HICKS HICCUP

Jeff Kennett you are wrong.  You assume too much.

According to the former Premier – if he is quote correctly – ‘we’re all to blame’ for the current plight of David Hicks in Guantanamo Bay.

Jeffery Gibb says it is unacceptable that Australians have not rallied to bring Hicks home. Why? Hicks was in no hurry to come home when he was training with Al Qaeda or fighting with the Taliban.

If the allegations against Hicks are true he is a traitor. And, as I understand it, if he were brought home, it would be as a free man because there is no criminal law in this country that would fit the ones he faces in America.

So I don’t feel to blame, Mr. Kennett. And neither do many other law-abiding Australians who don’t trot around the world playing mercenaries leaving a wife and young child in Adelaide.

Kennett also said ‘You have a look at how the media and the public got involved in the campaign for Schapelle Corby …compared with this’.

Once again not true. Millions of Australians and a lot of people in the media did not come out campaigning for the convicted drug trafficker.

Don’t get me wrong. I still do not know if Hicks is guilty or innocent. And I agree that it is disgusting and despicable that a man can be held without trial for five years. That is inhumane and is not justice being served or being seen to be served. And Prime Minister Howard and  Foreign Affairs Minister Downer  should have been pressuring the United States years ago for a fair and speedy trial. Not much to ask.

On the other hand you have Hicks fighting for the Taliban – a brutal, repressive regime, which rejected western justice and  harboured international terrorists – and then falling back on our courts to save his skin.

You can’t have it both ways. And now you have his lawyers saying that Hicks is at serious risk of pleading guilty to a crime he did not commit out of desperation to get out of Guantanamo Bay. Lawyer David McLeod says it would be a tragedy if Hicks returned to Australia wrongly convicted of terrorist crimes.

No. The real tragedy is that this convert trained with Al Qaeda and fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The tragedy lies with their victims who suffered and died under a regime of women-hating, medieval fundamentalists who were almost as bad as Pol Pot.

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2007