By Miranda Devine
THE American Major Michael Mori is a persuasive advocate for David Hicks. In Australia to press the case for his jihadist client, the Pentagon-appointed defence counsel was given a standing ovation by 400 admiring lawyers at Selborne Chambers in Phillip Street on Tuesday night.
"I expected this lectern to be awash with underwear," the vice-president of the NSW Law Society, Hugh Macken, said when introducing Mori to the standing room-only crowd.
Mori, a tough marine with a buzz cut and earnest demeanour, has won plaudits for his passionate defence of Hicks, aka Muhammad Dawood, the Muslim convert and traitor who was captured in Afghanistan fighting for the Taliban in December 2001, and has been imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay ever since.
"I've never said that David hasn't realised that he has made some poor life choices," Mori told Andrew Denton on the ABC TV show Enough Rope on Monday night. "But I can't believe that Australians would be surprised to find an Australian popping up in any scrape around the world."
Mori presents like a hero from central casting. But he is, in fact, a lawyer, and for all his sincere words he refuses to discuss the allegations against Hicks, which are far more serious than "popping up" in a scrape.
Mori won't talk about the allegation, admitted by Hicks, that he travelled to Pakistan in November 1999 and joined the al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has been implicated in last week's foiled plot to blow up 10 trans-Atlantic flights out of Heathrow Airport, as well as the Mumbai train bombings in India last month, and which also trained Faheem Khalid Lodhi, the Sydney architect convicted this year of planning a terrorist act, and his French associate, Willy Brigitte, who was deported from Australia in 2003.
Mori won't talk about the allegation that Hicks travelled to Afghanistan in 2001 to attend al-Qaeda terrorist training camps, where he was taught how to use assault and sniper rifles, about explosives, guerilla warfare, assassination and kidnapping techniques. Mori doesn't wish to discuss the allegation that Hicks met Osama bin Laden, who asked him to translate terrorism-training manuals into English.
The closest Mori has come to addressing Hicks's offences was when he told his Selborne admirers: "Thank God we're not all held accountable for the rest of our lives over poor decisions we made when we were 23 and 24."
A defence lawyer will always try to explain away his client's offence as a "poor decision". But the drunk driver who makes the "poor decision" to get behind the wheel of a car, and kills a pedestrian, is still guilty of manslaughter. The enraged husband who makes the "poor decision" to shoot his wife's lover is still guilty of murder. The bank teller who makes the "poor decision" to embezzle money from her employer is guilty of fraud. And the Adelaide boy who decided to become an Islamic jihadist and fight for the Taliban in Afghanistan against his country and its allies is guilty of more than poor judgement.
In fact, Hicks's poorest decision was probably made on September 11, 2001, when he watched on TV in Pakistan the twin towers collapse in New York, killing 3000 people, including Australians, and then freely chose to hotfoot it back to Afghanistan to pick up his AK-47 and continue to fight for the enemy.
Mori maintains Hicks has committed no serious offence and has been incarcerated unjustly. But Neil James from the Australia Defence Association argues that Hicks's detention as a captured combatant under the Law of Armed Conflict based on the Hague and Geneva Conventions is legitimate and a separate issue to whether he can be tried on civil criminal charges.
James acknowledges Hicks inhabits "a form of international legal limbo", which may need a new Geneva Convention. But the evidence "overwhelmingly" points to Hicks being a combatant in the continuing armed conflict in Afghanistan, he said in a statement, "not least because his family acknowledge he served with one of the belligerent factions … and have publicised his letters and other communications to that effect. If he has trained or served with [al-Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba] it may be logical to regard him as also a combatant in the wider conflict between the international community and Islamist terrorism."
The legal issues surrounding Hicks are complex, but the moral issues are not. He was captured fighting for the enemy against what he had described in letters home as "the Western-Jewish domination", a decision he made with full knowledge of the atrocities committed on September 11, 2001.
Yet in some influential circles around town, Hicks is feted as a war hero. The cult that has built around him is obscene, with calls by Sun-Herald columnist Alex Mitchell to make Hicks Australian of the Year. "Sixty years ago, if David Hicks was a POW in a Japanese or German concentration camp, we'd consider him a war hero."
The ACT Chief Minister, Jon Stanhope, nominated Hicks's father Terry as Father of the Year for his steadfast support of the son he left at age 10 when he divorced Hicks's mother.
It's funny how Schapelle Corby's mother, Rosleigh Rose, hasn't been nominated for Mother of the Year, despite trying just as hard to free her daughter from a Bali jail. Nor do you have Schapelle honoured in a play at the Opera House, which depicts Hicks in a cage with performers in orange jumpsuits underneath his parents' mournful faces.
The campaign for David Hicks seems surreal against the backdrop of the foiled Heathrow bomb plot, in which at least one of the alleged bombers, Don Stewart-Whyte, fits the psychological profile of Hicks - ordinary white boys who lost their fathers young and had issues with authority.
Hicks fits the bill for a homegrown terrorist. He wrote to his father from Afghanistan in 2000: "If I do meet fate this is called martyrdom … the highest position in heaven is to go fighting in the way of God against the friends of Satan." His martyrdom ambitions were foiled by his capture.
Yet Australia's own "friends of Satan" are hell-bent on turning him into a martyr anyway.