David Johnston (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to commence my comments on this motion by looking at the context that Mr Hicks finds himself in. As we all know, on 11 September 2001 the World Trade Centre in New York was attacked and 2,752 innocent lives were taken. They were not lost; they were taken. They were murdered by terrorists. The Pentagon was attacked and 189 innocent people were murdered by terrorists. A plane was hijacked and crashed in a field in Philadelphia and a further 44 people were murdered by terrorists. Those terrorists were al-Qaeda terrorists based in Afghanistan. So 2,985 innocent American lives were taken by al-Qaeda on 11 September.

David Hicks was arrested in Afghanistan in the immediately following December—in Afghanistan, which is the home, the base and the state of, and the sovereignty giving succour to, al-Qaeda. On the United States side, they allege that Hicks has attended an advanced al-Qaeda training course. In other words, he was becoming a specialist in weapons, tactics, explosives and the deployment of those instruments in accord with the level of attacks we saw in New York and elsewhere in the United States on 11 September. He was an al-Qaeda operative, the Americans allege, who took orders from Osama bin Laden.

This is an organisation that has carried out significant and substantial terrorist attacks in Spain, with the Madrid bombing in March of 2004, and on the USS Cole, where 17 sailors were killed. The Beslan school siege is linked to them. There were the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Yemen in 1992, Somalia in 1993, Operation Bojinka, and Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996—the list goes on. This is one of the most dastardly, callous and murderous organisations that the world has ever seen. David Hicks was found or caught in amongst them. That is the American side. It is also alleged that Hicks conducted surveillance on United States embassies. Let us not forget that the United States is our best and most significant strategic ally, and we have an Australian citizen on the ground in Afghanistan being arrested in December 2001.

Let us look at the Hicks story. That was the American side. The Hicks story was set out on 9 December 2006 in Victoria Square at a rally that featured Kay Danes, Brian Deegan, Mem Fox, Terry Hicks—and I take it that is Terry Hicks, the father of David Hicks—Professor Leon Lack, Charles Southwood, Katie Wood et al. Their story is that David Hicks did the following. Worried by the reported massacres in Kosovo in 1999, David travelled to Yugoslavia but arrived after the fighting was over. He then went to Pakistan to study at various theological colleges. He travelled to Afghanistan and after some months decided to return to Australia. At the Pakistan border he realised he had left his passport behind and returned in a taxi to retrieve it. The taxidriver had a cousin connected with the Northern Alliance and David was captured by them as he left the taxi. A few weeks later the Northern Alliance sold David to the Americans, who had just invaded Afghanistan.

These are two stories that could not be further apart. One story is that he is a murderous terrorist and the other is that he is a theological tourist. What are the Americans or the Australians or any decent sovereign nation to do with two stories like that?