David Hicks released from prison.

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He has also agreed not to talk to the media about some matters before the end of next March, as part of his conditions of release from Guantanamo Bay.

Call me a cynical communist or whatever, but I imagine there's some intense scrubbing and repainting going on there, right now.

I read that he was having difficulty dealing with the wide open spaces since he got to Australia and they started letting him into the prison yard.

Hopefully he'll be able to rebuild his life and become a productive member of the community.

My bet?

Someone fuckwit'll set up a "Terrorist Tracking Website" that will list each subsequent address and identity he assumes, much like they do with child molesters. Thereby allowing each and every dickhead with a net connection to track him down, and, sadly, probably beat the shit through him.

In 2001, under the alias Muhammed Dawood (the latter being the Arabic form of "David"), Hicks undertook military training in al Qaeda-linked camps and served with the Taliban in Afghanistan. He was captured by the Afghan Northern Alliance, handed over to the US military, designated an unlawful combatant and held at Guantánamo Bay, during which he alleged he was mistreated.

So was he a member of the Taliban or not?

The bit about being an "illegal combatant" strikes me as possibly hilarious.

What did he admit to exactly?

The article says he is a "Confessed terrorism supporter."

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Originally posted by UberDog:

What did he admit to exactly?

Well, after five years imprisonment without trial or any set time for release, I suspect he confessed to whatever was put in front of him.

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Originally posted by titanium wren:

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Originally posted by UberDog:
What did he admit to exactly?

Well, after five years imprisonment without trial or any set time for release, I suspect he confessed to whatever was put in front of him.

He pled guilty to providing material support for terrorism, but it was a bit more quid-pro-quo than you make it out to be. Hicks was facing up to twenty years if convicted, and since he was scheduled to be the first military trial, it’s probably a safe bet that there was some solid evidence against him. On the other hand, if he pled guilty, his sentence was a little more than time served plus probation at his home in Australia. At the same time, the Bush administration really needed some kind of positive resolution out of Guantanamo Bay, since the international community, congress, the military and the judiciary were all raising concerns about the prison at the time. Both sides found a quick resolution convenient.

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Originally posted by BlueShift:

quote:

Originally posted by titanium wren:

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:
What did he admit to exactly?

Well, after five years imprisonment without trial or any set time for release, I suspect he confessed to whatever was put in front of him.

He pled guilty to providing material support for terrorism, but it was a bit more quid-pro-quo than you make it out to be. Hicks was facing up to twenty years if convicted, and since he was scheduled to be the first military trial, it’s probably a safe bet that there was some solid evidence against him. On the other hand, if he pled guilty, his sentence was a little more than time served plus probation at his home in Australia. At the same time, the Bush administration really needed some kind of positive resolution out of Guantanamo Bay, since the international community, congress, the military and the judiciary were all raising concerns about the prison at the time. Both sides found a quick resolution convenient.

Too funny. His criminal resume reads like that of a CIA subversive operative, albeit with ideologies unpopular with the CIA. (Unpopular in name, that is. In practice, the CIA are very much the Taliban of the USA.)

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:
In 2001, under the alias Muhammed Dawood (the latter being the Arabic form of "David"), Hicks undertook military training in al Qaeda-linked camps and served with the Taliban in Afghanistan. He was captured by the Afghan Northern Alliance, handed over to the US military, designated an unlawful combatant and held at Guantánamo Bay, during which he alleged he was mistreated.

So was he a member of the Taliban or not?

The bit about being an "illegal combatant" strikes me as possibly hilarious.

What did he admit to exactly?

The article says he is a "Confessed terrorism supporter."

My limited understanding was that he was a Taliban fighter. He was out of the country (I think) at the time of the American invasion but came back to join up with his comrades and headed toward the front. But the Taliban were routed and he was captured without firing a shot.

The fact that he was trained by al-Qaeda is possibly misleading, because one of the things I've heard (but haven't verified for myself) is that al-Qaeda provided military training for the Taliban forces as part of their arrangement with their hosts.

Everyone is a greed that he was a Taliban soldier?

I am having trouble understanding the sympathy for him.

He wanted to see a repressive, misogynistic regime of anachronistic luddites remain in power?

Is the sympathy due to his imprisonment without charges alone?

Why do you sympathize with him for example, Witness?

I sympathize with him primarily because he's an Australian detained for half a decade, tortured and demonised for actions that weren't illegal in Australia when he was committing them. If he actually did anything more than train.

He was entitled to expect the protection of the Australian government. Instead of intervening to have him brought to home as was done with nationals from America's other allies, or even closely monitoring the situation to make certain he was being treated in a manner appropriate to a human being we turned around and ignored it for years. It was two election cycles before it became a burden on Howard that he was abandoning Australians to mistreatment at the hands of our great allies, without legal trial for years at a time.

Additionally I find my opinion toward him softened by the knowledge that his first meaningful experiences with Islam of any kind were when after seeing the newscasts of the genocides being perpetrated by the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia he quit his job and went over to try to stop the murder of innocents.

Afterwards he came home and couldn't forget what he'd seen in the Balkans. Instead of collapsing into alcoholism and petty crime he dealt with it by throwing himself into Islam and eventually throwing his lot in with some very bad people. He could just as easily have wound up in the Northern Alliance and been canonized as a hero of 'moderate' Islam even though their atrocities were, and are, just as bad as those committed by the Taleban.

Is membership in the Taleban something to be condemned and criticized? Absolutely.

But the experiences he witnessed led him to that point, and were very similar to the events that Israel has been using as cover for their violent acts against the Palestinians and Lebanese for decades.

Where his greatest crime seems to have been membership in an organization that wasn't illegal until after he had joined, Ariel Sharon became a 'man of peace' after his part in facilitating the butchery of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon at the hands of Lebanese Christians. The actions were so vile that the Israeli government made him resign from his position as Defense minister, but somehow he's a good guy.

My take is simpler, I think: he did bad things, made bad choices, and I don't condone what he did. The issue, though, is justice and the rights of every Australian citizen (and every human being) to a fair trial and to charges being brought in a timely manner. As soon as those are allowed to be eroded, the terrorists have won (to co-opt a corny phrase)... or more to the point, it opens the way for abuse of the rights of everyone. The case was a blot on Australia's history not because Hicks was any kind of good guy, but because the test of a system is how it treats even the bad guys.

What if he had been captured and detained as a POW?

Would that be different do you think?

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Originally posted by Witness:

Additionally I find my opinion toward him softened by the knowledge that his first meaningful experiences with Islam of any kind were when after seeing the newscasts of the genocides being perpetrated by the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia he quit his job and went over to try to stop the murder of innocents.

Afterwards he came home and couldn't forget what he'd seen in the Balkans.

He should have stuck around to see what the Muslim's did to the Serbs and Croats in retribution.

Maybe that would have spoiled his taste for war.

If he'd been captured as a POW and treated appropriately under the terms of the Geneva Convention there would be no issue.

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Originally posted by Bravus:
If he'd been captured as a POW and treated appropriately under the terms of the Geneva Convention there would be no issue.

Aye. If he hadn't had to wait until 2000 and frogging 6 to have a legal structure under which to be tried, the affair would have a very different ambience.

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:
He should have stuck around to see what the Muslim's did to the Serbs and Croats in retribution.

Maybe that would have spoiled his taste for war.

What happened after he left is irrelevant to my perspective.

You asked why I sympathized with him.

I believe his past acts suggest that he was trying to be a positive force in the world. His actions weren't illegal when he committed them, and his treatment after being taken into custody was illegal even under his captors' justice system. This fact is illustrated clearly by the Supreme Court ruling against the processes being put into place to deal with the prisoners in Guantanamo.

At the end of the day I see things the same way that Bravus does in this matter. Even if I believed he was pondscum he's treatment was a violation of the civilized standards our countries claim to uphold.

The issue for me, is not so much what he did, but, of course, how it was handled.

As KL pointed out, he was captured, on the declaration that he was "bad." It took until 2006 to figure what said badness was, and how to deal with it.

In the meantime, he was labelled an "unlawful combatant," a new, mysterious new type of bad dude - not a criminal, because then you have to do the whole fair-trial thing, and, unfortunately, some courts can pass judgements that may fly in face of the political status quo. Which has all sorts of implications, cats lying with dogs, rains of toads, and the general decay of society. It's a nasty side affect of the whole "Democracy" charade.

Of course, if he was a criminal, then there's things like extradition, and the chance of Dave getting sent back to Aus and being let off - the world'd be so much happier if we just let the US control everything. And, well, he's certainly much badder than good, normal criminals, like Mike Tyson, or most any Fortune 500 CEO.

And if you go with the whole POW thing, well, then you have to follow a bunch of rules watched over by a bunch of goddamn stoned Dutchmen...in Europe. Where was Europe when the Towers Fell? Rumour has it they were over the other side of the goddamn Atlantic Ocean.

And POW's you have treat with respect and such.

So Gitmo's a perfect choice - it exists outside of all known laws. I mean, it's on the land of an Enemy of Freedom itself. Doesn't get more badass alternate-reality than that.

And since he's outside the laws, well, he's pretty much your bitch. Of course, it's been denied that he was mistreated, by people who would know - the guys accused of mistreating him.

I'm guessing that, were such a person handled like this in a bog-standard court case, the case would be thrown so far out it'd have to reset its watch.

It's not really justice, more an all-singing, all-dancing, spinning bowtie extravaganza, fun-for-all-the-family clusterfuck of mythic proportions.

The real bastards here, IMHO, were the Howard Government, who stood idly by, vigorously nodding their heads - effectively ceding all power to the Bushco. Though some may say that happened before the whole Hicks thing. Specially Phil Ruddock.

The phrase "gross miscarriage of justice" would apply, had justice been somewhere near the general vicinity of this whole fuckup.

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a bunch of goddamn stoned Dutchmen...

A novel or at least a story begs to be written from that title. What could be more mysteriously entertaining than a bunch of goddamn stoned Dutchmen?

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the case would be thrown so far out it'd have to reset its watch.

Twice, even. Once for being in another time zone, and again for Einsteinian discrepancies.

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Originally posted by kenmeer livermaile:

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a bunch of goddamn stoned Dutchmen...

A novel or at least a story begs to be written from that title. What could be more mysteriously entertaining than a bunch of goddamn stoned Dutchmen?

The goddamn stoned Ducthmen getting their asses abducted by aliens from their ship as it tries to round the Cape of Good Hope.