Hicks is no searching/adventurerous adolescent:

‘The documentary The President Versus David Hicks … which aired on SBS TV…with Hicks's permission, the documentary quoted from some of his letters to his father, Terry. On February 14, 2000 David Hicks said "I am now officially a Taliban member" who would mix "learning" and "fighting". On August 10, 2000, he said that while fighting with Lashkar-e-Toiba, he "got to fire hundreds of rounds" into Indian-administered Kashmir. He also described himself as a "well-trained and practical soldier", and declared he was prepared for "martyrdom" since "the highest position in heaven" is reserved for those who "go fighting in the way of God against the Friends of Satan".
Hicks described the Taliban regime as "the best in the world" and praised the fact that the (then) leadership ran "the country by strict Islamic law" - including "the death sentence" and "all Islamic punishments".
In his letters to his father, Hicks advocated "an Islamic revolution" and maintained that if the Afghanistan experience was "spread throughout the Muslim world" then "the Western-Jewish domination is finished, so we live under Muslim rule again". The President Versus David Hicks also quoted from a poem written by the South Australian-born Islamic revolutionary in 1998: "Mohammed's food you shall be fed/To disagree, so off with your head."‘
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/this-young-revolutionary-was-true-to-his-word/2005/08/15/1123958006649.html

Going by the record amount of our OLO's it certainly looks like Hicks may also break a record in publicity.

Not bad for a no-hoper, as he must be for what he performed.

Pity he hasn't the look of a dashing hero, like the one they are chasing in East Timor.

Also pity Bush and John Howard didn't pick a better character than silly Hicks as the one to symbolise the worst of Western traitors against a justified cause.

Pity also that the cause wasn't more justified rather than part of the American Project for the 21st Century, the unlawful attack on Iraq being the introduction, and an atomic attack on Iraq undoubtedly the next.

Also looking at the characters who still control the White House whom most of us would not give the time of day,
never you know, Hicks might be accidently on the right track in the long run.

Correction from BushBred with apologies.

In sceond last paragraph of my commentary please replace Iraq with - IRAN.

“Hicks might accidentally be on the right track in the long run”

Bushbred, how could you (:>() !!

No hold on….it is an interesting thought: just how far off-track the US has gone, dragging its allies and indeed the doctrine of democracy down the gurgler along with it. And I don’t think we have seen anything yet, with a looming showdown in Iran.

Horus

In the interview aired on 4 Corners, Hicks was asked;

“Were you at any time a member of the Taliban?”

He replied;

“No”

This is in direct contradiction to what he said in a letter to his father;

“I am now officially a Taliban member”

So what do we believe?

Gerard Henderson’s article is pretty condemning. But at the end of the article, which contains many alarming quotes from Hicks, he says;

“It is easy to dismiss such words as the ravings of a juvenile foot soldier”

Hicks was asked about the letters in his interview. He said that they were full of exaggeration and were due to him being “over-excited”.

The 4 Corners interview strongly contrasts with Henderson’s article. It seems to me that Hicks addressed the questions in his interview in a frank manner, with a willingness to fully answer all questions and not attempt to skirt around anything.

If the stuff he had written in his letters could be upheld as true at face value, then he would surely have received a seriously long prison term.

I try to put Hicks in context with various people who need to be brought to justice. He seems to be about 0.00001% as bad as Bush and those responsible for the disgrace of five years without trial in Guantanamo, and the way that they have handled the whole ‘war on terror’, ~0.001% as bad as our illustrious PM and treasurer, ~0.01% as bad as my local mayor and about equally as bad as a police officer that I came up against a few years back, who brazenly perverted the course of justice to my detriment over a minor road safety matter.

It is amusing seeing all the Howard haters posting. They demonstrate two things; firstly that they are incapable of clear honest thought, and secondly that Bill is right.

The couple of facts mentioned in the article were obviously true, the rest was opinion, to which the author is entitled. If the opinion was unpalatable to the left, then they were entitled to disagree, and put an alternate.

Post after post vilifies Bill as a liar. Not one refutes any fact which he put forward. A number of them confirm Bill’s opinion that the left wish to regard Hicks as a young adventuresome man. Most of them confirm his characterising of their approach. One even wondered why he did not reply. Why would he? They complemented his article.

Hicks was not a prisoner of war entitled to the benefit of the Geneva convention. If he had been then he should have been incarcerated until the end of the war in Afghanistan. His status was such that he should have been tried by court martial forthwith, but there were difficulties with evidence, so it was deferred.

There was nothing wrong with the process, except in the rabid minds of the left, the same people who when the children of the illegal aliens finished up in the water through the criminal actions of their parents or their associates, raised a quibble about the expression “thrown overboard”.