Dear Atman,

Objecting to torture of anybody for any reason has nothing to do with hating the United States. Torture is simply wrong regardless of who is tortured. It is a violation of US law.

I am a US citizen & think the US is a great country. I think Hicks is a dirty dog. I also think it was wrong to torture him, and I think he was tortured.

Dear Loudmouth
Thank you for your assistance. What would I do without you? :)

As I said Hicks is a nong but there is always the tenet "innocent until proved guilty". I have a suspicion there is a lot more to the Hicks case in terms of his personal health and wellbeing as far as vulnerability to 'grooming'.

However it is just a hypothesis and is no way an excuse for consorting with terrorists.

Dear davidf.

You may think it is wrong to torture terrorists to gain vital information to foil airplane, bus and train bombings, but I do not. Terrorizing terrorists seems like a great idea to me. The USA and Prussia were the first countries in the world to sign an agreement recognizing that uniformed soldiers were not criminals. Times have now changed again, and you had better start figuring out that suicide bomber terrorists are not criminals, and they are not soldiers either.

Your US Constitution needs a bit of work to recognize this. If the men who created the US Constitution’s Right to Bear Arms had ever seen an Armalite rifle and what it could do in seconds to a McDonalds restaurant full of mums, dads and kids, they may have had second thoughts about enacting the First Amendment. And if the founding fathers of the US Constitution had ever known what an atomic bomb was, and ever realized that a terrorist state like Iran was trying to get one so that it could give it to fellow terrorists to detonate in a western country, they may not have been so self righteous about torture either.

Australia was the first country in the world to offer military assistance to the USA after the 9/11 bombings. Those bombings, in which 6 Australians were victims, were conducted by Al Qaida. David Hicks was fighting for Al Qaida at the time of the attack and that sure looks like treason to me.

The only miscarriage of justices is that he got off so lightly.

But unfortunately in Australia, we have this crowd of US hating social regressive who appear think that they are morally and intellectually superior to everybody else, and they seem to have a compulsive need to get puritanical and self righteous over everything. They can be relied upon to daub the slogans and man the barricades for every anti US and anti Australian cause imaginable.

Their agenda can be put like this. Minorities are always right. White Australians and white Americans are always wrong.

Lexi, you may be ignorant, but you are good at making up unsubstantiated garbage.

If you persevere you might become a disreputable journalist like Jason.

On the other hand, you might consider adverting to facts, and see Hicks for the lying, pathetic would be terrorist that he is.

Gitmo was the best accomodation and highest class company that he had experienced for quite a while, but gratitude cannot be expected from someone of his moral turpitude.

He sticks to the code of the al Quaeda vermin, and makes false accusations of torture and mistreatment.

He looked in good condition on the occasion his premature release, quite the opposite to the harrowing description of him in the subversive left wing press, immediately before his release.

Leo Lane:

You accuse me of making up "unsubstantiated garbage." On what do you base your hypothesis? My sources were Amnesty International and The Red Cross - if you were to google David Hicks and those organisations you would find the same information that I did. As for my being a journalist - I already have a profession - but Thank You for the compliment of comparing me to the author of this article. What are your qualifications? You don't appear to have evolved very far.

LEGO,

You may have a point. But what is overlooked in Hicks' case is that the organisations that he was prepared to go overseas and fight for are extreme Right-wing organisations - extreme and Right-wing insofar as they oppose modern democracy, equal rights and indeed the entire Enlightenment project, and use all manner of means to destroy it. Isn't that so ?

Yes, they make use of the latest technology but put it at the service of ideologies which would plunge the parts of the world that they can conquer back into the middle ages, back to what Europe had to go through five and eight hundred years ago, a thousand years ago.

What I don't understand is how and why groups and individuals who think of themselves as Left, brainlessly support and excuse these ideologies:

"Al Qa'ida is a CIA construct, it doesn't even exist, and anyway it's not so bad, it doesn't commit terrorist acts, and anyway when it does, it's the Americans' fault, they've brought it all on themselves,"

many on the Left (or who think they are on the Left) might say. Do they somehow think that it's the 'turn' of fundamentalist Islam to have a go at medieval ?

Well, it's been there, and done that, at various times from 630 or so until 2011, in many parts of the Muslim world (hopefully, what is happening now in the Arab/Muslim world is a sharp turn away from Islamism towards democracy, effectively towards the democratic and progressive Left).

Sure, Muslim architecture of the Middle Ages was beautiful and ingenious, but what about social development at the time, the slow groping towards human rights and political activity that characterised European history for a thousand years but which has been absent from the Muslim world until very recently ?

Hicks was copped working for the enemy, he did some time and he's out. He was one of the lucky ones. Let's move on.

Joe