American Kangaroo Court Claims Its First
Victim
By Amy Goodman
03/28/07 "ICH
" -- -- It is appropriate that a person from
Australia, home of the kangaroo, should be the first one dragged
before the kangaroo court at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo
Bay. David Hicks, imprisoned there for more than five years,
pleaded guilty Monday to providing material support for
terrorism.
The case of Hicks offers us a glimpse into the Kafkaesque
netherworld of detentions, kidnappings, torture and show trials
that is now, internationally, the shameful signature of the Bush
administration. Hicks’ passage through this sham process affords
us all an opportunity to demand the closure of Guantanamo and an
end to these heinous policies. Conditions may soon exist to
shutter the prison, with George Bush’s lame-duck status, the
Democratic takeover of Congress, the possible departure of
Guantanamo’s arch-defender and architect, Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales, and, if recent reports are true, a desire to
close the prison on the part of Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. These bogus
military commission trials amplify global contempt for the
Guantanamo prison.
The Pentagon claims that Hicks was in Afghanistan fighting
against the United States, then was apprehended by the Northern
Alliance in late 2001 while fleeing to Pakistan. After transfer
to U.S. military control, he was moved around various detention
facilities and, he says, brutally beaten and sodomized. By
January 2002 he was in Guantanamo. He was subjected to repeated
interrogations. He witnessed other prisoners being beaten and
terrorized with dogs. He was at times kept in total darkness, at
times in continual bright light (he has grown his hair to chest
length so he can cover his eyes to allow him to sleep). He had
no access to a lawyer for more than a year or knowledge of the
charges against him. Others, those lucky enough to have lawyers
or to have actually gotten out, tell similar tales of continual
cold, of desecration of the Quran and of sexual humiliation
designed specifically to torture Muslim men.
During his five years of detention, people fought for Hicks. His
father, Terry Hicks, traveled to the U.S. He donned an orange
jumpsuit, like the one his son was forced to wear, and stood in
a 6-foot-by-8-foot cage on Broadway in New York while fielding
questions from the press.
Even the U.S. Supreme Court, the body that appointed Bush
president in 2000, agreed that the prisoners must have some
access to habeas corpus, the right to challenge one’s
imprisonment. This central tenet of Western law, established in
the Magna Carta in 1215, has been thrown out the window, along
with the Geneva Conventions, by Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld, Gonzales and others.
Guantanamo has sparked one of the United States’ major growth
industries: protesting against Guantanamo. From campuses to
churches, the anger has driven regular citizens to action. Cindy
Sheehan and members of the Catholic Worker Movement went to Cuba
and marched overland to Guantanamo to challenge the illegitimate
prison and its jailers in person.
Even in Hicks’ brief moment in the controversial “trial,” the
government did what it could to strip him of the few rights it
claims he has. The presiding military judge, Marine Col. Ralph
Kohlmann, dismissed his civilian lawyer, Joshua Dratel, and a
Navy reservist attorney, Rebecca Snyder, who was assisting
Hicks’ government-appointed attorney. Hicks was stunned, and at
first refused to plead. Hours later, after the trial was
reconvened, he pleaded guilty to his one remaining charge.
Having no hope for a fair trial, he reportedly believed that
pleading guilty would allow him to serve his sentence in
Australia—his only hope of escaping Guantanamo.
There are still more than 380 prisoners at Guantanamo. Almost
none have been charged. Those ultimately charged with murder
could be sentenced to death by the military commission. The
decider of the death penalty after appeals are exhausted is none
other than George Bush, who as governor of Texas oversaw the
most active death chamber in the United States. Back then his
lawyer was Alberto Gonzales.
The U.S. attorney scandal is threatening to take down Gonzales.
But it is his condoning of torture from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib
that should seal his fate.
The grim Guantanamo experiment is reaching its climax. The house
of cards that has been erected to support this immoral, criminal
enterprise is poised to collapse. Call, shout, sit down, march,
donate, write, protest … demand that Guantanamo be closed.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily
international TV/radio news hour airing on 500 stations in North
America.
© 2007 Amy Goodman
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