Hicks

A reader writes:

You say that Hicks "knowingly aided a terrorist organization". How do you know this? How do any of us know what any of the Gitmo detainees are, or are not, guilty of? I wouldn’t take a detainee’s guilty plea as gospel. From what I can tell, Hicks is probably willing to admit to anything in exchange for the possibility of returning to Australia. Witnessing the denial of due process (and summarily sacking defendant’s counsel is a prime example of such denial), witnessing the utter lack of transparency of Gitmo’s legal machinations, what are to make of a defendant like Hicks and his pleas/statements? The system the Bush administration has set up at Gitmo self-devours any possibility of the legitimacy that normally flows from Anglo-American criminal procedure.

I don’t know whether to trust his confession. He’s in a kangaroo court system, where two of his three attorneys can be thrown out of the court on the same day for the pettiest of reasons. The judge is quite obviously biased. But there’s a mountain of reliable evidence that Hicks was mixed up with some very unsavory characters around the world. We’ll never know for sure, of course, because of the Orwellian system Bush and Cheney set up to torture, intimidate and psychologically brutalize "enemy combatants." Here’s another first-hand account of the bizarre goings-on in Gitmo’s "court" system.