,” Mr Richter said in a commentary for The Sunday Age.

“First there was indefinite detention without charge. Then there was the torture, however the Bush lawyers, including his attorney-general, might choose to describe it. Then there was the extorted confession of guilt.”


Source

From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 01 April 2007 05:23 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Yet Hicks was just a minnow — someone who, even according to the U.S. charges against him, never fired a shot at a U.S. adversary and spent only two hours on the front line with the Taliban in Afghanistan before trying to high-tail it to safety. And he converted to Islam and went off for terrorist training only after fighting on what was then the U.S. side, with the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army in 1999.
Source

From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
Jerry West
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posted 02 April 2007 10:49 AM      Profile for Jerry West   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:

Terror case plea deal sparks anger in US, Australia
Short sentence for David Hicks seen as 'lenient,' and his gag order dubbed a 'political fix.'
By Arthur Bright | csmonitor.com

The plea agreement that saw the release of "Aussie Taliban" David Hicks from detention at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has prompted harsh criticism - in the US as being too lenient, and in Australia as being a political tool in the upcoming elections.

Mr. Hicks's plea agreement includes a nine-month prison sentence. Additionally, Hicks agreed not to allege that he was subjected to illegal treatment while in US custody, and not to speak with the media for one year. The Washington Post reports that the plea was crafted without the knowledge of prosecutors in his trial at the US military facility. Hicks had been facing two counts of providing material support for terrorism. His was the first case to be heard by special war crimes tribunals set up under the Military Commissions Act of 2006....


Full Article


From: Gold River, BC | Registered: Oct 2001  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 02 April 2007 03:02 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
They didn't even bother with a show trial for this guy:

UK man released from Guantanamo:

quote:
A British resident is back in the UK after being held in Guantanamo Bay for almost five years.

Bisher al-Rawi, an Iraqi national, was held at the US detention camp in Cuba on suspicion of links to terrorism while on a trip to Gambia in 2002.

In a statement Mr Rawi, a businessman from south-west London, said: "I am delighted to be back home in England, with my family." He added: "My nightmare is finally at an end."
....

"As happy as I am to be home though, leaving my best friend Jamil al-Banna behind in Guantanamo Bay makes my freedom bittersweet," Mr Rawi said in a statement released through the law firm Reprieve.

"Jamil was arrested with me in the Gambia on exactly the same unfounded allegations, yet he is still a prisoner. I also feel great sorrow for the other nine British residents who remain prisoners in Guantanamo Bay."
....

"The extreme isolation they are going through is one of the most profoundly difficult things to endure. I know that all too well."
....

His lawyer, Zachary Katznelson, gave further details on why Mr Rawi was originally arrested. He said a "suspicious device" was found in his client's luggage but added that it turned out to be a battery charger.

Mr Katznelson added: "So it was misinformation that started this chain of events, though unfortunately that led to him first being taken by the CIA to Afghanistan to an underground prison of 24 hour darkness with rats everywhere, to then being taken to Guantanamo - and it took years to right this wrong."

He accused the American authorities of treating Mr Rawi with "brutality".

Mr Katznelson went on: "Right to the end they treated him with brutality, on the way to the plane in Guantanamo - they knew he was leaving - they insisted still on shackling him, blindfolding him, putting on earmuffs so he couldn't hear a thing and keeping him in the back of a very hot , very confined van on the way to the plane."



From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
laine lowe
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posted 02 April 2007 09:27 PM      Profile for laine lowe     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Looks like I screwed up the edit function. Nothing to see/hear...

[ 02 April 2007: Message edited by: laine lowe ]


From: north of 50 | Registered: Dec 2006  |  IP: Logged
laine lowe
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posted 02 April 2007 09:28 PM      Profile for laine lowe     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I feel bad for John Walker Lindh and his family. He got 20 years. And it doesn't seem like the Canadian government, past or present, did much other than get assurances that Omar Khadr wouldn't be executed. I doubt he'll get a reduced sentance of 9 months to be served here in Canada.

I'm glad that Hicks is out of that hell hole. Same for all those others who have managed to get out thanks to their governments caring about them But the whole "terrorist/enemy combantant" detentions without charge situation makes a mockery of justice and international law.

[ 02 April 2007: Message edited by: laine lowe ]


From: north of 50 | Registered: Dec 2006  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 03 April 2007 09:00 AM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
The year-long gag order given to an Australian inmate of Guantanamo Bay as a condition of his release tells Canada that it should be worried, very worried, about how a Canadian teenager has been treated for the past five years at the U.S. prison in Cuba. Canada's silence on the fate of Omar Khadr, 15 when he was incarcerated on suspicion of murdering a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, is shameful. It grows more so all the time.
Globe and Mail editorial

From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
remind
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posted 20 May 2007 01:33 PM      Profile for remind     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Just an update:

quote:
McLeod said Hicks wanted to put the past behind him and would respect a U.S. gag stopping him speaking to the media for a year after his March conviction.

-snip-

Hicks, 31, was captured in Afghanistan in late 2001 and spent five years in Guantanamo before he was sentenced in March to seven years' jail.

Under a deal with U.S. prosecutors, most of his sentence was suspended and he will be free on December 29, 2007.

Hicks was the first person convicted by a U.S. war crimes tribunal since World War Two and the first of hundreds of foreign captives held at the Guantanamo Bay to face a military trial.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070520/ts_nm/australia_hicks_dc


From: "watching the tide roll away" | Registered: Jun 2004  |  IP: Logged

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