By Richard Ackland and reviewer
The skeleton of the David Hicks story is reasonably well known to most semi-conscious Australians.
He was an Adelaide drifter who found Islam and revelled in small-scale heroics in the name of Allah on the field of battle, until captured by the Afghan Northern Alliance in late 2001 and sold to the Americans for a princely $1000. His military career then took an inglorious turn as he began five years in American custody at Guantanamo Bay, not as a prisoner of war, but as an "enemy combatant".
Leigh Sales's book puts some badly needed flesh on the story. Sales was until recently the ABC's Washington correspondent and it is the Washington component of the story that makes her book compelling. The alarming dysfunctionality and deceits of the Pentagon, along with a flawed and riven prosecution team, are reminders that what the public was being peddled about the Hicks case had virtually no connection with what we now understand to be a recognisable reality.
Yet it is around the unlikely and unprepossessing character of David Hicks that Sales canvasses some of the important issues of our time. What is a terrorist? How should those people rounded up in a "war on terror" be detained and tried? To what extent should the normal decencies be suspended for the "worst of the worst"?
The US President and his immediate coterie had sold the dispirited gaggle rounded-up in Afghanistan as the most evil and dangerous people in the world. The Australian Government was happy to oblige with the same sort of overblown nonsense.
So when in 2002 and 2003 the US Office of Military Commissions cast about to find people to send to trial there was an embarrassing disparity between what was available on the menu and what the politicians were spruiking out the front of the eatery.
Sales points out that the authorities were keen to serve up prisoners who spoke English and that two potential cases being readied for trial were those of the British detainees Moazzam Begg and Feroz Abbasi, who had "confessed" and wanted to plead guilty. Hicks was also considered a likely contender at this time, because it was believed that he, too, wanted to plead guilty.
This slight offering of English-speaking guilty-pleaders hardly amounted to the worst of the worst and Sales tells us that it was here the Pentagon decided to slow things down, putting trials on the back-burner. Instead, "intelligence" gathering became more pressing than trials, even though the intelligence was so thin as to be worthless. Consequently, the administration in Washington began fobbing off hapless Australian Government requests for details about the timing of charges against Hicks and his trial.
The high point of Sales's book is the story of the disintegration within the prosecution team at the Office of Military Commissions. Some of the best and brightest members of the team were convinced the system was rigged for convictions and that the US would pay dearly for this miscarriage. In particular, they felt that the case against Hicks was "weak" and an unworthy way to kick-off the trial process.
Colonel Fred Borch, the chief prosecutor, tried to dispel the tensions at a staff meeting in early 2004. In doing so he blurted out, "Stop worrying about it. These people are going to be found guilty" because the judges had been "hand picked" just for that task. [The recollection of the precise form of words varies and Borch has since tried to put a gloss on what he said.]
Sales is at her strongest in chipping away at the Washington edifice during the early days of the design and implementation of the military commissions. The book provides fewer fresh insights from mid-2006 when the US Supreme Court derailed the "Presidential commissions" in the case brought against the US Government by a Yemeni detainee Salim Hamdan, formerly Osama bin Laden's driver.
Still, there's plenty enough in these pages to disturb most citizens as to how a bastion of freedom can ditch so unceremoniously the defining elements of its nobility.
This is an annoyingly fair book - so much so that I kept willing Sales on to deal more sharply with the Washington cast who concocted the reams of flawed legal advice and the subversion of the US constitution, and with our politicians who so willingly surrendered sovereignty over one of our citizens.
Reviewer Richard Ackland is a Herald columnist and the editor of Justinian.