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Neocon Nuttery See other Neocon Nuttery Articles Title: Hicks pleads guilty to escape "inhumane gulag" Australian lawmakers have said Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks has pleaded guilty to terrorism charges to speed up his return home and escape a flawed system of U.S. military justice. "His guilty plea is simply a plea for release for exit from the inhumane Guantanamo Bay gulag. That's a human response," Reuters reported Greens Senator Bob Brown as saying. "His urge to get home to Australia almost under any circumstances has overtaken him. There is no way that this can be seen as a genuine guilty plea," he said. "Hicks has been brought before a kangaroo court. He's found his escape was to plead guilty. Who wouldn't do that after the torture and the hell-hole conditions in Guantanamo Bay? But the injustice of it remains," Brown added, stressing that guilty plea would not end the political debate in Australia about Hicks and his treatment. Brown, who heckled Bush about Hicks when the president addressed the Canberra parliament in 2003, said the guilty plea would not have held up under the Australian legal system. Meanwhile a government lawmaker, Senator Barnaby Joyce, continued his criticism of the military commissions on Tuesday and said Hicks had pleaded guilty to ensure he could get out of Guantanamo Bay. "I believe he's pleading guilty partly by reason of a judicial process, or rather a process, that has a lot of flaws in it," Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio quoted him as saying. The chief military tribunal prosecutor, Air Force Colonel Moe Davis, said Hicks could learn his sentence by the end of the week and could be back in Australia by the end of the year. Under a long-standing deal, Hicks will be allowed to serve the remainder of any jail sentence in Australia. Growing public support for Hicks, and concerns from lawyers, judges and church leaders over the military commission system, has divided the Australian government and threatened to become an issue at national elections, due in the second half of 2007. That could be why John Howard, Australia's conservative prime minister under growing political pressure at home, recently complained to Washington about the long delay in bringing Hicks to trial. After five years in detention, Hicks, 31, pleaded guilty before a newly constituted U.S. Military Commission hearing to a charge of helping al Qaeda fight American troops and their allies in 2001 during the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan. He was charged and started a trial process previously in August 2004. However, the U.S. Supreme Court last year ruled the system unconstitutional. Human rights group Amnesty International has condemned the tribunals as "shabby show trials," and demanded that detainees be tried under the regular U.S. judicial system.
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