Sille,

You don't have very much sympathy for your fellow human being do you?

Are you so trusting that without a shred of evidence solid or otherwise you fear a fellow Australian so much that you would have him condemned to one of the most dangerous countries on earth, Afghanistan, based on the word of a discredited US President who has found to have lied not only to his own people but through the UN to the world as a whole?

David Hicks cannot now defend himself. After being locked away in a communist Country for four and a half years, and with little or no visits from family or aquaintances, just how is he going to gather evidence in his defence?
If Australia locked up an American Citizen similar circumstances, the Americans would have 'rescued' him shortly after incarceration.
The weak Australian Government just accepts without question, anything the Yanks tell us!
Guilty or not, there is no JUSTICE in this case.

Lapkin is another Howard toady ready to sell out a fellow Australian without a trace of evidence he ever committed any crime or without once speaking to the lawyers who have run the case in the US or here. I have done both.

He is charged with guarding a bloody tank and was arrested leaving Afghanistan. For god's sake why do the morons have to over egg the pudding to turn Hicks into a one man crime wave.

Let's compare guarding a tank to

1. Bush, Blair and Howard illegally invading an entire nation, blowing it to bits and murdering about 100,000 civilians.
2. Australia locking up 4,500 innocent men, women and children who escaped the Taliban and calling them liars, frauds, queue jumpers and so on. The most famous of those families are the Bakhtiyaris about whom DIMA said on 22 March 2001, "Rakiya Bakhtiyari, Afghan", but still lied and covered up the truth for 5 years.
3. Look at the latest atrocity by US soldiers - the rape, burning and slaughter of a girl believed to be 15 years old and the massacre of her parents and little sister about 7 years old.
4. Haditha.
5. AWB stealing $300 million from the starving of Iraq to finance Saddam Hussein.

Get a grip people. Ted and co would be squealing like stuck pigs if the US did the same thing to a Jew wouldn't they? And I mean no disrespect to the young soldier kidnapped by the Palestinians as they had no right to do such a thing.

But Israel had no right to punish and punish again 1.5 million Palestinians by cutting off their power and water in the heat of summer or any other time.

Thank goodness for the supreme court judgement. As FrankGol indicates, it has restored some of the basic tenets of democracy and human decency, or at least not let Bush run off and blatantly violate them. Heaven help American democracy if the court had found in Bush’s favour. And yet the judgement was a five to three ruling. A bloody close call.

Now article 3 of the Geneva Convention must be upheld….. thank goodness.

David Hicks, and the rest in the Guantanamo pigsty, now need to be tried with highest priority and the shortest timeframe possible, as they have been kept in conditions that are in violation of article 3 for far too long.

What an absurd irony it would be if this good ruling leads to Hicks remaining in incarceration longer than he would otherwise, without trial, which looks very likely.

Sille writes: “Leave Hicks where he is or ship him back to Afghanistan. We must assume he is unstable or fanatical and a potential danger to Australia.”

Horrible. Sille has judged and condemned Hicks despite having no more than the most general concept of his guilt or innocence or mitigating circumstances. He/she should realise that it is a fundamental tenet of our legal system and that of the US, and of democracy, to treat people as innocent until proven guilty or shown to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

We must assume innocence until guilt is formally shown by a lawful court, or a guilty plea is recorded.

For all we know, he was simply on an ‘adventure’ that went a little bit haywire. Perhaps he found himself in a position that he couldn’t get out of without being beaten up or murdered, at the critically wrong time following 9/11.

That’s just complete conjecture. But the point is, we don’t know the full story and we should not condemn him, nor sympathise with a regime that keeps him incarcerated for years without trial

Prior to 1870, captured enemy combatants were simply considered criminals and were either jailed with other criminals, ransomed or executed. It was the United States and Prussia which were the first two nations which signed a treaty giving honourable treatment to captured enemy soldiers.

Today, it is internationally recognised that captured enemy combatants who wear the internationally recognised uniform of their governments, are POW's deserving humane treatment.

In the past, terrorist groups such as the Weathermen, Anarchists, Red Army Faction, ETA or Italy's Red Brigades, which only numbered a couple of dozen local imbeciles, were considered a local law enforcement problem. But today, terrorist organisations like Al Qaida have thousands of members, are equipped with military weapons, and have bases in the most lawless lands on this planet.

These terrorists are not criminals, because criminals do not commit suicide in order to mass murder civilians for political or religious reasons. Neither are they soldiers. They are not representatives of any recognised government, they specifically target civilians, have no regard for the Geneva Convention, and they do not wear uniforms while partaking in "military" operations.

Clearly, a new classification is needed for international terrorists with different standards of incarceration and different standards of prosecution. Hopefully, this will be the legacy of the recent Supreme Court ruling.

Once again, America leads the way.

Ah red, so you're an Amway man? Hm, why are you a redneck? Is it because your family doesn't fork, you think Dom Perignon is a Mafia leader, or you've been fired from a construction site because of your appearance?