David Hicks: Nothing but an Echo
Submitted by International A... on January 22, 2007 - 8:14am.
International Affairs
"David Hicks: Nothing but an Echo"
By Phoebe in Sydney
At one point, tears welled in his eyes as he leafed through a book of photographs he had brought of the conflict in Kosovo. He displayed pictures of a Serb soldier kicking a woman lying on the street and of a 5-day-old baby who had died of exposure in the mountains, where her family had fled.
"This is the pornography of violence," he said.
“Pornography exists for the lonesome, the ugly, the fearful – it’s made for the losers.” Rita Mae Brown
Given his career, his feelings about the US inaction in Rwanda, his commitment to a strong NATO and his personal dealings with Serb leader, Slobodan Milosevic during the Dayton Peace Accords, it’s easy to understand why General Wesley Clark was so determined to take action in Kosovo.
What motivated a 24 year old Australian drifter with no cultural or religious links to the Balkans to travel to Albania in 1999 and join the Kosovo Liberation Army is far from clear. But for David Hicks it was the first step along a path that would lead him two years later to the US prison at Guantanamo Bay. And while ever he’s at Gitmo, cut off from his family and the rest of the world, we’re unlikely to ever hear the reason from his lips.
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| David Hicks outside his family home in Adelaide |
Certainly the news that David had joined the KLA came right out of left field for his father, Terry Hicks.
“I thought it was an airline,” he’s reported to have said
In an interview on Sydney radio station 702 in 2004 (for which there is unfortunately no transcript ) Terry Hicks explained that during the build up to the Kosovo War David was working in Japan for a horse racing stable. He hadn’t done well at school, got into some minor trouble with drink and drugs and was expelled. He’d drifted around the central part of Australia working at a variety jobs, skinning kangaroos at a meat factory and doing various jobs on cattle ranches and had two children in a de facto relationship. After that relationship failed David took the job in Japan where, from his father’s account, he led a fairly lonely and listless existence. Terry says the only English language TV station David had access to in Japan was CNN International, and one of the main issues being covered was the rising tension in the Balkans between the Serbs and Kosovans. David, who hadn’t been overly interested in world events up until that point, became quite emotionally involved in the story.
“At that time Kosovo was dominating the media and after watching that I just had something inside that said I had to go and do that, like a spur of the moment sort of thing. I was watching the briefings. I found out there was one group and they were training in northern Albania. They were going into Kosovo and I realised that maybe, at a wild guess, I could go there and try it and I did it. To me that was doing the impossible.”
Hicks interview with Australian Federal Police
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2005/s1494795.htm
“I think Hicks, from talking to him, he really believes in that ideal of manhood and chivalry and things like that to help the oppressed and defend against what they are suffering. I think that's what propelled him into it. That and a sense of adventurism.”
Moazzam Begg, former Guantanamo detainee.
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2005/s1494795.htm
“Well, I mean obviously David didn't ever finish the ninth grade, you know, but he had two kids, he worked hard, his relationship broke up there and he started wandering. He wanted to do something more with his life, and guess I didn't do too well in my first go at college and my drastic change in my life was to enlist in the Marine Corps. He found a different adventure.”
Hick’s US military lawyer, marine Major Michael Mori
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/transcripts/s1709428.htm
But, by the time Hicks got to Albania the Kosovo War was all but over. He did four weeks training with the KLA and signed up with NATO, but when a peace deal was done he was sent home.
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| David Hicks posing with weapons borrowed from a storeroom in a photo taken in Albania on his first day of training. |
Before he left David did manage to get a photo souvenir of his time training with the KLA. A photo that would be used extensively by the Murdoch press in Australia to convince the Australian public that this man was obviously a very dangerous terrorist.
On return to Australia David started investigating Islam and went to a local mosque to learn more.
“I had to learn once and for all what is Islam and speak to a Muslim to find out what is this life he's living, what is his belief and thoughts.”
Hicks Australian Federal Police interview.
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2005/s1494795.htm
He left Australia, having converted to the Muslim faith, with names of contacts in Pakistan who would help travel in Asia and learn more about his new religion. In a letter to his father he said he’d met a Saudi fellow student who’d invited him to attend a training camp in Afghanistan.
In letters to his father David started spouting some radical Islamist views. He was supportive of the Taliban, denouncing the West for believing Jewish propaganda and even claiming he’d met Osama Bin Laden more than 20 times. This was, however pre September 11. He later told Australian Federal police that he was just trying to make himself sound important by boasting.
On September 11 David Hicks was in Pakistan and saw the Al-Qaeda attacks on television. In his interview with Australian Federal Police he said he was not impressed.
“It's not Islam, is it? It's like the opposite of what I was...wanted to do. Meant to help the people, stop oppression. And they did the opposite.”
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2005/s1494795.htm
But then he did something he described in the interview as a move he’s regretted ever since. He went back to Afghanistan to try to collect belongings he’d left there.
“I'm spewing that I went back. I mean, I could have left my stuff behind if I knew what was gonna happen. I could have stayed behind in Pakistan, not gone back. But I would have lost all my Islam. It might sound stupid, I've got lots of nice Islamic clothes I'd been saving. There's lots of money in them, with stuff I could have had home.”
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2005/s1494795.htm
To cut a long story short, he was trapped in Afghanistan when the US closed off the borders, he was given a rifle and sent to guard a Taliban tank. After a while he felt like he was doing nothing so he headed to the front where he fired no shots, took part in no action and eventually tried to escape. He was picked up the Northern Alliance and sold to the US for $1,000.
Before being sent to Guantanamo Bay in January Hicks has alleged he was brutally beaten and tortured. He was being held prisoner on a US navy ship but says he was blinfolded, put on a chopper and sent to some unknown landbase for interrogation.
This transcript from the respected Australian documentary program “Four Corners” covers what David told his father in their only meeting at Guantanamo.
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2005/s1494795.htm
Whether or not the physical torture can be proven there is no doubt about the mental torture and human rights abuses David Hicks has been subjected to since arriving at Guantanamo Bay.
He spends 23 hours a day in this cell:
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| A solitary life...David Hicks's cell, where he is confined for 23 hours a day, his lawyer says and inset, the reading room, with no books. |
The lights are permanently on. He is allowed one hour a day outside into the reading room inset in the above image. But his lawyer says there are no books in the reading room.
It was two years before he was even allowed to see a lawyer and now, just going into his sixth year at Guantanamo Bay, there is no indication of when he might get to any kind of trial – and, on current indications when, and if, that trial ever occurs it’s unlikely to be fair.
It wasn’t until June 2004 that any charges were laid against Hicks. They were very non-specific, he was accused conspiracy, aiding the enemy and “attempted murder by an unprivileged belligerent”. But the original military commission system was appealed (not by Hicks, but by others) and overturned by the US Supreme Court so the charges were thrown out.
“You can't try people without having real trials. You can't have the President be the prosecutor, the judge and the jury. And you can't simply pick up people and detain them forever". Michael Ratner, the Center for Constitutional Rights.
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2005/s1494795.htm“I believe that there is a desire to have justice for 9/11 and other crimes. The victims are owed that, absolutely, they are owed that. The American society is owed that. But for whatever reason, we're not willing to use the tried and true instruments of justice in this case. Justice, you know, when you don't have law, what you've got is revenge.” Lt Cr Charles Swift Military Attorney.
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2005/s1494795.htm“Well the letter that appointed me had that sort of condition, that the access to the client would only be guaranteed if for pre-trial negotiations for a guilty plea.”
Hick’s military lawyer, Major Michael Mori.
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2005/s1494795.htm
So what is a military commission? Well it’s something that has already been declared not suitable for any American charged with terrorism, but for some reason this loaded system has been accepted by the Australian government as a reasonable way for David Hicks to be tried.
David’s lawyer, Major Michael Mori explains on Australian TV’s interview show “Enough Rope”:
“… stepping into it, I thought I was I going to be involved in court martials, I have plenty of criminal experience dealing with court martials, and that's the laws we would be using. Unfortunately, what I found out that we were in something totally different, something completely made up and resurrected from 1942.
Snip
ANDREW DENTON: The Military Commissions in 1942 you're referring to were set up in response to Germans who'd come to America to commit acts of sabotage and needed to be tried.
MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: Yes.
…the people that created the system are the same people that were responsible for fighting the war in Afghanistan, setting up and choosing Guantanamo as the detention centre, approving interrogation techniques and being in charge of the interrogations that were going. So what you was a system of, sort of like, the investigators and the gaolers also being in charge of the supposed trial system. There was no independent check and balance on it. Unfortunately they needed to set up a system that would justify what they had already done.
This past week as I was preparing this blog, the new rules for the new military commissions were released by the Pentagon, and surprise, surprise, President Bush seems to have reacted to advice by experts on how to do things properly, by coming up with another version of what he was already doing.
"Things are worse under this new system.
"Under the old commission system a military defence lawyer was allowed to see all the classified evidence. Even if David Hicks couldn't, I could. Now they want to, basically, say that I may not see classified evidence. They may only use a summary and I may never get to see to check the classified evidence.
"It's very crafty how they put the burden on the defence to show why the Government's hearsay evidence is unreliable and yet they now give the ability to the Government to classify how evidence was obtained and the methods by which it was obtained."
By the way, under the new rules evidence obtained under torture is not admissable under the new rules, but evidence obtained via “coercion” is.
There are two aspects of good news for the USA in this story. One is that the Australian people have started to blame the Australian government rather than the Bush administration for hanging Hicks out to dry. Originally there was a loud anti-Hicks public outcry here, very much influenced by the rocket launcher photo (see above) which was printed endlessly with the unstated implication that it showed him at at terrorist training camp, rather than training with an ally of NATO in 1999.
By the way, here’s what Major Mori said when shown the photo on “Enough Rope”:
MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: The whole picture shows him and two other mates, and they're posing with their weapons, back in Albania when he was with the KLA, training. Unfortunately it looks like he is firing a rocket launcher. If they showed the whole picture, you'd see there is nothing in it, it's just the tube. I have my pictures in my military books, I'm holding my machine gun on my waist, and everybody has got their buddy pictures.
As Mori points out the Australian government could’ve done what the British and even the Saudis did and demanded their citizen be released from Guantanamo. But they haven’t.
In case you’re wondering, the Australian government says they can’t bring Hicks home because there isn’t any crime they can charge him with. (Oh right! That’s a good reason).
The other good news is that Major Michael Mori has come to represent everything about Americans that Aussies love to admire. Next week we announce our annual “Australian of the Year” and here was what one Sydney newspaper columnist wrote on the subject on the weekend.
MY NOMINEE for Australian of the Year is Major Michael Mori of the United States Marine Corps. His efforts to extract David Hicks from the horrors of Guantanamo Bay exemplify our values of a fair go and equality before the law.
Not for the Howard lot, though. There is not a lawyer of standing in Australia now who believes Hicks can get a fair trial, but Howard, Ruddock, Downer and Co do not care. Their subservience to the White House, the Pentagon and the US Attorney-General is sickening. They twist and bluster to do Washington's bidding.
The game got rougher again this week. The new Pentagon plan for military commissions would allow Hicks and other "terrorist suspects" to be tried, convicted and executed on hearsay evidence or coerced testimony.
The major went on the attack yet again. The rules "just don't provide for a fair trial", he said on Friday. "The right to a speedy trial - that's gone. Any right against self-incrimination has been taken away, along with the right to confront your accuser. They say all hearsay can come in and the burden is on the defence to show why the prosecution shouldn't be able to use this."
Semper fidelis, as they say in the Marines. Michael Mori would make a dinkum Oz of the Year. Far more so than some.
Or, perhaps it’s put more succinctly by Brett Solomon the Executive Director of GetUp (a web driven movement in Australia modelled very much on MoveOn)
"He is a soldier. People respect the uniform. And a lot of Australians have traditionally respected America - the symbol of justice, the symbol of democracy and freedom. And in a sense Mori is a symbol of the old America they used to respect and still respect. And the military commission process is a symbol of the new America that they no longer respect, and the Australia they're losing respect for."
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/david-hicks-australias-most-wanted/2007/01/12/1168105177862.html?page=4
This story has been moving as I’ve tried to write it down and explain it and the latest is that there will possibly be another appeal against the latest version of the military commissions announced by the Pentagon. This is the assessment of CBS legal analyst, Andrew Cohen.
“What Congress did choose to do last year was to fail and/or refuse to answer all of the important questions raised by our government's efforts to prosecute the terror detainees at Gitmo. Even though the new military rules are better than the old rules — the ones that were ceremoniously dumped by the United States Supreme Court — there is still a significant question whether they go far enough in giving the detainees certain core due process rights. We (and Congress) will have no one but ourselves to blame if the new-and-improved rules still generate a new round of legal challenges generating a new round of Supreme Court review generating another ruling that is disappointing to White House officials.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/19/opinion/courtwatch/main2377767.shtml
The problem is another challenge to the system could mean more years in prison without trial for David Hicks and the others who, I’m sure, are like him being in human rights and legal black hole. Major Mori says he could appeal the new rules but that could leave David in prison until 2009.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/hicks-like-a-monkey-in-a-cage/2007/01/19/1169095942733.html?page=2
I’ll let Major Mori complete the argument for the defence, which many people are wondering if anyone is ever going to be heard in anything like a real court:
“As David sits locked up at Guantanamo for five years charged with aiding the Taliban, the former Taliban head spokesperson, who was (indistinguishable) with Osama Bin Laden was allowed to come to the United States and attend Yale University. The ambassador for the Taliban in Pakistan was allowed to leave Guantanamo and set free. You see it’s those hypocrisies, and the fact that David Hicks comes from a low income family in Salisbury South Australia that it’s easier to sacrifice him for whatever political needs there are … but the Commission will not provide him a fair trial (snip)… it should’ve been done three years ago, four years ago. It took more than two and a half years even to lay charges against him, and I think that violates our fundamental principles of due process and fairness.”
(my transcript. You can hear this at 6:30-7:30 minutes)
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/breakfast/stories/2007/1821870.htm
Or perhaps I should end on this from Mori’s interview last year on “Enough Rope”.
MAJOR MICHAEL (DAN) MORI, HICKS' MILITARY ATTORNEY: It's disappointing that David Hicks has lost four years of his life (note: this is now five years), and he's never injured anybody. And when you look back at the war in Afghanistan and the, and the crimes that were committed - either by the Northern Alliance abuses or the Taliban abuses, or civilians that were killed by bombings - and you sit back and say, "Now we're holding people accountable for that conflict, and it's David Hicks?" It's a joke.
Or this from the same interview:
MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: : I've never said that David made the best decisions in life and I've never said that David hasn't realized that he has made some poor life choices.
snip
When I see David and I'm down there and I see - he has more in common with the Alabama National Guardsmen outside his cell than the guy locked up next to him. David doesn't hate Americans. He doesn't, you know
Or this from one of David’s letters home:
I've reached the point where I'm highly confused and lost - overwhelmed, if you like. I suffer extreme mood swings every half hour, going from one extreme to the other. I can no longer picture what happens outside. My entire world has become this little room, and everything beyond is nothing but an echo.
Love, David.
I had never heard of David Hicks until I read your diary. His experience of injustice contains some similarities to that experienced by an Irishman who was unjustly imprisoned not far from where I live in Colorado.
Here is an excerpt from the website created to fund his legal defence:
"Ciarán Ferry was imprisoned by British authorities in March of 1993 after two weapons were found in a car in which he was a passenger. He was held for two years before being tried without a jury under the infamous Diplock court system, and sentenced to 22 years in Long Kesh, a special prison in the north of lreland opened in 1976 solely to accommodate both Republican and Loyalist prisoners sentenced for political offenses. He spent seven and a half years in the H-Blocks before being released in the summer of 2000 under the Good Friday Accord, brokered by Britain and Ireland with the active encouragement of U.S. President Bill Clinton and U.S. Senator George Mitchell.
"Ciarán and Heaven Ferry were married in Belfast in August of 2000, and lived there immediately following their wedding. In September of that year, police found Ciarán's personal details and home address on pro-British hit lists, and the couple was given a government grant to secure their flat against gun and bomb attack. A few months later, during a Christmas visit to Heaven's family in Colorado, the couple decided to stay in the United States to provide a safer life for the baby they had learned they were expecting. Mr. Ferry firmly believes that it would be dangerous to return to Ireland, and to do so would also put the lives of his wife and daughter in jeopardy.
"Ciarán, an Irish citizen, was arrested without a warrant by the Bureau of Customs and Immigration Enforcement (formerly INS) on January 30th, 2003. He was attending a formal interview with his wife, Heaven Ferry, in relation to Ciarán's pending permanent residency application that had been filed a year earlier. Ciarán had been supporting his family for over a year as a landscaper in Denver, Colorado and as a printer in Paterson, New Jersey. At the time of the arrest, a distraught Mrs. Ferry, who was allowed no contact with her husband, was told that her husband was "being questioned about his past activities in Ireland." Mr. Ferry, however, was told, and subsequent documents verify, that the official charge against Ciarán was overstaying his visa.
"The Immigration and Nationality Act, however, is very clear about extending legal status to visa overstayers who are the spouses of U.S. citizens and file the required paperwork with the immigration service. Under the Bureau of Customs and Immigration Services regulations, Ciarán was legally in status again when he filed his residency application a year earlier and received his work authorization card and Social Security number. Rather than placing Mr. Ferry in the immigration detention facility, the officers transported Mr. Ferry to FCI Englewood, a federal penitentiary in Littleton, Colorado, where he was held "without bond in the "Special Handling Unit"-- normally reserved for violent offenders.
"At an "asylum-only" immigration court hearing at the BICE detention facility in Aurora, Colorado on February 26, 2003, the Immigration Court found Ciarán eligible to apply for asylum in the United States, but refused to take jurisdiction to consider the legality of his detention, or grant him a bond hearing. A hearing for Mr. Ferry's asylum petition was scheduled for August of 2003.
"Mr. Ferry was transferred to the Denver County Jail, where he was held in a high security area. Mr. Ferry was not allowed to see daylight and received one hour of indoor exercise per week. He was routinely strip searched after visits from his American citizen wife and two year old daughter...."
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I think you can begin to get the picture from that small slice. But for further info, and to see where things stand now, please take a look at:
is a new one on me. Sounds outrageous. haven't had a chance to check out the further details on the link you've provided but thanks, I will when I get some breathing space.
Our interest the dramas of Ireland overlap a lot.
I think when you see the way people were treated there, how wrong the authorities can be, and how long it can take them to admit (if they ever do) that they were wrong -- and how their heavy handedness contributes to insurgency (or whatever you want to call it) you bring a different perspective to what's going on re the "War on Terror".
Just going OT: Have you read "Those are Real Bullets, aren't They?" It's a tracing step by step of Bloody Sunday. Frightening.
And my favourite historical fiction on Ireland is a couple of books by Thomas Flanagan (I believe there's a third book, but haven't found it yet). The two I've read are "Year of the French" which covers the 1798 uprising in County Mayo and then "The Tenants of Time" which runs from the Fenian Uprising to the fall of Parnell.
If you haven't read them, you should. My old Irish aunt bought one of them for me from a second hand book store and I was hooked immediately. Learned so much.
You'd be taking them to the Better Business Bureau if you bought a washing machine the way we went into the war in Iraq. Wes Clark, CNN Aug 17 2003
Yes, Ciarán has been punished quite excessively for having been one of four people in a car which the RUC alleged to have two guns inside the trunk (For those who don't know, the RUC was not above reproach, and was the root cause for the promised new policing called for in the Good Friday agreement of 1998). He served 7 years of a 22 year sentence until the UK government released him, thereby deeming him no threat. However, the Bush administration saw that he had once been an IRA volunteer, and tried to force him to become a spy for them. When he declined, he was thrown into solitary confinement and kept locked up in various Denver area facilities until he was deported two years later. It didn't matter that he had been released by the UK, or that he was married to an American woman, had an American daughter, and had applied for American citizenship. All that mattered was that the Bush administration thought him to be a "terrorist" who they ought to be able to use as a spy. Idiots. Ciarán's war came to an end while he was in Long Kesh prison when the IRA reinstated a ceasefire in 1997. It was unjust in the extreme for him to be so mistreated by the Bush administration. It's still unjust that he is prevented from returning here.
I've not read that account of Bloody Sunday, although I have read several. Paul Greengrass also has an excellent movie about that unnecessary attack. I've also met the brother of one of the unarmed marchers who a British soldier killed that day. My own brother and his family lived in Derry then (he was working there for Dupont), although they were all away the day of the march. Did you know that the second in command of the Parachute Regiment soldiers there was none other than Michael Jackson, he who years later would refuse Wes Clark's order at Pristina airport? All I can say is he was a "brave man" (not) when his opponents were unarmed and mostly teenagers.
The third Flanagan book you mention is "The End Of The Hunt", and it covers the run-up to the Rising, and the ensuing Anglo-Irish War followed by the Civil War. Of the three, I liked "The Year of the French" the best. Flanagan really mastered the writer's art in that one, and he did a fine job with the real history.
Another writer of Irish and Celtic historical fiction I like a lot is Morgan Llywelyn. She is a Welsh woman who has walked the length and breadth of Ireland. Her novels are stunningly well researched, and very well composed. She has a series of them entitled by significant years beginning with "1916" and working forward (so far to "1972", which of course culminates with Bloody Sunday). She has many others as well, touching on just about every period of Irish history, and some Celtic history before the Celts came to Ireland. These include, "Druids", "Red Branch", "Finn McCool", and "Lion of Ireland" to name just a few.
It is troubling that our country has adopted so many of the UK's tactics and laws to deal with terrorism. For the most part, those tactics and laws did nothing to stop the IRA. Indeed, things such as Internment, Diplock courts and a whole variety of "dirty war" tactics may have even prolonged the fight. It was only when the British government commenced serious talks (negotiations) with the IRA that the IRA called it's historic 1994 ceasefire which changed everything.
Nick Kelly
Wes Clark will be the national security candidate.
Actually there are several really good cartoons on the David Hicks situation on th Fair Go for David website.
http://www.fairgofordavid.org/htmlfiles/cartoons.htm
But that one puts it in perspective nicely. Leunig, the artist, is one of Australia's most famous.
You'd be taking them to the Better Business Bureau if you bought a washing machine the way we went into the war in Iraq. Wes Clark, CNN Aug 17 2003
Whenever governments suspend due process for "outlaw" classes (e.g. "terrorists"), they usually scoop up and seriously mistreat some innocent people. And those innocent people are always nearly powerless before that government, as the cartoon shows. That is why some such prisoners have resorted to hunger striking. The only power they may have is the power to refuse.
Due process of law cannot sort the innocent from the guilty when the innocent and the guilty are denied due process.
Nick Kelly
Wes Clark will be the national security candidate.
I've take to take some time to read and digest this before I can make an intelligent comment but this looks great at first glance....Thanks so much....
Back later.