So David Hicks will soon be free! Or so it seems. Latest news is that his guilty plea and plea bargain won an unbelievably lenient commutation: from the expected 20 years to life to the seven years he was actually sentenced to the nine months he will have to serve, most of those in an Australian prison. (The six years and three months taken off are not, we are assured, a nod at the five years he spent at Guantanamo.) It seems to be a sop to John Howard, the last leader of the "coalition of the willing" standing; Howard's facing a tough reelection later this year, and his unwillingness to insist on due process for Australian citizen Hicks (Tony Blair got the Tipton Three out of Guantanamo ages ago) has in recent months become a major embarrassment for him. At this rate Hicks will be freed shortly after the election - but conveniently can't make any statements of any kind before that.
Don't expect Hicks' non-Australian Guantanamo fellows to get off with such light sentences - if they ever even come to trial.
But then the Hicks saga may not be over. Hicks' father claimed that his son had pleaded guilty only to get out of Guantanamo any way he could (it would be insane not to, one wants to say), and in response some US military judge has said that David would be in trouble if his guilty plea was not serious: he could face new charges of perjury. Sounds like Catch-22. If Hicks is innocent, he may be in bigger trouble than if he was in fact guilty.
But what did we expect? Guantanamo's been a legal and moral black hole from the word go - by design, of course: the people imprisoned there can't be proven innocent since they've not been charged of a crime! By now it would be nearly impossible to do right by them even if the administration were serious about it - something the surreal Hicks trial surely doesn't suggest. If only there were even a small chance that the monsters who thought this place up might some day have to experience some of the moral horrors they have unleashed.
