Expat Canuck

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | David Hicks gag order expires

If he manages to get any money out of this I'll scream.

Does anyone know what he was actually caught doing? I assume he was an enemy fighter and caught with an AK-47 in hand but does anyone have any specifics?

Bigfella

Expat,

On the Australian side the gag order was as transparently political as pretty much everything else about this.

Apparently he was picked up by members of the Northern Alliance guarding a tank & passed on to the Americans.

I don't know how long you have been in country, but until virtually the end of his time in Gitmo the Australian Government disowned him - intimating as clearly as possible that they believed he was guilty & making it plain they had no interest in intervening to ensure fairness or due process, let alone freedom.

This worked just fine for the first few years, but as his time in prison grew without any sign of a trial his imprisonment became much more unpopular here. Contrasts were made with the UK, which intervened to free a number of their citizens. The problem for Howard & co. was that it wasn't just the 'usual suspects' raising questions.

One of the more remarkable examples I encountered was a smalltown lawyer & prominent National Party* member who wrote a long piece to his local paper criticising the situation. He subsequently stood successfully for the NSW Upper house for the Nats.

(*for non-Australians the Nats are ab extremely conservative rural-based party that exists in coalition withthe Liberal Party).

With the polls poor & an election about a year away, Howard lobbied the US to get Hicks tried & shipped home as quickly & quietly as possible. And what was the worst they could charge him with? being a supporter of terrorism. What was the compelling evidence? the self-incriminating testimony of a man with a choice between a few months jail time in his home country or indefinate imprisonment at Gitmo. What a joke.

The gag order was designed to make sure Hicks didn't say anything that might potentially embarrass a government already on the nose.

Hicks is a dickhead who got into bed with some extremely nasty people in order to make himself feel important. He should expect to spend the rest of his life (or at least a decade or two) under surveillance. Beyond that I think he has already paid a sufficiently high price for his idiocy.

__________________
Win nervously lose tragically - Reds C C

Cactus

Bigfella:

The propaganda value of men in David Hick's situation - AND origin - to the Talibunnies was tremendous in the pre-9/11 days; in certain circles the value may endure. As a fighter such a man may have only been a low-rung "dickhead", but in propaganda videos a foreign volunteer from a Western country was worth a hundred veterans from Chechnya or Kashmir.

Such videos play a dual role: To motivate, by shaming and cajoling, local Moslem youth to join their fight which even foreigners are shown joining; and to sow dissension and confusion in their opponents' ranks by creating an image of Western backing. For an uneducated Pathan boy such a man would have been Rambo incarnate; conversely for a Tajik boy it would be a disheartening sight to see "CIA" backing up the 'bunnies. The 'bunnies may be crude in their approach, but their target audience is cruder. You cannot dismiss the effort as "childish" by the effect it had on you - you are not the primary audience.

PS: It seems that such men's propaganda value has not diminished that much even now - Certainly each such case has caused a lot more confusion in their opponents ranks than the hundred of Uzbek, Chechen or Pakistani veterans who were picked up by the lynch-mobs or Dostum's cargo containers.

Expat Canuck

At the very least, I feel that he has shown his colours once and I would never trust him again and would monitor who he hangs out with and his family. If he steps out of line again lock him up. He did not just join the army by signing on the dotted line. He went out of his way to fly around the world and make contact with people who may kill him. That is one hell of a lot of planning and forethought for me to ever believe he is anything other than what I take him for at face value.

A potential murdering bastard who is willing to map out the steps in order to achieve a goal that is to the detriment of anyone in his way.