Peter Boyer
Try as he might to pass himself off as a monument of reason and calm in the debate over David Hicks, Phillip Ruddock stands condemned by the evidence as a fraud and a failure in his role as Australia’s chief upholder of the rule of law. His refusal to take issue with the clear injustice of the Hicks incarceration amounts to a deliberate undermining of our legal and democratic systems, which in another, fairer world might well have put him in the dock.
Nothing justifies five years of imprisonment without public scrutiny and without trial — especially given serious Red Cross and even FBI claims that Guantanamo Bay inmates have been mistreated. But what on earth did Hicks do that has so offended our government?
We know that Hicks saw himself as a fighter for Islam who went to Afghanistan to help the Taliban — though he appears not to have engaged in hostile action. We know that in the turmoil of the Taliban overthrow, Afghan irregular fighters handed him over to the Americans as a ‘terrorist’, it is said for a sum of money. But no crime has ever been defined.
Mr Ruddock claims that Hicks was indeed charged with crimes, but that these expired because the military commission process lacked Congressional approval, which has now been rectified. But the ‘charges’ were so vague as to be meaningless — clearly political in their motivation. They were laid under an illegal system (found so by the US Supreme Court) and could never have withstood the scrutiny of a normal court of law.
It seems that it’s been impossible to pinpoint any actual wrongdoing by Hicks — even under the old, rigged military commission system — and it remains a fair statement that he has never been legitimately charged with a crime. Mr Ruddock and his colleagues know this, despite their denials.
Mr Ruddock’s assurances about ‘safeguards’ under the new commission system would carry more weight if he and his government had protested the manifest unfairness of the previous one. Of course, they didn’t. They have had five years to sort this out, but have failed. Their only acceptable course now is to accept their clear responsibility, bring home this Australian citizen and face whatever consequences arise out of this sorry, sordid, disgraceful affair.
In Peter Boyer’s chequered career he has done time as a newspaper journalist, a museum curator, a historic site interpreter (whatever that means!), and a communications manager for a federal government agency. The only serious training he submitted himself to was a university degree, which taught him to be sceptical and suspicious of experts. As a magistrates’ court reporter in Brisbane he came to understand the width of the gap between law and justice.
