Linda Seaborn, Hobart
Major Michael Mori, the US military lawyer for Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks, addressed an 800-strong public meeting on August 18. The meeting was organised by Amnesty International.
Hicks, 31, from Adelaide, has spent four-and-a-half years at the US naval prison in Cuba as an "unlawful combatant" following his capture by US-backed Northern Alliance troops in Afghanistan in December 2001. In 2004, US authorities charged him with conspiracy, attempted murder and "aiding the enemy", and he was to have been tried by a US military commission. However, the US Supreme Court ruled in June that the military commission system set up by US President George Bush was unlawful.
Mori explained that Hicks has not done anything that violates Australian law or the Geneva Conventions on war. He explained that the US government has not alleged Hicks engaged in any actual acts of violence against anybody. He is alleged to have attempted to kill British, Australian and Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, while he was in US detention, because others in the Taliban "conspiracy" that Hicks is alleged to have been part of before his detention had attempted to kill these soldiers.
Mori said that such charges could only be upheld by a rigged trial system — the US military commission, whose members were "handpicked" by those prosecuting Hicks.
Mori posed the question, "Why is David Hicks there?", answering, "Because the Australian government won't ask for him back". Why is this? According to Mori, it's because Washington, with Canberra's full support, has claimed that the alleged "terrorists" held at Guantanamo Bay are "the worst of the worst", and it would look foolish if there were no convictions. Hicks, he said, is being sacrificed by the "spin doctors of the war on terror".
Jon Piccini and Stella Riethmuller report from Brisbane that on August 15, former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib addressed 150 people at the University of Queensland. Habib, whose tour was organised by UQ's Students Against War and Racism group, spoke about the injustice of his detention and the inhumane treatment he suffered.