an Australian citizen, was captured by the US military in Afghanistan over 5 years ago and held at Guantanamo Bay. He has been subject to some of the worst
physical and psychological torture imaginable, and denied proper legal
recourse. The US government last week charged Hicks with for
“material support for terrorism,” taking off charges of conspiracy to commit
murder, attempted murder and aiding the enemy (which they never provided any
evidence for). Hicks will soon be among
the first to be subject to a sham trial under the Military
Commissions Act.
Hicks” case has gained notoriety for two
reasons. First, there is a growing
movement in Australia demanding that Hicks be released from Guantanamo Bay. And second, his military lawyer, Maj. Michael
Mori of the United States Marine Corps, has been very outspoken against the
military commissions and torture his client is being subjected to. Mori has made 7 trips to Australia, and has at times referred to the military
commissions as kangaroo courts.
But to the US government, the idea of a Guantanamo detainee defense lawyer actually defending their
client and speaking out publicly is unacceptable. Col. Morris D. Davis, chief prosecutor for
the military commissions, made what can be taken as nothing short of a threat
towards defense lawyer Mori for his outspokenness in the case. Col. Davis said “in the U.S. it would not be tolerated having a U.S. marine in uniform actively inserting himself into
the political process. It is very disappointing to see that happening in Australia, and if that was any of my prosecutors, they would
be held accountable.” Davis went on to make
nothing short of a blatant threat, saying that it would be up to the US Marine
Corps whether to charge Mori with a violation of Article 88 of the Uniform Code
of Military Justice, which makes it illegal for a military officer to use “contemptuous
words” against public officials. (“Terror
Prosecutor Assails Defense Lawyer”, NY Times,
This comes in the wake of Charles D.
Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, naming
law firms which represent Guantanamo
detainees pro bono on a radio interview this past January, and suggesting that
businesses stop working with these firms.
The Bush regime has invented new rules under
the Military
Commissions Act that give it the right to torture, detain people indefinitely
on their say-so without basic legal rights, and put them through military
tribunals which violate basic legal precepts of habeas corpus and due
process. This is a radical departure
from standards of international law, and if this is allowed to become the new normalcy,
is a big step in establishing the legal architecture of fascism.
Moreover, the Bush regime does not want
anyone, and especially a military lawyer, challenging its right to do
this. This is why military defense
attorney Davis is being threatened by Col. Davis.
As the World Can’t Wait call puts it, “That which you will not resist and mobilize
to stop, you will learn – or be forced – to accept.” If we allow torture, indefinite detention,
and outrageous military tribunals to become normal and legal, then we are
ultimately complicit in these crimes against humanity, and allowing a horrific
future to be cemented into place. There
is an urgent responsibility on the shoulders of the American people to bring
all this to a halt and drive Bush from power.
And while you think about what to do, read the following account of what
David Hicks has been subjected to, written by Alfred W McCoy in the June 2006
issue of Australia’s The Monthly:
David Hicks was one
of the first to learn the real meaning of Rumsfeld’s orders for “deprivation of
light and auditory stimuli”. By the time he felt the full effect of these
enhanced psychological methods in July 2003, Hicks had already suffered
eighteen months of extreme treatment. After a Northern Alliance warlord sold him to US Special Forces for $1000 in
mid-December 2001, Hicks was packed into the brig of the USS Peleliu in the Arabian Sea. From there he was twice flown to a nearby land base
for ten-hour torture sessions, shackled and blindfolded, which were marked by
kicking, beatings with rifle butts, punching about the head and torso, death
threats at gunpoint and anal penetration with objects – all by Americans. For
the daylong military flight to Guantanamo, Hicks was wrapped in the standard
sensory-deprivation package of drugs, earmuffs, goggles and chains.
During his first
year in the general prison population, Hicks was, according to a court
affidavit, subjected to regular sleep deprivation, forced “to run in leg
shackles that regularly ripped skin off my ankles”, handcuffed for up to 15
hours so tightly that his arms were numbed, and offered enticements to
co-operate, including promises of time with prostitutes and even eventual
repatriation to Australia. Fellow detainees Rasul and Iqbal felt Hicks was
singled out for “aggressive” treatment, with constant cell changes to deny him
human support and almost daily interrogations that slowly made him “more
willing to co-operate””
“Yet even Hicks’s
first eighteen months of harsh treatment could not have toughened him up
sufficiently for what would happen next: an extreme application, almost
unprecedented in its severity, of the CIA’s established sensory-deprivation
torture technique involving eight months of strict solitary confinement. On 9
July 2003, as his case before the military commission was starting, Hicks was
transferred to Guantanamo’s Camp Echo and isolated inside a closet-sized,
self-contained cell designed to deny its occupant all stimuli.
During the next 244
nights and days without sunlight, watched around the clock by silent guards,
Hicks found his human contact restricted to weekly visits by the Muslim
chaplain, and far less frequent conferences with his civilian and military
attorneys who were, significantly, given access solely to extract a guilty
plea. The chaplain, an austere West Point graduate named James Yee, limited his
conversation to questions of Islamic doctrine and recitation of Arabic prayers.
For infrequent meetings with attorneys, Hicks was moved just a few feet from
his cell into an adjacent common area and shackled, by steel chains about hands
and waist, to a bolt in the floor. Family letters that passed military censors
had all expressions of love or support blacked out: evidence of a carefully
calibrated psychological strategy of crushing Hicks’s will and forcing him to
capitulate.
Under these extreme
conditions, Hicks lost 30 pounds from an already lean frame. He read a
recondite thousand-page Islamic legal commentary, one of the few books allowed,
seven times. Denied any sense of time, he experienced “extreme mood swings”
almost hourly. He began to contemplate suicide by smashing his skull against
the walls of his cell. Yet he somehow survived and refused to give in or
confess. By the time he gained access to civilian counsel in early 2004, his
American attorney, Joshua Dratel, found Hicks at the brink of despair: so
withdrawn that he was obsessed with the minutiae of his surroundings, almost
unable to comprehend the reality of his trial and the larger issues at stake.