What patrickm said there:

It is clear that Hicks is a standard enemy combatant who ought to be returned to Australia and set free after giving his parole. Detaining Hicks in this disgraceful way has harmed and continues to harm the war effort. He ought to have been held as a bog standard POW and when he offered not to return to the battle field released back to Australia to get on with his life.

Five years is not the main issue IMV, the issue is that he has not been afforded the POW standards that he was entitled to as a soldier fighting for the Taliban. Australians were and are entitled to go overseas and join the army of the lawful govermnet of a country. The Taliban were the recognised government. You can join the US army if you want. The Taliban subcontracted training activities to the Al Qaeda group so it is no surprise that Hicks was trained by them. Everybody was as I understand it.

The war in Afganistan was ended with the establishment of the new government and there was no justification for holding him past that point provided he agreed not to return to fighting.

This issue shows that there is always struggle within united fronts. The ruling elites in both Australia and the US have demonstrated a decided lack of wisdom and are less thorough going democrats than Tony Blair has shown himself to be in handling the issue years ago! Well done Blair.

T’were well this backflip were done t’were well it were done quickly.

Unfortunately when he returns further relevations will again damage the war effort and that is the price that the Iraqi people must pay for this failure of the two western ruling elites. Progressives ought to work to seperate the two issues and prevent the ALP that would abandon the Iraqi peoples from linking them.

I note Razor’s rebuttal remarks to Patrick above concerning David Hicks and al-Qaeda and the Taliban vis-a-vis the Geneva Convention.

One difficulty here is assuming that the Geneva Convention has to be sidelined in the first place in the “war on terror”. One has to first of all concur with the Bush administration’s rhetoric on the war on terror, a point that needs careful discussion and reflection. Even allowing for the vocabulary on the war on terror, it is interesting surely that conventional forms of military action have ensued in Afghanistan and Iraq, even though it is admitted that al-Qaeda does not constitute a geo-political nation on whom one can “declare war”. As both Afghanistan and Iraq have been invaded by Coalition forces moving army divisions around using conventional weapons, the US has been applying basic military tactics in the field. There is a strong presumption then in favour of observing the Geneva Convention irrespective of whether it is acknowledged by the opposing side.

The US did not suddenly exclude the Geneva Convention from applying when it unilaterally invaded Panama to deal with Manuel Noriega’s hideous regime nor in the prosecution of the first Gulf War.

On reflection it might be worth recalling that the Allied forces in the Pacific theatre of World War Two applied the Geneva Convention standards to those combatants who served the Japanese Imperial Forces (includes army, navy, air force and also the partisans who supported Japan). It can also be recalled that Japan did not care for the Geneva Convention when it launched its aggression in the Pacific theatre (and in China from 1931 onwards), and those POWs taken by the Japanese were subjected to acts of gross cruelty (witness the Burma railway, Changi prison, the shooting of Australian nurses on the ship the Vyner Brooke in 1942 as recounted by the survivor sister Vivian Bullwinkel, etc). It might also be recalled that while Japan launched its attack on the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbour its actions on December 7th 1941 also yielded civilian casualties.

When the US declared war on Japan it did treat Japanese POWs under the Geneva Convention even though Japan had opted out of it. It might be said that Hiroshima and Nagasaki constituted “payback” for Pearl Harbour (itself a hideous sequence of acts). Yet the Japanese prisoners taken were not subjected to the sorts of “special conditions” currently laid down the US military commission holding Hicks and others at Guantanamo.

I think the basic point is that the US can pursue its objectives against the networks that comprise al-Qaeda while nonetheless treating those people it captures and detains under those optimal jural conditions that have long characterised the democratic freedoms so loftily espoused in the common-law traditions found in the USA, UK and Australia.

By way of analogy, as the Nazis perpetrated atrocities, would it logically and morally follow that the allies should have incarcerated Goering, Hess, Jodl, Donitz, Speer etc in the same conditions that civilians suffered under in Dachau and Buchenwald?

Whether it is a legal certainty that David Hicks is guilty or not, the conditions under which he has been detained in Guantanamo are very hard to justify on legal, military or moral grounds.

It might also be noted juridically that Australia and the US both ratified in 1948 the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Articles 6 - 11 of the civil and political rights contained in that declaration do apply to David Hicks. These provisos include-
art 5 - no torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment;
art 6 recognition as a person before the law;
art 7 equality before the law without discrimination and equal protection of the law;
art 8 right to effective legal remedy
art 9 no arbitrary arrest or detention
art 10 full equality for a fair public hearing by independent and impartial tribunal
art 11 no-one held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law at the time when it was committed.

Irrespective of “if” the Geneva Convention applies or is sidestepped, the USA nonetheless finds itself holding Hicks and others in a manner which is contrary to the UN Declaration. We might recall that this Declaration was drafted in the wake of the Nazi atrocities so that such things might not be repeated. I do not recall the US administration saying that the UN Declaration would be suspended for the duration of the war on terror.