The President v David Hicks
SBS television
March 18, 8.30pm
REVIEW BY ROHAN PEARCE
The President v David Hicks is a moving documentary that follows the journey of a father, Terry Hicks, trying to understand the events leading up to the detention of his son, David, in a US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
David Hicks has been imprisoned by the US since he was handed over by Washington's band of more or less loyal warlords in Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance, in November 2001.
The US military is known to have been using "stress and duress" techniques — torture — on the Guantanamo prisoners during interrogations.
The Australian government has refused to challenge the detention of Hicks and the less publicised imprisonment of Egyptian-born Sydney resident Mamdouh Habib, who was arrested in Pakistan. This is despite the imprisonments being a gross violation of international law.
The US has classified the prisoners at Guantanamo as "unlawful combatants", a category invented by the White House to evade the responsibilities towards prisoners of war which the US has under the Geneva Conventions, and to remove any rights the prisoners would enjoy under US law if they were charged with criminal offences.
The President v David Hicks follows Hicks' father to Pakistan and Afghanistan, where David Hicks allegedly fought on the side of the Taliban government during the US invasion.
The documentary successfully counters the attempts of the US and Australian governments, with the connivance of the Australian corporate media, to dehumanise the Guantanamo prisoners, conveying a real sense of the emotional torment being suffered by Hicks' family at the absence of a loved one.
It also highlights the hypocrisy of the White House's "war on terror". In Afghanistan, Terry Hicks travels to a camp where David is believed to have received military training — a camp established by the CIA during the US-funded jihad against the left-wing, Soviet-backed government of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, when Osama bin Laden and his ilk were Washington's allies.
David Hicks now has a Pentagon-appointed military lawyer, who will defend him before a US military tribunal, which will charge him with unspecified crimes. But even this lawyer, Major Michael Mori, has criticised the tribunal process. On January 21, Mori told journalists: "The commission process has been created and controlled by those with a vested interest only in convictions."
The President v David Hicks, while it is an unambitious documentary, successfully conveys the tragedy of one of the many atrocities that are almost taken for granted since the US ruling elite and its allies began their fraudulent "war on terror".
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, March 10, 2004.
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