If the United States imagines the first guilty plea by one of the 395 Guantanamo Bay detainees somehow justifies its treatment of all suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists, it is sadly mistaken. Indeed the way that the case against David Hicks, the 31 year-old Australian picked up five years ago in Afghanistan, has been handled demonstrates just how bereft of basic justice and common humanity the process is.
Hicks, who originally denied all charges of aiding a terrorist organization, changed his plea to guilty after a deal was struck with the US military. Instead of a 20-year jail sentence, Hicks was given seven years to be served in an Australian jail. After the time he has already been detained has been taken into account, he is likely to be released within nine months. Part of the plea bargain deal was that Hicks signed a legally binding statement saying he had never been tortured nor treated illegally during his five years of incarceration in the US Cuban base. This affidavit flies in the face of all the evidence. Leaving aside the legality of his detention in a maddening legal limbo and the US failure to bring him quickly to trial, his family has maintained consistently that Hicks was tortured and sexually abused by his guards.
Australians, whose government has been a dogged supporter of the Bush Iraqi policy, have been outraged by the treatment of this young man. They have wanted to know how the British managed to get some of their citizens released two years ago without any formal trial. At worst they assume that Hicks was a deluded dreamer who got mixed up in events he did not understand. They do not believe that he should have been caged like an animal in Guantanamo for five years. There is also a strong suspicion that Hicks took the plea bargain as the only way of escaping from his nightmare prison. Many believe him entirely innocent.
Eased of the embarrassment of the Hicks case, Prime Minister John Howard’s government will probably resume its unstinting support for Bush. This would be a mistake. If the treatment of one of their own citizens has caused such anger in Canberra, why are the Australians not now protesting the treatment of the 394 detainees left behind?
Guantanamo Bay will go down in history as the moment the Americans threw away any claim to be acting on behalf of justice and decency against an unprincipled and ruthless enemy. All the specious claptrap about “enemy combatants” as opposed to prisoners of war concealed the truth that the Bush White House was quite prepared to behave with an equal ruthlessness and lack of principle. The values of truth and justice that America claimed to be defending were sacrificed at Guantanamo Bay. Those who always doubted US sincerity were unsurprised. But the many people who wanted to believe that America really did represent a force for good in world affairs have been shaken profoundly. Guantanamo has thus been a victory for bigotry and a defeat for decency.
