Hick's nice little earner..

[Lord Jim]

My father was exposed to malaria, in the Pacific, back in The Big One, WW II.....

It was something he really disliked discussing, like so many things, so when I went to the Philippines some 40 years later...As a writer in the mid 80's....

Well, like so many things, it was just one more thing we never talked about...

[loCAtek]

There has already been an investigation into this...

[Lord Jim]

There has already been an investigation into this...

There has been an investigation into my father's history? I was unaware of that....

[The Hen]

They are onto you and yours Jim.

I'll make up the spare room now if you like.

[Lord Jim]

Well, if we could avoid having this discussion right now, I would prefer that...

[The Hen]

As mentioned earlier, I also have spent a few years in a malaria ridden country. Back in those days I was on a daily prophylactic of quinine.

The only harm that caused was a love of Indian Tonic water, (preferable with a decent Gin these days).

[loCAtek]

Well, since it has much of the same effects, maybe they should have just been given 'E', and said it was for an educational program.

[loCAtek]

Beg your pardon, but this wasn't answered;

So how effective is mefloquine as a 'truth serum'.

Are anxious, paranoid, depressives such reliable sources of good intel?

[The Hen]

Lo what do you not understand about the following? (To help you I will put some important words in big letters for you.)

Mefloquine, even at the standard dose of 250mg, can cause severe side effects such as paranoia, hallucinations, aggression, psychotic behavior, memory impairment, convulsions, suicidal ideation and possibly suicide. The drug produces psychoactive effects because it can cross the blood-brain barrier. In addition, it has a relatively long half-life and is fat-soluble, meaning the drug can remain in the body for a long period of time.

What do you not understand about the exceptionally high dosage? Five times the standard dose was given.

[loCAtek]

I understand that, but how does that apply to good interrogation?

As explained by Sue U, torture does not constitute good interrogation as the tortured will not give useful, [re: truthful] info.

Please explain- if one is anxious, paranoid and/or depressed; how is their testimony to be considered accurate and useful AKA the truth?

[Sean]

Depends on whether the interrogater is interested in the truth...

[loCAtek]

Also, why is Hicks being lauded as a heroic whistle-blower with this book, when it's been public knowledge that there was an investigation over two years ago?

He can neither confirm nor deny, he was given any drugs.

Was this investigation in the media, what gave him the idea to include the allegations?

[loCAtek]

Depends on whether the interrogater is interested in the truth...

Well, when you're hunting down Bin Laden, that's a good start.

[The Hen]

Also, why is Hicks being lauded as a heroic whistle-blower with this book, when it's been public knowledge that there was an investigation over two years ago?

He can neither confirm nor deny, he was given any drugs.

Was this investigation in the media, what gave him the idea to include the allegations?

I posted his affidavit sometime ago. he made that affidavit whilst still the Guantanamo.

He wanted this to go to Court.

He has confirmed he was given drugs. He has support that has confirmed he was given drugs.

He is not being lauded as a heroic whistle blower.

Please show your evidence that he is.

[The Hen]

There has already been an investigation into this...

Did that investigation address all the matters in the Hicks affidavit?

The David Hicks affidavit
December 10, 2004


This is the full text of the affidavit lodged by Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks asserting that he has been tortured during his detention:

DAVID M HICKS, being duly sworn, deposes and says:

1. I am David M Hicks, a Petitioner in the abo e-captioned action, and I make this Affidavit, submitted under seal (*), in support of my of my Amended Complaint, and my applications for injunctive relief.

2. I am a native and citizen of Australia, born in Adelaide August 7, 1975. I have completed the 9th Grade in the Australian school system.

3. This Affidavit provides an outline of the abuse and mistreatment I have received, witnessed, and/or heard about since I have been detained by the United States in Afghanistan, aboard US Naval vessels and US military aircraft, and at the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (hereinafter "Guantanamo Bay"). I have been detained by the United States Armed Forces from December 2001 until present. I arrived in Guantanamo Bay in January 2002. I does not detail all of the abuse I have received, or witnessed, or heard about, but merely sketches some of it. I have been careful to specify what happened to me, what I saw happen to others, and what I have heard about. During the course of my interrogations, I have repeatedly asked for a lawyer and why I am not being treated as Prisoner of War.

4. Since I do not have access to either a typewriter or computer, this Affidavit has been prepared by my attorneys based on information I have provided to them. I have reviewed the Affidavit carefully, and verify that it is completely accurate.

5. I have been beaten before, after, and during interrogations.

6. I have been menaced and threatened, directly and indirectly, with firearms and other weapons before and during interrogations.

7. I have heard beatings of other detainees occurring during interrogations, and observed detainees' injuries that were received during interrogations.

8. I have been beaten while blindfolded and handcuffed.

9. I have been in the company of other detainees who were beaten while blindfolded and handcuffed. At one point, a group of detainees, including myself, were subjected to being randomly hit over a eight hour session while handcuffed and blindfolded.

10. I have been struck with hands, fists, and other objects (including rifle butts). I have also been kicked. I have been hit in the face, head, feet, and torso.

11. I have had my head rammed into asphalt several times (while blindfolded).

12. I have had handcuffs placed on me so tightly, and for so long (as much as 14-15 hours) that my hands were numb for a considerable period thereafter.

13. I have had medication - the identity of which was unknown to me, despite my requests for information - forced upon me against my will. I have been struck while under the influence of sedatives that were forced upon me by injection.

14. I have been forced to run in leg shackles that regularly ripped the skin off my ankles. Many other detainees experienced the same.

15. I have been deprived of sleep as a matter of policy.

16. I have witnessed the activities of the Internal Reaction Force (hereinafter "IRF"), which consists of a squad of soldiers that enter a detainee's cell and brutalize him with the aid of an attack dog. The IRF invasions were so common that the term to be "IRF'd" became part of the language of the detainees. I have seen detainees suffer serious injuries as a result of being IRF'ed. I have seen detainees IRF'ed while they were praying, or for refusing medication.

17. I was told repeatedly that if I cooperated during the course of interrogations, I would be sent home to Australia after the interrogations were concluded. I was told there was an "easy way" and a "hard way" to respond to interrogation.

18. Interrogators once offered me the services of a prostitute for fifteen minutes if I would spy on other detainees. I refused.

19. Failure to cooperate meant the loss of the ordinary necessities of living, such as showers, sufficient food, relief from the prospect of IRF'ing and other regular abuse visited upon non-cooperative detainees, access to reading material, and social contact (including receiving mail).

20. During Ramadan, food was withhold from detainees after the break of the daily fast in order to coerce cooperation with interrogators. Detainees who refused to cooperate were punished regularly, and denied the ordinary necessities of living.

21. I have been told that strobe lights and extreme cold were also used to disorient detainees in order to soften them up for interrogation. I have also heard that religious detainees were exposed to pornography, and were dragged around naked in order to break their will.

22. Detainees were not allowed to know the date, day, year, or time. We were deprived of any and all information and news from the world. Detainees were permitted very little exercise.

23. At one point during 2003 alone, my weight dropped by 30 pounds (and I was not overweight to start).

24. Other detainees also informed me that interrogators attempted to turn them against me by spreading rumors about me. In any event, due to the way interrogations were conducted, and the physical layout of the camps, it was obvious to all of the detainees who was being interrogated, for how long, and whether that detainee emerged abused or not (with the latter signifying cooperation). Thus, any detainee would know who was cooperating with the interrogators.

25. The interrogation process ruled the detention camps and the lives of detainees. Cooperation with interrogators offered the only means of relief from the miserable treatment and abuse the detainees suffered. Those who failed to comply suffered abuse until they gave in.

26. My conditions changed after I was moved to Camp Echo (as did the treatment afforded me by the military personnel on duty there) July 9, 2003, and then again after the visits from my attorneys began. However, at Camp Echo, I have been held in a solitary cell and have been so since arriving at Camp Echo. I was not allowed outside of my cell in Camp Echo for exercise in the sunlight, from July 2003 until March 10, 2004.

27. As noted earlier, the above catalogue of abuse and mistreatment is not complete. It is but a summary of some of the abuse I suffered, witnessed, and/or heard about since my detention began. I would be able to provide further information and detail if the Court so desires, but a complete account would require a substantially longer document. In fact, at my request and due to the persistence of my lawyers, I have recently met with US military investigators conducting the probe into detainee abuse in Afghanistan. Also, this is not the first time I protested my mistreatment, since on several occasions - in Afghanistan, and later at Guantanamo Bay - I informed representatives of the International Red Cross of the abuse.

WHEREFORE, it is respectfully respected that the Court grant the relief sought in my Amended Complaint, and for any such other relief that the Court deems proper.

DAVID M HICKS

Sworn to before me this

5th day of August, 2004.

MD MORI

Major

United States Marine Corps

Judge Advocate

Please post the findings.

[Big RR]

Don't hold your breath Hen, the US has acted shamefully here under two adminstrations, with little hope of it ever ending. Face it, once the executive can abrogate the rule of law and imprison (and worse) political enemies with impunity, why would it ever give that power up?

[Lord Jim]

DAVID Hicks described Osama bin Laden as "lovely" and trained with al-Qaeda a month before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a court was told.

Australian Federal Police (AFP) also told a court in Adelaide today that Hicks could still be seen as a perceived threat to Australia.

The AFP today asked the Federal Magistrates Court to impose a control order on Hicks, the convicted terrorism supporter and former Guantanamo Bay inmate who is due for release from an Adelaide jail in nine days.

If granted, it would be only the second control order granted in Australia.

Hicks' s lawyers today told the court they would not oppose the control order but would contest certain proposed aspects of it.

AFP lawyer Andrew Berger said Hicks had admitted taking part in four al-Qaeda training camps between January 2001 and August 2001 - a month before the terrorist attacks in the US.

He also detailed letters from Hicks to his family in Adelaide during 2001.

Mr Berger said in a May 2001 letter to family, Hicks wrote: "By the way I have met Osama bin Laden 20 times now, lovely brother, everything for the cause of Islam. The only reason the west calls him the most wanted Muslim is because he's got the money to take action."

Hicks admitted he attended al-Qaeda training camps in Pakistan in an interview with AFP officers while detained at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba in May 2002, Mr Berger said.

http://www.news.com.au/features/osama-i ... 1115161629

I thought this article said it pretty well:

Maybe Dave just shouldn’t have joined the Taliban

In her excoriating review of David Hicks’ memoir My Journey, ABC reporter and author Leigh Sales begins with the following assessment of the blame-shifting psychology of the former Taliban recruit:

“A sentence near the end of this controversial book encapsulates David Hicks’s attitude to his stay at Guantanamo Bay on terrorism-related charges:‘Any and all inconvenience . . . was brought about due to my incarceration and treatment and that was at the hands of others.’

“In other words, Hicks eschews personal responsibility. Guantanamo: My Journey is a flawed memoir, chiefly because of an astonishing lack of self-reflection.”

Sales is better qualified than most to offer this assessment. The 7.30 Report host is also the author of Detainee 002: The Case of David Hicks.

The book is a dispassionate chronicle of Hicks’ troubled drift from the depressed northern suburbs of Adelaide to the Taliban training camps of Afghanistan, where he met Osama bin Laden (four times) before being captured and imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.

In the opinion of some Hicks’ defenders, Sales’ book commits the ultimate moral crime of being far too journalistic and not remotely forgiving in its matter-of-fact description of Hicks.

Her book doesn’t present him as a doe-eyed innocent with a thirst for adventure who fell in with a bad crowd. Rather, it portrays him, accurately, as a dope, a grown man who made a conscious decision to join an organisation which wants the western world obliterated, and has spent the remaining years of his life whining like a child that he’s the innocent victim of a terrible conspiracy. [and who also abandoned his two young children to do it.]

In his own book, My Journey, Hicks insists that he has been sold out by his homeland. He should probably just be thanking his lucky stars he wasn’t jailed indefinitely for treason.

Despite the one obvious and irretrievable error of judgment in David Hicks’ troubled existence – his conscious decision to join the world’s most notorious terrorist organisation – the Hicks whingefest continues in full swing.

Irony is lost on his cheer squad. At the same time that the Greens are pushing for media reforms which would break up newspaper ownership and result in the closure of mastheads, they’re holding candlelit vigils for doe-eyed Dave, saying the freeze on proceeds from his absurd biography is a grotesque attack on freedom of speech.

If not for his decision to join an organisation which as of last night has now killed 29 Australian servicemen, [for anyone looking for heroes, seems to me those lads would be good candidates] Hicks would obviously be without a book. Hicks – or if not Hicks then his supporters – should be smart enough to recognise that the DPP is acting within its powers in freezing the book royalties. The book itself arose from this criminal act.

Hicks continues to shop himself around to bludge some kind of legal redress for circumstances wholly of his own making. It was reported yesterday that he is now taking his case to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, clogging up its busy caseload of actually looking after people who have lost everything through no fault of their own.

His former lawyer Stephen Hopper said this week that the onus now rests with the Australian Government (and taxpayers) to go through the rigmarole of filing a reply to the UN to contest his claims.

“I think what he’s trying to do is show that in fact his incarceration and treatment in Guantanamo Bay was against principles of international law and that his conviction was without any merit at all,” Hopper said.

The submission to the UNHCR “requests the US authorities to formally overturn Mr Hicks’ conviction under US law and to nullify the plea agreement”. It also demands as yet unspecified compensation from the Australian Government for his jailing at Gitmo.

Central to this assertion is Hicks’ belief that the US military commission which heard and upheld the case against him was a kangaroo court, and he should never have been jailed at all.
It’s a fascinating insight into the concept of a life without consequence.

One of the more telling interventions in the Hicks case came in May when a former chief prosecutor from the US Office of Military Commissions, Colonel Morris Davis, made some sharp public remarks about the conduct of Hicks.

What a surprise, his supporters would say. It is surprising when you consider that Colonel Morris Davis no longer works for the office, after publishing a scathing report about the practice of waterboarding to extract confessions from subjects, and for criticising the Obama administration’s plans to try Guantanamo detainees.

“Hicks was not just some accidental tourist,” Davis said. “He made the wilful decision after September 11 (2001) to go to Afghanistan to take up arms against Australia and its allies.”

It’s a pretty simple case of personal responsibility, and of owning the decisions you make in life. Hicks supporters should find themselves another cause, as this is a cause which was lost a long time ago.

http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/umm ... e-taliban/

[The Hen]

Yes Jim, he met Osama. Should everyone who has met him be jailed and tortured?

Yes Jim, he undoubtedly shouldn't have joined the Taliban and his book is full of flawed memories. I haven't read his book and it is not the issue I have ever been concerned with.

[loCAtek]

Beg your pardon, but this wasn't answered;

So how effective is mefloquine as a 'truth serum'.

Are anxious, paranoid, depressives such reliable sources of good intel?

If so, should we start taking ~Steve seriously now?

[loCAtek]

Also, why is Hicks being lauded as a heroic whistle-blower with this book, when it's been public knowledge that there was an investigation over two years ago?

He can neither confirm nor deny, he was given any drugs.

Was this investigation in the media, what gave him the idea to include the allegations?

I posted his affidavit sometime ago. he made that affidavit whilst still the Guantanamo.

He wanted this to go to Court.

He has confirmed he was given drugs. He has support that has confirmed he was given drugs.

He is not being lauded as a heroic whistle blower.

Please show your evidence that he is.

Your own link;

13. I have had medication - the identity of which was unknown to me,

and, earlier in the thread;

Perfect folk-hero material.

David (Hicks) v Goliath (US).