David’s Crime

Ned Kelly was tried in an open Court,
so was Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant, a trial
of sorts in as far as a soldier’s Court Martial
is construed ‘open’ and fair.
But not David Hicks.

Justice for David will be a rare commodity,
he will have no access to civil rights, due
process will not exist, rules of evidence
dispensed with, Defence won’t have a say,
can’t review, won’t be able to defend.

A godsend for Prosecution you’ll say. Now
what was David’s crime? Your guess is as
good as mine – surviving the battlefield
per se, in the wrong place at the wrong time,
injured when most around him were dead?

Was his crime stupidity, being with Taliban fighters
defending their land? Ostensibly he bore arms
resisting Americans killing his companions,
but not as a soldier sanctioned – rather an
Al-Qaeda trained terrorist civilian, so they say.

It must be a rare distinction. Now he languishes
a five year, untried victim of the US Armed Forces
legal system, a non-person to the Justice Department,
a Guantanamo Bay civilian detainee held ominously
and disadvantageously in an offshore prison.

Is he simply a guilty verdict awaiting unspecified
charges to be laid at a gimcrack show trial
for which the Authorities hastily rewrote regulations,
enacted after their first attempts to bring him to
trial spectacularly bumbled, stumbled and failed?

He hasn’t committed an offense in Australia, but
we’ve disowned him anyway. Perhaps we’ll seek
clemency after he’s found guilty and sentenced to
death. But probably after the event as it seems,
sadly, to be the new, unheralded, Australian way.
© I.D. Carswell