Demands grow for release of Australian Guantánamo prisoner, David Hicks

Two weeks ago, hundreds demonstrated outside the federal parliament and a national television and radio advertising campaign was launched demanding Hicks’s immediate repatriation.

The growing movement is being animated not only by the almost daily revelations about the sadistic treatment of Guantánamo prisoners, but by deep-seated hostility to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and concerns about the escalating assault on democratic rights at home. Tens of thousands of ordinary Australians now recognise that the soul-destroying incarceration of Hicks is the real face of the so-called “war on terror” and that long-held and hard-won legal principles are under serious threat.

In face of this sentiment, which threatens to unseat the Liberal-National coalition government in federal elections later this year, Prime Minister Howard and other senior government officials have attempted to feign concern about the length of Hicks’s imprisonment. The cynical play-acting has descended to new lows during the past two weeks.

Last November Attorney-General Phillip Ruddock told the local media that he expected terrorism charges to be laid against Hicks before the end of December. When none had been announced by late January, Howard sent a letter to the White House requesting a mid-February deadline.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2007/feb2007/hick-f19.shtml