Hicks is innocent!

[Neferti]

I thought Hicks was playing "hero" before we entered the war on terror?

I think so. He headed to Pakistan to study Islam in about 1999 and then went off to Afghanistan and the Afghans handed him into the Yanks in around December 2001 and, apparently, they got a $1000 for doing so. I can't see how anyone can say he is innocent. Young and stupid, perhaps ... he was born in 1975. I have no sympathy for him.

[Rorschach]

Colonel Morris Davis, chief prosecutor for the US office of Military Commissions, said, "He eventually left Afghanistan and it's my understanding was heading back to Australia when 9/11 happened. When he heard about 9/11, he said it was a good thing (and) he went back to the battlefield, back to Afghanistan, and reported in to the senior leadership of al-Qaeda and basically said, 'I'm David Hicks and I'm reporting for duty.'" Davis also compared Hicks' alleged actions to that of those who carried out terrorist attacks such as Bali, the London and Madrid bombings, and the Beslan school siege.

In October and November 2001 Hicks wrote multiple letters to his mother, Sue King, back in Australia. He asked that replies were to be directed to Abu Muslim Austraili, a pseudonym he used to circumvent non-Muslim spies he believed intercepted correspondence. In these letters he detailed the validity of Jihad and his own prospect of "martyrdom".

As a Muslim young and fit my responsibility is to protect my brothers from aggressive non-believers and not let them destroy it. Islam will rule again but for now we must have patience we are asked to sacrifice our lives for Allahs cause why not? There are many privileges in heaven. It is not just war, it is jihad. One reward I get in being martyred I get to take ten members of my family to heaven who were destined for hell, but first I also must be martyred. We are all going to die one day so why not be martyred?

In November 2005, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Four Corners TV program broadcast for the first time a transcript of an interview with Hicks, conducted by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) in 2002, and other material, including a report that Hicks had signed a statement written by American military investigators stating that he had trained with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, learning guerrilla tactics and urban warfare.

Initial charges against Mohamed Dawood/David Hicks
David Hicks, charge sheet, Guantanamo military commission

Hicks was charged by a U.S. military commission on 26 August 2004.

In Guantanamo, Hicks had signed a statement written by American military investigators which read, in part, "I believe that al-Qaeda camps provided a great opportunity for Muslims like myself from all over the world to train for military operations and Jihad. I knew after six months that I was receiving training from al-Qaeda, who had declared war on numerous countries and peoples."[23][53][54] The indictment later prepared by U.S. military prosecutors for his commission trial alleged that, prior to his capture in 2001, Hicks had trained and conspired in various ways and was guilty of "aiding the enemy" while an "unprivileged belligerent" but did not allege any specific acts of violence. The indictment made the following allegations:

* In November 1999 Hicks travelled to Pakistan, where he joined the paramilitary Islamist group, Lashkar-e-Toiba (Army of the Pure).
* Hicks trained for two months at a Lashkar-e-Toiba camp in Pakistan, where he received weapons training, and that during 2000 he served with a Lashkar-e-Toiba group near the Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
* In January 2001 Hicks travelled to Afghanistan, then under the control of the Taliban regime, where he presented a letter of introduction from Lashkar-e-Toiba to Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda member, and was given the alias "Mohammed Dawood".
* He was sent to al-Qaeda's al-Farouq training camp outside Kandahar, where he trained for eight weeks, receiving further weapons training as well as training with land mines and explosives.
* He did a further seven-week course at al-Farouq, during which he studied marksmanship, ambush, camouflage and intelligence techniques.
* At Osama bin Laden's request, Hicks translated some al-Qaeda training materials from Arabic into English.
* In June 2001, on the instructions of Mohammed Atef, an al-Qaeda military commander, Hicks went to another training camp at Tarnak Farm, where he studied "urban tactics", including the use of assault and sniper rifles, rappelling, kidnapping and assassination techniques.
* In August Hicks went to Kabul, where he studied information collection and intelligence, as well as Islamic theology including the doctrines of jihad and martyrdom as understood through al-Qaeda's fundamentalist interpretation of Islam.
* In September 2001 Hicks travelled to Pakistan and was there at the time of the 11 September attacks on the United States, which he saw on television.
* He returned to Afghanistan in anticipation of the attack by the United States and its allies on the Taliban regime, which was sheltering Osama bin Laden.
* On returning to Kabul, Hicks was assigned by Mohammed Atef to the defence of Kandahar, and that he joined a group of mixed al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters at Kandahar airport, and that at the end of October, however, Hicks and his party travelled north to join in the fighting against the forces of the US and its allies.
* After arriving in Konduz on 9 November 2001, he joined a group which included John Walker Lindh (the "American Taliban"). This group was engaged in combat against Coalition forces, and during this fighting he was captured by Coalition forces.

[boxy]

So, pretty much everything happened before any declaration of war.

[Rorschach]

and your point would actually be?

he wasn't an idiot?

[boxy]

Oh no, he's definitely an idiot.

[Rorschach]

For those who want to go to the link b4 reading...

http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/how ... ue-stream/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

How Hicks turned stupidity into a revenue stream
David Penberthy
28 Oct 05:59am

Sometimes you get the publicity you deserve. For David Hicks the decision to pose up with a rocket launcher perched on his shoulder was somewhat regrettable in the PR department.

Seriously, I was just minding my own business.

I’m not saying of course that posing with an RPG of itself justifies being thrown in the clink at Guantanamo Bay for several years and then incarcerated with some of South Australia’s most accomplished scumbags and weirdos at the Yatala Correctional Facility. But, you know, people will draw their own conclusions.

Especially when coupled with the fact that you did it because you were being trained by al-Qaeda. And happened to meet Osama bin Laden four times. Once is an accident, twice a zany coincidence, but three or more suggests you’ve fallen in with a bad crowd.

Bob Carr is one of the few politicians who speaks in crisp sentences devoid of cliché. He had a cut-out-and-keep observation on Hicksy this week, whose doe-eyed supporters are now engaged in enthusiastic can-rattling to see if their bloke can get an apology (yay) and some dosh (better) for having his precious freedoms trampled by the military-industrial complex.

The excellent phrase “shit happens” was recast in elegant fashion by the Foreign Minister:

“If you do what David Hicks did you undertake certain risks,” Carr said.

“You put yourself in the line of fire-fighting a jihad against NATO forces, against western forces, then your life becomes more complex.”

Hicks and his lawyer Stephen Kenny are seeking to have his 2007 conviction for supporting terrorism overturned in the US Supreme Court, after the US Court of Appeals ruled last week that the charge could not be applied retrospectively. This is because the law did not actually exist at the time of the offence.

If the application is successful, Hicks will be holding out his hand for compo for the six years he spent in Camp X-Ray and the nine months he spent in Yatala under a plea deal to confess to supporting terrorism.

Whether the decision in the US Court of Appeals applies squarely to the Hicks case is a matter for debate. The fact that he subsequently confessed, and that his confession led him to Yatala, doesn’t help his cause. There’s no suggestion that his confession was given under pain of torture. He confessed because he did it. The evidence shows he did it. Also, it seems ridiculous that our government could be pursued for compensation for the actions of another government, that of the United States, in jailing him.

Obviously nothing warms a lawyer’s heart like an absurd technicality so it is unsurprising that Messrs Hicks and Kenny are about to re-enter the fray.

Here’s another suggestion. Instead of encouraging his client to posture like he’s Smithfield Plains’ answer to Nelson Mandela, perhaps Mr Kenny could advise his client that rather than bludging money off the taxpayers he experiment with gainful and respectable employment.

Having done the unforgiveable by signing on with a mob in Afghanistan who have now killed 37 of our countrymen, Hicks has tried to turn this lapse of judgment (to use a hefty understatement) not as the basis for a statement of remorse, but a business idea.

According to journalists I know in Adelaide who have followed the Hicks case closely, he is currently kicking around doing not much at all, dealing with apparent post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s a sad condition I suppose, but again, it’s one of the risks you take if you pack your bags for a war zone, despite knowing that the September 11 atrocity had happened, that Al Qaeda were responsible, yet three months later there he was in Afghanistan doing his bit for the Taliban.

He wrote his dumb and deluded book about his ordeal, then immediately got into a stink with the government about whether he was profiting from the proceeds of crime. He obviously would have been, given that he’s a convicted criminal.

The book is a case study in naive victimhood. You could almost jail him for calling it “My Journey”, the preferred term of the self-absorbed. I have only read the extracts, which were irritating enough, but I have read to enough to know that it’s an exercise in blame-shifting, where Hicks talks about what happened to him as if it was all the result of external forces. Nothing “happened” to David Hicks. He made choices. The choices were his alone, so too are their consequences.

Shorn of any decision-making role, Hicks has become a darling on the Left with speaking engagements at the Sydney Festival, where the cloth-eared old pinkos in the crowd (who to a man and woman would regard themselves as feminists) somehow forgot that their bloke was part of an outfit which shoots girls for going to school and chucks rocks at women for having sex out of wedlock. Not to forget the knee-slapping fact that that Hicks, doyen of the sisterhood that he is, wrote letters from Guantanamo Bay to a female friend in Adelaide asking her to introduce him to some girls with “really big tits” when he eventually got home. A man gets lonely fighting the Great Satan. He must have been as toey as a Roman sandal, locked up with all those ululating 9-11 beardos.

The way Hicksy is going he might even ask Canberra in addition to the apology and the compo to lay on some girls with big tits for him too. It seems only right after what he’s been through. Setting aside the fact that it was entirely his fault. Life does become more complex. That should be the end of this story.

[Neferti]

For those who want to go to the link b4 reading...

http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/how ... ue-stream/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

How Hicks turned stupidity into a revenue stream
David Penberthy
28 Oct 05:59am

Sometimes you get the publicity you deserve. For David Hicks the decision to pose up with a rocket launcher perched on his shoulder was somewhat regrettable in the PR department.

Seriously, I was just minding my own business.

I’m not saying of course that posing with an RPG of itself justifies being thrown in the clink at Guantanamo Bay for several years and then incarcerated with some of South Australia’s most accomplished scumbags and weirdos at the Yatala Correctional Facility. But, you know, people will draw their own conclusions.

Especially when coupled with the fact that you did it because you were being trained by al-Qaeda. And happened to meet Osama bin Laden four times. Once is an accident, twice a zany coincidence, but three or more suggests you’ve fallen in with a bad crowd.

Bob Carr is one of the few politicians who speaks in crisp sentences devoid of cliché. He had a cut-out-and-keep observation on Hicksy this week, whose doe-eyed supporters are now engaged in enthusiastic can-rattling to see if their bloke can get an apology (yay) and some dosh (better) for having his precious freedoms trampled by the military-industrial complex.

The excellent phrase “shit happens” was recast in elegant fashion by the Foreign Minister:

“If you do what David Hicks did you undertake certain risks,” Carr said.
........................................ blah blah blah ............

It doesn't bother me one way or the other whether you quote the entire article or not. Just that usually people tend to quote a couple of paragraphs, make a comment or two and put in the link for people to read the rest of the article if they want to ..... usually to save Bandwidth (some Forums will delete long cut and pastes). Since this Forum belongs to Freediver and he has never complained about long cut and pastes ... do whatever you wish to.


Oh, and Carr is a pain in the butt and I have never taken much notice of what he says. Hicks is still an idiot. Some call him a traitor even!

[Rorschach]

Off topic but in answer to your comment nef... two reasons I post whole articles is access...
Some articles disappear off the Net. So clicking on the link eventually means you see nothing except an error code.
Some articles have restricted access. So if I have access I post the whole thing because I know others can't see it.