In a scathing critique, Hicks's US military prosecutors have privately described the convicted Australian as a man of "no personal courage or intellect" who rolled over as soon as he was questioned.
And they have undermined the Australian Government's portrayal of Hicks as a dangerous terrorist by admitting that his crimes were relatively minor compared with those of his fellow inmates at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
"I think he read Soldier of Fortune magazine too many times," said John Altenburg, the top US official in the Office of Military Commissions from 2004 to last year, speaking publicly about Hicks for the first time.
The formerly private views of the Hicks prosecutors are revealed in a new book, Detainee 002 - The Case of David Hicks, by ABC journalist Leigh Sales.
Sales quotes another, unnamed, Hicks prosecutor, who had reviewed classified US intelligence reports..."Certainly he was a big talker but as far as I can tell, he never killed an American and never planned to," the prosecutor says. He said Hicks had "no personal courage or intellect. He would be a total liability on a proper operation; he can't keep his mouth shut. He talked from the second we caught him. We never had to use any techniques at all on him in Guantanamo - there was no need."
One Australian official said Hicks "talked to everybody ... ASIO, the AFP, the CIA, the FBI, M15, anybody who'd come in with a hamburger, he'd tell them whatever they wanted to know".
The new book...shows that, contrary to popular belief, Australian diplomats were working feverishly behind the scenes as early as 2003 to push the Americans to move faster on the Hicks case, but to no avail.
The prime culprit was the Pentagon which, through a mixture of incompetence and deliberate obstruction, ensured that the Hicks case proceeded at a snail's pace.
The book identifies US Vice-President Dick Cheney and former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld as the key powerbrokers who backed the Pentagon's intransigence in relation to the Guantanamo Bay inmates.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21634515-601,00.html
>Spitting Image posts for "david hicks"
Posted by Stubbornson at April 29, 2007 07:23 PM