Even the U.S. military thinks Guantanamo Bay detainees trials are unfair

Major Michael Mori, the U.S. military counsel for the Australian alleged Taliban David Hicks has stated that his trial is unfair:

“Using the commission process just creates an unfair system that threatens to convict the innocent and provides the guilty a justifiable complaint as to their convictions”.

Major Michael Mori, the U.S. military counsel for the Australian alleged Taliban David Hicks has stated that his trial is unfair:

“Using the commission process just creates an unfair system that threatens to convict the innocent and provides the guilty a justifiable complaint as to their convictions”.

Mori himself has called for Hicks to be tried in Australia since it upholds the rule of international law and there is a means and procedure to try him.

The Law Council of Australia wants Hicks to be tried in a U.S. civilian court or by court martial.

Dissenting from Mori’s view, the Law Council says there has been no serious suggestion that Hicks has committed a crime under Australian Law, and Australian Criminal Courts would lack the jurisdiction to hear the case.

After digging a bit on international law rulings on mercenaries, it strikes me that Hicks would be able to be charged, under Australian and/or International law, as being a mercenary. Quoting the Indian government’s reference to international law as it applied to the Kashmir conflict:

Ever since the Dogs of War controversy in Angola in the 70s, the international law relating to mercenaries has vastly changed. The International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1989, substantive provisions of which have since become part of general international law, interdicts states from recruiting, using, financing or training mercenaries. Both the mercenary and his employer state bear criminal responsibility under international law. States have duties with respect to extradition or prosecution of mercenaries.

On the Bush administrations own admission, Hicks has attacked and killed no-one, and at best would be tried on conspiracy charges (aka thought crime), under a U.S. military tribunal, devoid of many of the practices of international law. It seems to me that if the man is not charged with murder, and at best seems to have been a Taliban foot soldier, he deserves a trial equivalent to that of John Walker Lindh, that is, equivalent to a U.S. citizen.

However it is a sad fact that Jose Padilla, who is a U.S. citizen, but isn’t caucasian, has been held without charge or contact for 20 months in a Naval brig in Charleston, N.C. despite a U.S. federal court order to release him, recently stayed on appeal by the Bush administration.

What is very clear, is that Hicks and all of the other Guantanamo Bay detainees do not deserve to be locked in a cage open to the weather like a dog and denied basic dignities like a toothbrush, withheld from contact with anyone except his jailers for two years. These revelations come from the New York press conference of Steven Kenny, the conservative Australian lawyer acting as a voluntary assistant to Major Mori.

What was stunning from Kenny’s press conference (I’ve seen the unedited footage) was how little the Bush administration was allowing him to say, particularly on the treatment of these prisoners. Given the U.S. record of training South and Central American troops in torture techniques at the School of the Americas, the administration should open access to Guantanamo Bay to religious and humanitarian missions, in compliance with the Geneva convention on treatment of prisoners of war and of it’s obligations as signatory of U.N. mandates on international human rights.