Cheney, Howard 'struck deal' on David Hicks

US Vice-President Dick Cheney and Australian Prime Minister John Howard cut a deal to release Australian inmate David Hicks from Guantanamo Bay, according to a report published in the US today.

The report quotes a US military officer.

"One of our staffers was present when Vice-President Cheney interfered directly to get Hicks' plea bargain deal," the unnamed officer told today's edition of Harper's magazine.

"He did it, apparently, as part of a deal cut with Howard.

"I kept thinking: this is the sort of thing that used to go on behind the Iron Curtain, not in America.

"And then it struck me how much this entire process had disintegrated into a political charade.

"It's demoralising for all of us."

Harper's magazine, launched in 1850, is the second oldest continuously-published monthly magazine in the US.

Hicks, 32, is due to be released from Adelaide's Yatala Prison at the end of the year after agreeing to a deal in March.

In return for a nine month prison sentence in Australia, the deal required Hicks to plead guilty to a charge of providing material support for terrorism.

A month before the plea deal, Mr Cheney visited Australia and Hicks, who had been incarcerated at the US military prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for five years, was a raging issue in Australian politics.

Hicks' plea deal surprised observers at Guantanamo for his trial because it was not negotiated by US Colonel Morris Davis, the chief prosecutor for Hicks' military commission, but by the commission's convening authority, Susan J Crawford, a former top official of Cheney's Defence Department staff.

Mr Howard, after the deal was announced, denied involvement in the plea bargain.

"We didn't impose the sentence, the sentence was imposed by the military commission and the plea bargain was worked out between the military prosecution and Mr Hicks' lawyers," Mr Howard said on March 31.

After the plea deal was made public, Australian Greens leader Bob Brown said, "the message has gone very clearly from Canberra to Washington to Guantanamo Bay: don't allow Hicks to be released until after the elections and certainly don't allow him to speak".

Mr Howard rejected this too.

"And the suggestion from (Greens leader) Senator Brown, that it has something to do with the Australian elections, is absurd," Mr Howard said at the time.