Commentariat: Janet Albrechtsen knows best

Ah Mamdouh, we hardly knew ye - at least, not like Janet knows ye.

Albrechtsen also really knows David Hicks better than anyone else. Two weeks ago, when Hicks was returned to Australia, Janet pushed to the front of the media line, saying, “let me be the first to welcome home David Hicks”. She also offered to help him write his memoirs because his friends don’t know him like she does.

Albrechtsen went beyond Hicks’s guilty plea to the US military commission and rehearsed his earlier “admissions” - such as when he called himself a “well-trained and practical soldier” in letters to his father.

But the clincher for Albrechtsen was a passage from a letter Hicks had written from Guantánamo Bay to former flatmate, Louise Fletcher:

Listen, have you got any friends I can f*** when I get home? They have to be good-looking and I prefer big tits as well. Well, send their photos with the letters so I can check them out.

If any real doubts remained that Hicks’s admissions to the US military commission provide an ex post facto justification for his disentitlement to the right of habeas corpus and the presumption of innocence, then Albrechtsen believes that Hicks’s desire to f*** good-looking women with big tits should dispel them.

But on these grounds, who among Australian (heterosexual) men would ’scape whipping?

Arguments about the rule of law need a more serious and considered forum than Albrechtsen provides.