Liverpool said:
Why he can't return
January 7, 2007
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/why-he-cant-return/2007/01/06/1167777323596.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2
And from another angle..............
Why they don't want Hicks home too soon
Norman Abjorensen
WERE the Bush Administration to have a sudden fit of uncharacteristic compassion and decide to free Australian prisoner David Hicks from Guantanamo Bay, it is most unlikely he would be on his way home at least in the foreseeable future.
It is a safe bet that the Australian Government would be exerting strong diplomatic pressure in Washington to prevent such an occurrence, and in the unlikely event of it happening anyway, would be hell-bent on at least delaying it.
Why? Because 2007 is an election year, and a free and media-accessible David Hicks in Australia would be like a human billboard advertising all that is wrong with Iraq, justice American-style and the mindless adherence of Howard and his conga line to Uncle Sam and its disastrous adventurism.
With opinion polls showing more and more Australians opposed to the war in Iraq, and a Labor Party just itching for a fight on the issue, David Hicks would become an issue in himself first-hand testimony not only to the brutality meted out to him and others like him, but also to the reluctance of his own Government to act on his behalf.
Put simply, his presence would be an ongoing embarrassment to the Government. It might even occur to someone to ensure he is enrolled and nominate him for a seat in parliament against one of those who has acquiesced in his incarceration, like Philip Ruddock or Alexander Downer.
In any event, he would be the ghost of Banquo: the figure sacrificed who can tell all. The Government, quite clearly, would do all in its power to have him kept well out of the way such as in Guantanamo Bay.
Not only has Hicks been denied even the rudiments of natural justice, reliable and undenied reports suggest he has been tortured and at the connivance of his own Government which must be to a great majority of Australians an act as disturbing as it is despicable.
Even the most vociferous critics of the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have hesitated to call it a concentration camp, but an authoritative account of life inside the centre at the US naval base suggests that is exactly what it is.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a concentration camp as "a camp where non-combatants of a district are accommodated, such as those instituted by Lord Kitchener during the South African war of 1899-1902; one for the internment of political prisoners, foreign nationals, etc., esp. as organised by the Nazi regime in Germany before and during the war of 1939-45".
The term applies to situations where those held are persons selected for their conformity to broad criteria without judicial process, rather than having been judged as individuals, and is in sharp counter-distinction to prisoner-of-war camps, a category that the United States has been careful to avoid so as not to come under the Geneva Conventions which confer certain basic rights.
A former US army Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, James Yee, who was himself charged with being a spy and held in solitary confinement for 76 days, published in 2005 For God and Country, the first detailed account of what was happening inside this man-made hellhole, and to which, through its inactivity and statements made, the Australian Government has given its support.
All charges were subsequently dismissed and the laying of the charges is itself now being investigated by Congress. Would an Australian government dare to inquire into the imprisonment of David Hicks? Not this one.
The publicised excesses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq have been written off as an aberration by the US propaganda machine, but Yee's account, which has not been repudiated, suggests a systematised approach to Muslim detainees, at once brutal and designed to degrade and humiliate, has been inculcated into the military routine.
One must really wonder about the concept of a war on terror a war without a tangible enemy that can be engaged in conventional combat.
It is hard to escape the feeling that America needed to shed blood preferably Arab blood, or any Muslim blood in the wake of September 11, and with its lamentably fruitless hunt for Osama bin Laden yielding no results, it turned to Afghanistan and then Iraq.
Finally, Saddam Hussein an evil and brutal man, but by no means the worst was strung up on the gallows to avenge this primeval blood lust.
The United States got its corpse.
Poor misguided David Hicks, it seems, is a casualty of collateral damage in this fantastic and entirely unjustifiable exercise.
Don't hold your breath for an early return.
Dr Norman Abjorensen teaches politics at the Australian National University.
http://canberra.yourguide.com.au/detail.asp?class=your%20say&subclass=general&story_id=548241&category=Opinion&m=1&y=2007