Was Hicks' Gitmo Plea a 'Political Fix'?
The conviction of Australian David Hicks in a U.S. terrorism case after years of imprisonment at an American military prison at Guantanamo Bay has been a hot political issue in his home country. And the controversy is nowhere near dying down even months after he accepted a plea bargain that allowed him to return home to serve his time.
It appears that high-level Bush administration officials may have been involved in a successful effort to negotiate a plea bargain that served to justify a questionable prosecution, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, which suggests in an article today that the plea bargain represented a “political fix” of a “corrupted legal process.”
“Hicks pleaded guilty to one count of providing material support for terrorism, under a U.S. statute adopted long after he was captured,” the newspaper recounts. “After all that time this was the best the prosecution could muster because there was no evidence that the former kangaroo skinner had actually done any terrorism. In any event, prosecuting an Australian caught in Afghanistan under domestic American criminal law posted all sorts of legal problems.”
The Hicks case prompted the resignation of one prosecutor, Moe Davis, who “cit[ed] political interference,” the newspaper says. And, as discussed in another ABAJournal.com post, it also apparently put the career of a Marine Corps defense lawyer who represented Hicks on a slow track.
“In the kabuki theater that surrounded the plea bargain, a sort of mock trial was convened,” writes New York attorney Scott Horton in a Harper’s magazine article earlier this year. “Plea bargain agreements frequently have very little to do with the truth, but this one … seems to have suppression of the truth as its major objective.”
