It was bound to happen! The totally unsatisfactory and disgraceful situation relating to David Hicks has resurfaced - clearly something John Howard and Alexander Downer would have wished to avoid, especially in the middle of an election-campaign.
As Richard Ackland writes in his op-ed piece in the SMH:
"Try as they might to bury one of the nastiest instances of political meddling in the course of justice, sooner or later the David Hicks case was bound to resurface as an unwanted pong for a desperate government.
The New York attorney and Columbia law lecturer Scott Horton, who has written tirelessly on Hicks's case for Harper's Magazine, reports that a military officer told him that the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, "interfered directly to get Hicks's plea bargain deal".
And:
"In fact, the corruption infecting what is supposed to be an independent military justice system has become so apparent that it was a factor in the US Supreme Court changing its mind in June and deciding to have a broad review of the legal rights of detainees. This is scheduled for the current sittings of the court.
We have also seen the dismissal of two military commission cases after the military judges pointed to a flaw in the Military Commissions Act. The effect of that legal shortcoming means David Hicks pleaded guilty to an offence that did not exist at the time he committed it, before a commission whose legal status was a nullity, and whose regulations for its proper functioning hadn't been issued."
As Richard Ackland writes in his op-ed piece in the SMH:
"Try as they might to bury one of the nastiest instances of political meddling in the course of justice, sooner or later the David Hicks case was bound to resurface as an unwanted pong for a desperate government.
The New York attorney and Columbia law lecturer Scott Horton, who has written tirelessly on Hicks's case for Harper's Magazine, reports that a military officer told him that the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, "interfered directly to get Hicks's plea bargain deal".
And:
"In fact, the corruption infecting what is supposed to be an independent military justice system has become so apparent that it was a factor in the US Supreme Court changing its mind in June and deciding to have a broad review of the legal rights of detainees. This is scheduled for the current sittings of the court.
We have also seen the dismissal of two military commission cases after the military judges pointed to a flaw in the Military Commissions Act. The effect of that legal shortcoming means David Hicks pleaded guilty to an offence that did not exist at the time he committed it, before a commission whose legal status was a nullity, and whose regulations for its proper functioning hadn't been issued."
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