Guantanamo Terrorist Sentenced for War Crimes to Only 9 Months. Why?
David Hicks, the Australian native being held as a terrorist at Guantanamo Bay, was sentenced for commission of war crimes to only 9 months in prison. David Hicks is one of the worst-of-the-worst, but he’ll be out of jail before the end of this year. If this doesn’t sound right to you, join the club.
Hicks’ tribunal was the first to be completed since the White House overhauled the system following a Supreme Court holding that the tribunals violated Constitution protections and the Geneva Conventions protecting soldiers and others captured on the field of battle. Hicks’ plea bargain and nine month sentence shows just how screwed up the tribunal system remains.
Hicks arrived at the courtroom with three lawyers, one Marine Major and two civilians. By the end of the day, he had only the Marine Major to protect him. The judge dismissed both civilian attorneys on questionable premises. The judge also berated Hicks for his attire. He explained that Hicks should be wearing business dress rather than the short-sleeved, khaki prison garb he had on: Such proper attire would ensure that Hicks was adequately protected by the presumption of innocence.
Hicks then signed a plea agreement, admitting he had trained with Al Qaeda, guarded a Taliban tank, and had scouted a closed American embassy building. Hicks had fought on the battlefield for a mere two hours, before selling his weapon to raise cab fare to flee to Pakistan. Fighting in battle has never been considered a war crime, until now.
His plea agreement has a unique feature. Hicks agreed to recant his allegations of abuse while in detention and not to speak to reporters for one year. Jennifer Daskal of Human Rights Watch said this unusual agreement for Hicks’ silence indicates that the primary goal of the US Government is protecting itself from the “disclosure of abuse.”
Meanwhile, the Government continues to try to scare lawyers off. Recently, Cully Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, publicly called it “shocking” that major American law firms could represent Guantanamo Bay detainees free of charge and said they would likely suffer financially after their corporate clients learned of the work. He said, in an interview on Federal News Radio: “I think, quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms” He added that he thought some law firms were not actually representing clients free of charge and were “receiving money from who-knows-where.” Who-knows-where is obvious code for Al Qaeda.
If the US Government really wants to stop terrorism, that means preventing the next generation from growing up as terrorists. The way to stop a new generation of terrorists is to be all we can be, to hold these trials fairly and above board. Muslims throughout the world want to see the bastards that killed three thousand people on September 11th punished for their deeds, but they also want the United States to lead, to show their own governments how to hold a fair trial.
