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David Hicks: Terrorist or Tourist?

Born into what is generally described as an average family in Adelaide in August 1975, there was little in David Hicks’ early years to suggest he would become one of Australia’s most infamous people. But along the way, Hicks’ thirst for the sort of adventures you don’t normally find in tourist brochures found him locked up in solitary confinement by the US in the notorious Guantanamo Bay in Cuba – the world’s most secure prison – accused of being an al Qaeda terrorist. He was held without a trial for almost three years, without a charge being laid. It just proves that you never know what life has in store for you.

Hicks’ controversial story is a polarising one in Australian society. According to the Adelaide journeyman turned Muslim convert himself, he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Others believe he was a terrorist and therefore deserved everything he got.

Despite his uneventful early years, life threw Hicks the pro­verbial curve ball when he was 10 years old. His parents separated and – like so many troubled children in similar situations – he turned to alcohol, drugs and petty crime through his teenage years. With no real direction in his life, Hicks started to wander. He held a variety of jobs through the years, including a stint droving cattle in the Northern Territory. As unlikely as the setting may seem, that was the first place he started studying the Koran.

Back in Adelaide, Hicks fell in love with a woman named Jodie Sparrow. They had two children together, but the romance didn’t last. They split in 1996. David Hicks cast his eye at the wider world; that same year, 21-year-old Hicks moved to Japan to train horses. This was during the build up to violent conflict in Kosovo. Every day, Hicks read the newspapers and, dismayed by the way Slobodan Milosevic oppressed the Kosovan people, he vowed to help.

Hicks travelled to Albania early in 1999 and joined the Kosovo Liberation Army, determined to fight against the invading Serbian forces. Even though the conflict only lasted a few months and he never got near the frontline, it was a pivotal experience in Hicks’ life. It appealed to his sense of adventure, while letting him feel he was working towards a greater good. It was the turning point in his life that led him to Guantanamo Bay.

When Hicks returned to his country of birth later that year, he applied to join the Australian Army, but his low level of education saw him rejected. He instead converted to Islam. Hicks started to visit the various mosques around Adelaide, where he prayed and studied his new chosen religion, but it never seemed enough for him. He still craved adventure.

Hicks got in touch with some Muslim missionaries in Pakistan. With nothing more than a promise of accommodation, a 24-year-old’s burning desire to forge his own path, and a backpack, he made his way to Pakistan, ostensibly to learn Arabic and gain a deeper understanding of the Koran. Before long he linked up with the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba terrorist group and trained for three months at one of their desert camps. But this was just a stepping stone on Hicks’ path as a terrorist.

He hadn’t been in Pakistan long before he got to know a Saudi national with connections to one of the training camps in Afghanistan that had been set up by the US and Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, to drill Muslims to rise up against Russia’s occupation of Afghanistan. The man asked Hicks if he’d like to train there. His answer shouldn’t be much of a surprise by now.

It was at the camp in Afghanistan that Hicks first laid eyes on the man that would change the course of the 21st century, the man who used passenger-filled planes as bombs against the US, the man who has come to personify evil to the Western world, the man the US spent a decade and countless billions of dollars hunting down and killing for his actions – Osama bin Laden. Hicks saw the al Qaeda leader eight times in total during his time at the camp. He even spoke to him once.

Hicks was back in Pakistan on 11 September 2001 when commercial jets crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Arlington, Virginia. He claims he was there on his way back to Sydney. Instead, after watching the carnage, he decided to head back to Afghanistan.

He later told the Australian Federal Police that he had made the decision to retrieve his belongings – his clothes, money, birth certificate and passport. Like many other discrepancies in his story, there is no explanation for why he had left them there if his plan was to return home.

Instead, the US Department of Defense contends that he returned to Afghanistan to rejoin his al Qaeda associates to fight against the US, British, Canadian, Australian, Afghan and other coalition forces.

When he arrived in Kandahar, Hicks was given an AK-47 automatic rifle, ammunition and grenades. He allegedly chose to join al Qaeda fighters defending the Kandahar airport, where he was allegedly assigned to guard a Taliban tank when the US started their bombing campaign.

Hicks eventually decided it was time to get out of Afghanistan, but he was captured by a Northern Alliance warlord in early December 2001. The warlord gave him up to the US Special Forces for $1000.

By this stage in the War on Terror, the US was going hard. President George W Bush had sworn to overcome terrorism. As a result, it had been decided that al Qaeda and Taliban suspects would no longer be classified as ‘prisoners of war’. The reasoning was that the Taliban was not recognised as the official government of Afghanistan. They were instead classed as ‘illegal combatants’, and thus were not covered by international humanitarian laws such as the Geneva Convention. That meant they had no access to a US trial, but would instead have to face a Military Commission. Basically, they would be denied their basic human rights as guaranteed by the US constitution.

A month after the warlord collected $1000 for him, Hicks found himself shackled to the floor of a 2 metre by 3 metre cell at Guantanamo Bay, the notorious US military base in Cuba. The only other humans he saw for 16 months were his guards. It was almost a year before he saw natural light. As for a lawyer, Hicks had to wait two years before he could get any legal advice. He wasn’t even charged until 2004.

According to Hicks, he spent 23 hours of every day in solitary confinement, and was subjected to regular interrogations. He also says he was forced to run in shackles, deprived of sleep, beaten while handcuffed and blindfolded, bashed while under sedation, and assaulted anally while wearing a bag over his head. He also had to endure watching other prisoners being savaged by attack dogs. A total of 775 detainees have been taken through Guantanamo Bay since 7 October 2001.

When the legal wheels finally started to turn, Hicks was charged with attempted murder, conspiracy and aiding the enemy. But the US Supreme Court declared the Military Commission to be unconstitutional in June 2006 and the charges against Hicks were dropped.

In March 2007, he pleaded guilty to a new charge of providing material support to a terrorist organisation. He was sentenced to seven years in prison, with six years and three months suspended as long as he didn’t speak to the media. Another provision was that he agree that he was never illegally mistreated in Guantanamo Bay.

Once the negotiations between the US and Australia were complete, Hicks was flown home to serve the remainder of his sentence at Adelaide’s Yatala Prison, which must have felt like Buckingham Palace compared with where he had been for almost the past six years.

David Hicks was released from jail on 29 December 2007. His only concern today is whether or not he can claim the royalties on his bestselling book of his adventures. After all, it’s against the law in Australia to profit from a book about your crimes.

But David Hicks would have us believe that he didn’t commit any crimes. It was all a terrible mistake. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time in history.