Skip to main content

David Hicks "affair" resurfaces

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."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t...
Post a Comment
Read more

The NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) goes on hold.....because of one non-Treaty member (Israel)

Isn't there something radically wrong here?    Israel, a non-signatory to the NPT has, evidently, been the cause for those countries that are Treaty members, notably Canada, the US and the UK, after 4 weeks of negotiation, effectively blocking off any meaningful progress in ensuring the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.    IPS reports ..... "After nearly four weeks of negotiations, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference ended in a predictable outcome: a text overwhelmingly reflecting the views and interests of the nuclear-armed states and some of their nuclear-dependent allies. “The process to develop the draft Review Conference outcome document was anti-democratic and nontransparent,” Ray Acheson, director, Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), told IPS. “This Review Conference has demonstrated beyond any doubt that continuing to rely on the nuclear-armed states or their nuclear-de...
Post a Comment
Read more

#1 Prize for a bizarre story.....and lying!

No comment called for in this piece from CommonDreams: Another young black man: The strange sad case of 21-year-old Chavis Carter. Police in Jonesboro, Arkansas  stopped  him and two friends, found some marijuana, searched put Carter, then put him handcuffed  behind his back  into their patrol car, where they say he  shot himself  in the head with a gun they failed to find. The FBI is investigating. Police Chief Michael Yates, who stands behind his officers' story,  says in an interview  that the death is "definitely bizarre and defies logic at first glance." You think?
Post a Comment
Read more