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David Hicks revisited

David Hicks is back in Australia. Of course the whole melodrama of getting Hicks back from Gitmo to South Australia can only be described as a farce. The US wouldn't allow Hicks to over-fly American air-space and in the end the Australian tax-payer had to pick up the tab of some $520,000 for a private jet to transport Hicks. Then it seems this rather pathetic character was thought to warrant no less than both South Australian and Federal Police officers on board the plane.

It is timely to remind oneself of the disgrace which backgrouds the whole Hicks process. Tim McCormack, the Australian Red Cross professor of international humanitarian law at the Melbourne Law School has done so, in an op-ed piece in The Age. McCormick attended the proceedings against David Hicks in Cuba in March as an adviser to the defence team on law-of-war issues.

"Now that David Hicks is back in Australia to serve out the rest of his sentence at Yatala, it is opportune to reflect on the implications of his "trial" for the future of the US military commission process. It is not a pretty picture.

One of Major Michael Mori's recurrent criticisms of the proposed US military commissions (mark I and II) was the complete lack of judicial independence from the executive arm of the US Government. He repeatedly used a cricketing analogy, likening the trial process to the absurd scenario of dispensing with the independent umpire and allowing the bowlers themselves to determine whether or not to declare the batsmen out lbw."

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