The whole point is that Hicks should be released immediately.

The "Star Chamber" set up by the US executive is illegal and the US judiciary will rule that The President overstepped his authority.

Hicks will be released and Guantanamo closed.

Just another mess Ruddock will have to dig himself out of.

Wendy I truly hope you are not "mainstream Australia" because if those are the views of mainstream Australia I think we are all in a great deal of trouble.

The world is not so simple that it can be divided into "us" and "them". It seems to me that your argument comes down to the notion that Hicks was one of "us" who left to fight for Islam which makes him one of "them", and he was ready to fight "us" which means we can jail him in inhumane conditions without charge or trial. This is not like footy, where all you need to know is which team you love and which team you hate.

Bushbred, you and I have been on opposite sides before, but this time you are right on the money mate. Hicks seems to me to have been a deluded character, none too bright, who read one too many commando comics, sneaked in to see Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, was probably the first kid in his class to finish every level of Doom, and he wanted to find out what war was like. Prime recruitment material for an organisation like the Taliban, who fill his head with a bunch of mumbo jumbo, put a gun in his hands and park him somewhere as one of the "expendables".

Sure, he was an idiot. And sure, he was preparing to fight in a war. And sure, he would have been on the wrong team. What all of this tells me is that he should be tried and if found guilty punished. But he should NOT be left to languish in Guantanamo for four years while US lawyers argue about his legal "status".

Bring him home, charge him with treason, and jail him. Fair enough. But do it properly - with due process in front of a proper court. Proper Australian justice, not the shallow and reprehensible shadow of justice which the US has now been shown to have.

Anth

I forgot to mention of course that Hicks was with the Taliban when they were the allies of the US being wooed to build an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. How is it treason to be on the same side? And of course at the time we were not invading Afghanistan.

Wendy is only winding me up - her extremism is worse than her bite really. Three men hanged and killed themselves overnight in this hell hole called Gitmo Bay. 13 people have died in immigration detention in Australia, most of them killed themselves.

Hicks hasn't done anything wrong under any law in the world but his detention certainly has broken every law of detention in the world.

The bigotries that stand in Australia today by the few are strange really considering they have all been proven to be untrue.

TAMPA was hijacked, the kids were thrown overboard, SIEVX sank outside our waters, the Bakhtiyari family were from Pakistan, Iraq had WMD, Guantanamo Bay is humane, Woomera was decent and caring.

None of these things were ever true yet some cling to the hate they generated in the telling of the fairly tales.

Time to reexamine I think.

It's not so complex. If Hicks has done something that violates law, prove it in an open court. The only other option is that he has not, it cannot be proven, and he is a political prisoner.

What a load of nonsense, the fact that he is innocent under Australian law , US civil law and the Geneva conventions means that he should be released.

We'll extraditing citizens to Saudi next for eating pork chops.

I think Anth's last post and the first paragraph of Marilyn's last post demonstrates simple-mindedness of the extremists on this thread.

The fact that he has now been detained for so many years without a trial pretty much makes whatever he may have been willing to do irrelevant.

Bushbred made a good point about Hicks' low intellect too. Which I think may be a partial answer to YngNLuvnIt's question. But I really don't know why he was there and I'm not that sure a simple person like Hicks even knew either.

Yes Anth, we certainly are in a lot of trouble if too many people in the world think like Wendy. I just hope that if the Hicks situation starts the ball rolling for much further breaches of human rights then it's the people who share her extreme views who are the first victims of it. A very harsh thing to say but it's only fair.

I have lot more to say on this issue but I'd only be repeating others on this thread. So Agreed, agreed, agreed to anyone who could see beyond the simple "Us and Them" mentality.