David
Hicks Bullied Into Guilty Plea
At Guantánamo Kangaroo Court
By Richard Phillips
29 March, 2007
World
Socialist Web
After
more than five years of imprisonment in Guantánamo Bay where
he endured torture and protracted periods of solitary confinement, Australian
citizen David Hicks finally pleaded guilty to one charge of “providing
material support for terrorism” as part of a plea bargain to get
out of the US hell-hole.
Hicks is the first prisoner
illegally incarcerated in Guantánamo Bay to be brought before
a military commission. The vague charge, the commission itself, and
Hicks’s guilty plea are all legal travesties, which not only violate
the Geneva Conventions but centuries-old basic legal principles.
The real guilty parties are
the Bush administration and its political accomplice, the Australian
government. Prime Minister John Howard and his ministers have violated
the legal rights of one of their citizens and endorsed the Guantánamo
regime where fear and intimidation, sensory deprivation and other torture
techniques are routine.
Both Washington and Canberra
immediately seized on Hicks’s guilty plea as a vindication of
their actions. US defence spokeswoman Major Beth Kubala claimed Monday’s
hearing demonstrated that the “process is transparent, legitimate
and moving forward.”
In the Australian federal
parliament, Howard read the charge sheet, while Justice Minister David
Johnston gloated, “When you plead guilty you put yourself in the
dock and you don’t go home that night.” In line with its
failure to defend Hicks’s basic rights throughout his ordeal,
the Labor opposition has refused to make any statement until the proceedings
are finished.
So obvious is the legal farce
that conservative National Party MP Barnaby Joyce felt compelled to
comment: “One of the many reasons why the law disapproves of prolonged
incarceration without charge or trial is because of the intolerable
pressure it places on the accused to plead guilty just to escape detention...
The only thing that is guilty here is the judicial process under which
he was being tried.”
Joyce was expressing the
sentiments of broad layers of Australians who are appalled at Hicks’s
treatment.
The military commission hearings
are neither “transparent” nor “legitimate” but
kangaroo courts established to produce guilty verdicts that will justify
the entire Guantánamo operation and the so-called “war
on terror”. The process allows unlimited detention without trial,
the use of evidence extracted under torture, severe restrictions on
prisoners’ defence lawyers and many other reversals of long-established
legal rights.
The very conduct of Monday’s
hearing, which was designed to intimidate and threaten Hicks and his
defence lawyers, further exposed the legal norms being established under
the “war on terror”. Presiding Judge Marine Colonel Ralph
Kohlman made no pretence of impartiality as he bullied Hicks and his
defence lawyers during the three-and-a-half-hour arraignment.
Early in the proceedings,
Hicks was asked by Kohlman whether he was satisfied with his legal defence
team. Hicks said he was, but wanted “equality with the prosecution”
and that he would ask at a later date for more lawyers and paralegals.
Kohlman’s response was to evict from the court two of the three
members of Hicks’s legal team.
Kohlman told assistant defence
counsel lawyer, Rebecca Snyder, that she would have to step aside because
she was a Defence Department employee and could not act for Hicks until
she changed her reserve status in the military. Stunned by the decision,
Hicks declared: “I’m shocked, because I just lost another
lawyer”, only to be sharply reprimanded for “interrupting”.
Kohlmann then declared that
Hicks’s American civilian lawyer Josh Dratel could not act as
a defence lawyer until he signed a legal document agreeing in advance
to the commission’s guidelines for defence counsels. The rules
had not even been formulated.
Dratel immediately refused,
protesting that the military commissions were an “ad hoc”
system that was making up the rules as it went along. He told the judge
that his obligation was to his client, not the military process, and
he would not sign any document that provided “a blank cheque that
draws on my ethical obligations as a lawyer.”
A series of heated exchanges
followed between Hicks’s remaining lawyer, Major Michael Mori
and Kohlmann. Mori challenged the judge’s impartiality because
Kohlmann had been involved in the 2004 military trials that were ruled
unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court. Mori also cited the judge’s
attempts to start the arraignment last week, when he knew that Dratel
could not attend. Kohlman rejected these arguments and then closed the
hearing.
The blatantly biased nature
of the proceedings undoubtedly had its impact. A short while later,
an unexpected special night session of the military commission was hurriedly
convened, at which Major Mori told the judge that his client had agreed
to plead guilty.
The charge of “providing
material support to terrorism” is another legal fraud cooked up
by the Pentagon after the US Supreme Court ruled that Washington’s
previous military commissions and the initial charges against Hicks
were unconstitutional. “Providing material support to terrorism”
is not a war crime under the Geneva Conventions or the laws of war.
Moreover, it is being imposed retrospectively. It therefore constitutes
an open violation of the US Constitution and the Australian Criminal
Code and would be unacceptable in any genuine court of law.
Journalists attending the
Guantánamo kangaroo court reported that Hicks was in a dishevelled
state, with dark lines around his eyes and more than 13 kilos heavier
than in 2004, when he last appeared in public. He has grown his hair
to chest-length to block out the prison lights that remain on his cell
24 hours a day. According to his family and lawyers, Hicks is in bad
health with stomach and back complaints and is deeply depressed and
disoriented.
Hicks’s father Terry
spent three hours with his son before the arraignment. He told the media
that David, who was chained to the floor, was so distressed that he
was prepared to do anything to get out of Guantánamo. He appeared
to have little understanding of mass popular demands in Australia for
his release and did not trust the US military commissions to honour
any plea-bargaining deal or allow him to serve out any sentence in Australia.
Terry Hicks directly blamed
the Howard government for his son’s guilty plea, saying: “The
Australian government, I believe, are the ones that put the pressure
on David. They demonised him, they pre-judged him for five years. I
suppose Mr Howard would be throwing his hands up with glee at the moment...”
The Murdoch media in Australia
immediately went into overdrive with a blazing “Guilty”
headline on the front page of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph. The Australian
had no fewer than three comments and an editorial all attacking those
who criticised Hicks’s treatment, and claiming that Hicks’s
plea justified his systematic vilification as “a terrorist”
who had now received his just desserts.
The only thing proven by
the guilty plea is that most people, if sufficiently brutalised, can
be made to say whatever their torturers want. The lengthy columns in
the Australian demonstrate the complete contempt, not only within the
newspaper’s editorial board but more generally in Australian ruling
circles, for basic democratic rights and due legal process.
Howard is no doubt hoping
that he will be able to bury the issue. But for many ordinary working
people, it is blindingly obvious that Hicks has been battered into submission
and treated unjustly. The illegal detention and prosecution of Hicks
in a US kangaroo court is the real crime—for which both the US
and Australian governments should be held accountable.
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