Hicks home

These are the issues I’ve always had with the whole David Hicks thing, the guy was charged with a crime that didn’t even exist at the time he committed it, he wasn’t allowed legal representation for years, was allegedly tortured and was kept in part from testimony from other Guantanamo Bay prisoners who had been tortured. Now I’m not saying for one second that David is as pure as the driven snow, hell he joined a radical Islamic training group, but to suggest that David was a bigwig mastermind terrorist is just nonsense, if David Hicks, a confused and angry Australian who chose to stand on the other side of America’s cultural war, is the best Bush had in terms of important detainees who threaten democracy, we’ve already lost the war on terrorism.

Detainee still in jail but finally home
CANBERRA - David Hicks will wake this morning in a South Australian cell remarkably like the one in which he spent the past five years at the United States military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, His overalls will be white, rather than orange, and he will still be held in isolation from other maximum security prisoners who include Snowtown "bodies-in-the-barrel" killers Robert Wagner and John Bunting. The 31-year-old Muslim convert from Adelaide captured as a Taleban fighter in Afghanistan will also remain surrounded by controversy, with renewed calls for his immediate freedom and a royal commission into the Government's handling of his case. And despite a US ban on speaking to the media imposed as part of the deal under which he was transferred by private jet to Edinburgh RAAF base, Adelaide, Hicks will next year be free to tell his story - as long as he does not profit from it.