Senior lawyers accuse Australian government of war crimes over Guantánamo

The calls came as a hearing by Hicks’s defence lawyers resumed yesterday in Australia’s Federal Court arguing that the Howard government had failed its constitutional duty to protect the 31-year-old Australian citizen.

Hicks was captured in Afghanistan by Northern Alliance forces in December 2001, sold to the US military, and then transported to Guantánamo in early January 2002. The father of two was one of the first war prisoners incarcerated in the notorious US-run prison, which was established to circumvent the Geneva Conventions and other long-standing legal principles and to allow the US military to use various forms of physical and psychological torture, run kangaroo courts and hold prisoners indefinitely.

The Pentagon is currently preparing two charges against Hicks—attempted murder and aiding terrorists—for a forthcoming US military court. The charges will rely on hearsay evidence and information extracted under coercion. Hicks, who has been kept in solitary confinement and tortured, was denied any access to a lawyer or his family for the first two years of his incarceration.

Robert Richter attacked the government in an op-ed comment, entitled “Hypocrites breaking our law at every turn,” published on February 18 in the Melbourne-based Sunday Age.

Directly accusing Attorney-General Philip Ruddock of being a liar, who had “publicly prostituted his duties to the law—and to those he owes a duty of protection,” Richter challenged the attorney-general to sue him for defamation over the article and “take the risk of the facts emerging in any litigation”.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2007/feb2007/law-f27.shtml