In February of 2007, Australian native David Hicks was a detainee in the prison facility of Guantanamo Bay. In March of 2007 he was sent home and allowed to return to life as a private citizen. Part of his "plea agreement" was that he remain silent about his time at Gitmo and the conditions of his release. No doubt members of the administration hoped this would keep us from learning the truth. Oops:
IT was January 9 last year when Morris Davis, the chief prosecutor for the Bush administration's military tribunals, took what he regards as a disturbing telephone call regarding David Hicks.
On the end of the line was the Pentagon's general counsel, William "Jim" Haynes. He asked Colonel Davis how soon he could charge Hicks. The Australian had been held in custody without a hearing for five years after being picked up in Afghanistan in late 2001.A political appointee, Mr Haynes is a controversial figure in Washington. He has tight connections with US Vice-President Dick Cheney, and in 2002 he endorsed for the military and the CIA the use of "enhanced" interrogation techniques, including waterboarding - a technique that simulates drowning and is regarded as torture by many legal experts.
But Mr Haynes's overture to get on with the Hicks matter, notwithstanding the delays to that point, was, by any measure, a bizarre request.
"The only thing we had in place at the time was the Military Commission Act," Colonel Davis says in an exclusive interview with The Australian.
"We had no manual for military commissions, we had no regulations for trial by military commissions. We didn't have a convening authority (that oversees the tribunal process) at that point."
'Only made sense in political context'
The rules for military commission trials were being rewritten after the US Supreme Court had, in effect, overturned the previous structure. The only way Colonel Davis could make sense of what he was hearing from Mr Haynes was in the context of what he was reading about the political environment in Australia.
"At the time, you had John Howard in the press, making it clear to Americans that Hicks had to be charged by February," Colonel Davis says.
"I was getting leaned on. We were getting pushed to get charges out before all the process was in place."
Nor did it escape Colonel Davis's attention that Mr Cheney was due to visit Australia towards the end of last February.
It was clear the Hicks case was a top-agenda item with the then prime minister. In the end, Mr Cheney would travel to Australia armed with good news.
Colonel Davis had managed to get charges laid in early February, but admits now it was all too rushed, in the way that the Hicks defence had characterised it at the time.
"They said we were pushing the train out of the station before all the track was laid, and, you know, that was a pretty good analogy."
Colonel Davis says the phone calls he got from Mr Haynes and the timeline in Australia in which a "loyal ally" in Mr Howard was eyeing a difficult election and wanted to get the Hicks matter put to rest, means the nine-month sentence deal that got Hicks home has a "bad odour".
And last week's revelations of Hicks's own terror training manual again underlined that Australia's Taliban was no innocent abroad and it remains a sore point for Colonel Davis that Hicks, in his eyes, got off so lightly, saying any plea deal he would have struck would have demanded a jail sentence of about 10 years.
Hey America, do you feel safer?
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