My tortured journey with former Guantanamo detainee David Hicks

One afternoon, a couple of hours after another session on the phone with Hicks, I took my son to school. As I stood in the background and watched him interact with about 30 other two-year-old boys and girls, tears began streaming down my cheeks. I had not expected to be overcome with so much emotion. I'm embarrassed admitting that I was. Unsure of what was happening at first, I touched my eyes thinking that perhaps something else was coming out of the tear ducts. I didn't spend much time thinking about what I was feeling at that moment. But, in hindsight, I believe I was coming to terms with how we all eventually lose our innocence. Something about that seems tragic to me. It reminds me of a passage in another memoir, "The Ticking Is the Bomb," by Nick Flynn, who wrote about his own obsession with the Bush administration's torture program.

"Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth."

Not surprisingly, the Pentagon has vehemently denied Hicks' torture claims. In 2007, as a condition of his guilty plea and release from Guantanamo, the US government forced him to sign a document stating that he had "never been treated illegally." Hicks, who was the first detainee sentenced under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, said he is also "not allowed to challenge or collaterally attack my conviction, seek compensation or other remedies, or sue anyone for my illegal imprisonment and treatment."

What makes Hicks' story all the more tragic is how badly he's been vilified by some Australian media organizations since his memoir was published last October for having the audacity to finally reveal the details of his torture. Yet, those same outfits seem willing to accept that Howard pressured the Bush administration to charge Hicks with a war crime, because Hicks "had unexpectedly become a political threat," according to Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman,

Gellman, author of a book on Dick Cheney titled "Angler," wrote that Howard, "under pressure from home," met with Cheney during the vice president's trip to Sydney in February 2007, where the two discussed Iraq, and told Cheney, "there must be a trial 'with no further delay' for David Hicks who was beginning his sixth year at the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay."

"Five days later, Hicks was indicted as a war criminal," Gellman wrote. "On March 26 [2007], he pleaded guilty to providing 'material support' for terrorism. Shortly after Cheney returned from Australia, the Hicks case died with a whimper. The U.S. government abruptly shifted its stance in plea negotiations, dropping the sentence it offered from 20 years in prison to nine months if Hicks would say that he was guilty."

"Only the dramatic shift to lenience, said Joshua Dratel, one of three defense lawyers, resolved the case in time to return Hicks to Australia before Howard" faced re-election in 2007, Gellman reported.

But Hicks' plea deal prohibited him from speaking to the media for a year. That's how Howard dealt with this "political threat." But justice was poetic as Howard lost his bid for another term in office.

Hicks' plea deal, "negotiated without the knowledge of the chief prosecutor, Air Force Col. Morris Davis, was supervised by Susan J. Crawford, the convening authority over military commissions. Crawford received her three previous government jobs from then-Defense Secretary Cheney - she was appointed as his special adviser, Pentagon inspector general and then judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces."

Political interference in Hicks' case, however, began even earlier. Davis, who resigned as chief prosecutor from military commissions at Guantanamo over the government's handling of terrorism cases, revealed that a day after US officials met with the Australian ambassador to the United States in early January 2007, Defense Department General Counsel William Haynes called him up and asked, 'how quickly can you charge David Hicks?' even though at the time he had no regulations for trial by military commissions."

Davis would later say that Hicks should not have been charged. Stephen Kenny, one of Hicks' former attorneys, said that "it has always been my position that [Hicks] never committed any crime."

"We looked at Australian law, international law and Afghani law and we were unable to identify any breach of those laws, Kenny said. The law that he eventually pleaded guilty to [material support for terrorism] was not actually an international war crime at all. In fact it was a crime that didn't exist."