Natasha Stott Despoja (SA, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to bring to the chamber’s attention the ongoing situation of David Hicks, who is detained in Guantanamo Bay as an enemy combatant. He has been there for more than four years under what can only be described as cruel conditions at that US military detention facility. I want to record my and my party’s ongoing concerns with the conditions under which David Hicks is detained and our concerns over the way that the US authorities seem to be preventing—allegedly—the British Foreign Office from directly contacting David Hicks to ensure that he is granted British citizenship.

A US military commission, a commission which has little credibility among international jurists, has charged Hicks with conspiracy to attack civilians, attempted murder and aiding the enemy while being an unprivileged belligerent. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said Hicks is ‘among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth’.

But things are changing. Evidence is mounting against the Bush administration’s tough line on Guantanamo detainees, and that includes David Hicks, Australian citizen. The US President, George W Bush, has admitted—only recently, I might add—that he would like to close Guantanamo Bay, saying:

I’d like to close Guantanamo, but I also recognize that we’re holding some people there that are darn dangerous and that we better have a plan to deal with them in the courts.

What the President failed to say was that the remaining detainees would be treated within the normal course of American jurisprudence. There was no mention of the President scrapping the flawed military commission process he instigated. But he did recognise—rather surprisingly, I might add, and I am glad to say—that Guantanamo is viewed by some countries as a glaring example of America not living up to its human rights principles. This admission stops short of reversing the injustices that continue to be perpetrated against David Hicks and the rest of the Guantanamo detainees.

As for our government’s response and approach to South Australian citizen David Hicks, I feel that our government has abandoned this man. The Australian government does not seem to be doing anything to prevent David Hicks from standing before the military commission process. Prime Minister John Howard has stated that his preferred option is for US authorities to expedite the military commission process to ensure that it occurs as soon as possible. Even if a military commission were to prove David Hicks innocent of any wrongdoing, he would still have to prove his innocence against the charge of being a so-called enemy combatant. The absurdity of preventing David Hicks from having an open and fair trial in a civilian US court is made all the more acute when one considers some of the evidence emerging about the guilt and innocence of Hicks and other Guantanamo detainees.

A recent report by US attorneys Mark and Joshua Denbeaux, released in April this year, argued that 55 per cent of detainees are determined not to have committed any hostile acts against the US or coalition allies during the war to oust the Taliban in 2001. Of the remainder, only eight per cent were deemed hardcore al-Qaeda fighters while the rest have no definitive connection to either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. What makes the Denbeaux report so compelling is that the information has come from the Pentagon’s own assessments of the Guantanamo detainee profiles. What this report suggests is that most of the detainees could be safely released with the reasonable expectation that they would pose no threat to either US or allied interests. Moreover, even for those who are being questioned or held on suspicion of being hardcore al-Qaeda fighters and possible future terrorist risks upon their release, there is still no compelling argument as to why US civilian courts cannot be trusted to make a final determination on their guilt or innocence.

Of the eight per cent who have some direct connection to al-Qaeda, we need to know how the US authorities have come to their conclusions. American historian Professor Alfred W McCoy from the University of Wisconsin—I believe he has done a number of interviews recently—has stated that the questioning procedures used by the US authorities to extract information from detainees in Guantanamo Bay and generally are less than humane. McCoy argues:

Guantanamo is not a conventional military prison. It’s an ad hoc laboratory for the perfection of the CIA psychological torture.

McCoy goes on to describe the long history of the use of psychological techniques by the CIA. McCoy himself suggests that David Hicks may very well have been subject to such techniques and have been psychologically damaged, when citing Joshua Dratel’s first meeting with David Hicks—Joshua Dratel being David Hicks’s US civilian attorney. Here, McCoy says that Dratel’s observation was that David:

... was in a severely damaged and stressed psychological state, obsessed with himself, unable to grasp reality and unable to focus on the real issues in this case.

The triple suicide at Guantanamo Bay on the weekend—and I will not go into the US authorities’ response to that, calling it an act of war or a PR exercise—says to us that we need to question the treatment and the ongoing detention of these detainees. I am not suggesting that people should not be detained and charged—but indefinitely held? This is extraordinary. Should they be subject to a flawed commission process—one that has been attacked by bodies from the UN through to international jurists to Lord Goldsmith, the UK Attorney-General, to the heads of nations, be it Denmark most recently and many others? Why is Australia a cheerleader for the military commission process? The Pentagon is the sole arbiter of evidence and, up until recently, evidence obtained by torture could be used. We have to look into these issues.

I am aware that the Minister for Foreign Affairs has said that an Australian consular official has recently visited David Hicks and said that he is ‘fit and well’, although he has complained about a persistent back problem. I am afraid that this is at odds with evidence from Major Michael Mori, who, as we know, is David’s US military attorney. He says that David is suffering from poor health, depression and weight loss. So there are elements of this case that are very disturbing. We are not talking about prisoners of war. We are not talking about the Geneva conventions. We are talking about the complete abrogation of international humanitarian law, or what we know of it. We are talking about ‘illegal combatants’—a terminology that has been employed in order to deal with these detainees.

I do not suggest for a moment that we are talking about not fighting a war on terrorism or al-Qaeda or bringing people to justice for the horror that was September 11. But, for goodness sake, why are we allowing the erosion of the rule of law and all of those things that we fight for when we talk about fighting for democracy and fighting against terrorism? We are sacrificing all those things that make us decent, democratic, civilised and human, and I think the plight of David Hicks is one that we have to start paying attention to. He is an Australian man. He is a citizen. He has been charged, but he will never get a fair trial under the military commission process. I urge our government in these next few days and weeks to support the British Foreign Office and its initiative to grant British citizenship to David Hicks in order to help expedite his repatriation or his release from Guantanamo Bay.

In the time remaining tonight, I want to reflect on the death of one of South Australia’s greats—a great journalist, Des Colquhoun, a former editor in chief and general manager of the Advertiser and a daily columnist for a long period of time. He was much more than a journalist. Certainly he wrote much more than journalism by today’s understanding of the word, although by the standards of his day he was proud to be called just a journalist. He represented for his readers—and they were peculiarly South Australian sorts of readers—a view of the world that was kinder, more tolerant and loving than any other writer of his time.

At the same time, he could be astringent and unsentimental. He confronted bigots and those who wanted him to censor, censure and condemn with a hugely expansive, ‘Fer God’s sake!’ and a torrent of lovely words that reminded even the worst of them that life is for living, enjoyment, embracing and dancing. Words can do that. Words do not only summon us to duty and action. Des’s words were about feelings and not denying them. Puritans hated him, but they were the only ones who did—and even they weakened before his dionysian charm. He once said that he wanted to write a pop song. That sounds pretty ordinary, but what he meant was that he wanted to write a song that would reach everyone and touch their hearts about the beauty he saw in life and love and wine and friendship.

He squeezed uncomfortably into a newspaper executive role for years because stupid people thought he was so clever he could make money for them. But he fled that cage and became a columnist, day after day speaking with ordinary people over their muesli, as he imagined it, urging them away from tight conventional views, urging them to spread their wings and take a kinder, jollier point of view. That was when newspapers could allow a voice like Des’s to be heard—when they could tolerate his wild song. (Extension of time granted) He was a good, funny and clever man. There are many people who miss him dearly. For me he was a beloved godfather, or ‘The Godfather’ as he called himself. I wish tonight to put on record my love and condolences to his family, especially to Merey and Lachlan. Tonight South Australia has lost a great man.