With David Hicks admitting guilt to terrorism charges, right wing columnists have been quick to attack the many people who supported the campaign to bring home and free David Hicks.
Admitting guilt is usually a task usually assigned to those who have committed crimes. However, David’s court case, along with all those held at Guantanamo Bay, must leave many with a bad taste in their mouth.
The court setup at Guantanamo Bay had excludes itself from the Geneva Convention on human rights, it allows evidence obtained under torture as well as hearsay evidence. These laws would not stand up in any respectable nation. It was a court so dodgy it had to be set up on an offshore base, far from the law.
The charges were so uncertain it took five years to move the case to where we are today. They have been five years of justice denied. Evidence from Guantanamo Bay tells of the horrors of torture and the denial of basic human rights to the prisoners. Hicks went three years before even seeing a lawyer.
Ultimately, Hicks was in the wrong place at the wrong time probably doing something that many may not agree with. This doesn’t mean he committed any crime. If there was any evidence of him doing anything you would have thought that it could have been dug out after five years. Yet in the end, it was Hicks who possibly saw the plea as a way out who brought an end to the proceedings.
This is why we should not let Hicks stay a day longer in a prison whether it is one illegally placed on Cuban soil or one in our own backyard. A criminal conviction is supposed to be held by those who have committed a proven crime; we must never lose sight of this fact.
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