David Hicks - Not Guilty but the American and Australian governments ARE.
I have embedded a good video about ALL the US government lying about the war on the people of Iraq - at the end of the article.
That is George Dubbaya Bush and Co.
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/us-admission-marks-beginning-of-the-end-for-david-hicks-20150123-12wkzy.html
US admits David Hicks' terrorism conviction is invalid.
The US government was forced to admit David Hicks' innocence of a war crime, marking the "beginning of the end" of his ordeal at Guantanamo Bay, his former lawyer says.
In the course of Mr Hicks' appeal against terrorism-related charges, the US government has said that it does not dispute he is innocent and his conviction was not correct.
Lawyer Dan Mori, who was initially appointed to defend Mr Hicks, told Fairfax Media that the US would have looked "completely foolish" if it had not admitted his former client was innocent of providing material support for terrorism.
In 2012, a US appeals court quashed the same charge against Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's former driver, ruling it was unlawfully applied retrospectively.
"The point is this charge has been thrown out by the civilian appeals court already in other cases. This is the [Military] Commission prosecutor's office trying to salvage the last conviction of this first group of detainees," Mr Mori said.
David Hicks was one of the first detainees transferred to Guantanamo Bay from Afghanistan in 2001. He was held there for five-and-a-half years before he was convinced to give an Alford plea. That enabled Mr Hicks to be convicted without admitting his guilt and allowed him to return to Australia to serve a seven-month prison sentence.
Mr Hicks is currently appealing his conviction in the US Court of Military Commission Review, although he previously agreed not to as part of his plea deal.
Mr Mori agreed with Mr Hicks' current lawyer, Stephen Kenny, saying the conviction would inevitably be quashed, saying the US government's admission marked the "beginning of the end" of his former client's ordeal.
Mr Mori, who wrote about the original case in his memoir In The Company Of Cowards: Bush, Howard and injustice at Guantanamo, blamed vested interests within the Military Commission for Mr Hicks' detention and conviction.
"My feeling is they captured a lot of people and they didn't know what anybody had done and then they realised they'd screwed up and nobody had really violated a law of war," he said. "Then they had to create a system and create a crime to try to get people."
Now a Melbourne-based lawyer, Mr Mori said the Commission brought detainees to Guantanamo Bay, who "should have been tried in the (US) Federal Court" in order to secure convictions.
http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/why_we_fight/
nspired by Dwight Eisenhowers legendary farewell speech (in which he coined the phrase military industrial complex), filmmaker Eugene Jarecki surveys the scorched landscape of a half-centurys military adventures, asking how and telling why a nation of, by, and for the people has become the savings-and-loan of a system whose survival depends on a state of constant war.
The film moves beyond the headlines of various American military operations to the deeper questions of why - why does America fight? What are the forces political, economic, ideological that drive us to fight against an ever-changing enemy?
That is George Dubbaya Bush and Co.
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/us-admission-marks-beginning-of-the-end-for-david-hicks-20150123-12wkzy.html
US admits David Hicks' terrorism conviction is invalid.
The US government was forced to admit David Hicks' innocence of a war crime, marking the "beginning of the end" of his ordeal at Guantanamo Bay, his former lawyer says.
In the course of Mr Hicks' appeal against terrorism-related charges, the US government has said that it does not dispute he is innocent and his conviction was not correct.
Lawyer Dan Mori, who was initially appointed to defend Mr Hicks, told Fairfax Media that the US would have looked "completely foolish" if it had not admitted his former client was innocent of providing material support for terrorism.
In 2012, a US appeals court quashed the same charge against Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's former driver, ruling it was unlawfully applied retrospectively.
"The point is this charge has been thrown out by the civilian appeals court already in other cases. This is the [Military] Commission prosecutor's office trying to salvage the last conviction of this first group of detainees," Mr Mori said.
David Hicks was one of the first detainees transferred to Guantanamo Bay from Afghanistan in 2001. He was held there for five-and-a-half years before he was convinced to give an Alford plea. That enabled Mr Hicks to be convicted without admitting his guilt and allowed him to return to Australia to serve a seven-month prison sentence.
Mr Hicks is currently appealing his conviction in the US Court of Military Commission Review, although he previously agreed not to as part of his plea deal.
Mr Mori agreed with Mr Hicks' current lawyer, Stephen Kenny, saying the conviction would inevitably be quashed, saying the US government's admission marked the "beginning of the end" of his former client's ordeal.
Mr Mori, who wrote about the original case in his memoir In The Company Of Cowards: Bush, Howard and injustice at Guantanamo, blamed vested interests within the Military Commission for Mr Hicks' detention and conviction.
"My feeling is they captured a lot of people and they didn't know what anybody had done and then they realised they'd screwed up and nobody had really violated a law of war," he said. "Then they had to create a system and create a crime to try to get people."
Now a Melbourne-based lawyer, Mr Mori said the Commission brought detainees to Guantanamo Bay, who "should have been tried in the (US) Federal Court" in order to secure convictions.
http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/why_we_fight/
nspired by Dwight Eisenhowers legendary farewell speech (in which he coined the phrase military industrial complex), filmmaker Eugene Jarecki surveys the scorched landscape of a half-centurys military adventures, asking how and telling why a nation of, by, and for the people has become the savings-and-loan of a system whose survival depends on a state of constant war.
The film moves beyond the headlines of various American military operations to the deeper questions of why - why does America fight? What are the forces political, economic, ideological that drive us to fight against an ever-changing enemy?
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