I Cogitate

Crash of civilised values in Cuba
After celebrating the birth of Christ, we should reflect on the death of decency, writes

Phillip Adams
The Australian
December 26, 2006

Due south of the Florida Keys, Cuba arcs 1300km across the Caribbean, looking for all the world like a hammerhead shark or a raised eyebrow. At one end of the island, Fidel Castro is dying. At the other, David Hicks is being driven insane.

A lot of symbolism for a small country and two men. Cuba, home to the missile crisis and the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the CIA's botched attempts at Castro's assassination, its capital the setting for Graham Greene's satire on the Cold War, Our Man in Havana. And Castro's final breaths in Havana will be close to the last gasps of communism.

And Hicks? Our man in Guantanamo? With the war on terror replacing the Cold War, the treatment of Hicks embodies the worst aspects of the Bush administration and the conga line of suckholes who support it.

One hopes that John Howard, Philip Ruddock and Alexander Downer enjoyed their Christmas dinners -- an occasion which, I understand, celebrates the birth of Christ as well as the triumphs of retailing. Presumably the Christian jailers of Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo had turkey and pud, too, and you can bet there were some macabre Chrissie decorations about the place. Tinsel and Santas to go with the carols, Rudolph and I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas. Talk about the clash of civilisations.

Hicks has had five years in and out of wire cages and solitary confinement, John. That's 60 months, Philip. Or more than 1800 days, Alexander. Though treated as cruelly as any criminal on earth, Hicks has never been formally charged -- let alone convicted -- of anything. And his term of imprisonment shows no sign of ending. Best estimate? Another two years before Hicks has his day in some parody of a court. But we can't bring him back here, can we, gentlemen? Because there's no appropriate crime on the Australian statutes with which to charge him. So Australia remains complicit in a gross breach of human rights, not to mention ethics, morality and common decency.

Though it's an old and some would argue proud tradition, I'm not wildly enthusiastic about Australians going off to other people's wars, to conflicts that aren't our business. That applies to prime ministers putting Australians in harm's way in Vietnam or Iraq. Or to Australian Serbs or Croats who headed to Yugoslavia to help with ethnic cleansing, or to Australian Jews volunteering for active duty in Israel. So I'm hardly going to endorse Hicks's adventurism in Afghanistan.

In the long run it isn't Hicks's rights we should be defending; it's my rights and your rights and the rights of other Australian kids who may be swept up in some mutated form of idealism or religious enthusiasm. We've got standards to maintain: Australian standards of justice. Instead, we're in bed with a government that rips up its constitution in regards to the civil rights of its citizens, that allowed the horrors of Abu Ghraib, that abandoned the Geneva Conventions, legitimised torture, adopted the obscene policy of rendition and created the hell holes known as black sites. And, along the way, Guantanamo.

It's a long list of atrocities committed under the imprimatur of the war on terror, cashing the blank cheque of 9/11, ranging from that dramatic erosion of civil rights within the US to the conduct and consequences of the Iraq war. In this scheme of things, the maltreatment of Hicks may seem utterly trivial. But it goes to the heart -- apparently the dead heart -- of Australia's democratic and legal traditions. Even the British Prime Minister, a greater Bush suckhole than ours, found the Guantanamo situation intolerable and brought the British prisoners home, where no charges have been laid because no British law had been broken. This may be something of a political embarrassment for a card-carrying member of the coalition of the willing. Yet on this single issue Blair and co are to be congratulated for showing Howard, Ruddock and Downer how to behave. Shame, gentlemen, shame.

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