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CANBERRA - More than five years after his image was first splashed across Australian newspapers and television screens, aiming a rocket launcher with Albanian Islamic guerrillas, David Hicks is finally coming home.
The one-time itinerant drug-user from Adelaide turned Muslim jihadist is expected to learn this morning what sentence will be imposed for a guilty plea before a United States military commission on a charge of providing material support for terrorism.
Under a prisoner-exchange agreement with the US, Hicks will be able to serve his time in an Australian prison, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer confirmed yesterday.
An AAP reporter at the hearing said that "overweight, clean-shaven, smiling and with a straggly mop of dark brown hair dangling down to his chest, Hicks resembled more an overfed member of a heavy metal band than a suspected terrorist". Hicks, wearing a khaki prison jumpsuit, initially declined to enter a plea.
But his later decision to strike a deal and enter a guilty plea to gain a far shorter sentence than the 20 years chief prosecutor Colonel Moe Davis considered a "reasonable benchmark" will not silence critics of the American military justice system and the Australian Government's handling of his five-year detention at Guantanamo Bay. Nor will it still cynicism at Canberra's recent increased stridency for the case to come to trial, following its unflinching refusal to pressure Washington for his release in the same manner as Britain and other countries secured the return of their nationals caught - like Hicks - in the Afghan war.
Although many Australians believe Hicks to be guilty, there was overwhelming support for Canberra to insist on a speedy and fair civilian trial, preferably in Australia, or for his release from a system ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court.
A Newspoll found 56 per cent of voters opposed the Government's handling of Hicks' detention, and a Morgan poll in Prime Minister John Howard's Sydney seat of Bennelong reported that 62 per cent of his constituents believed Canberra should demand the prisoner's immediate release.
Concerns for the fairness of the US military system prompted entrepreneur Dick Smith, one of Australia's richest men, to fund his defence.
Downer yesterday dismissed criticism and suggestions that Hicks' trial was brought forward to help Howard's endangered Government in this year's election as a conspiracy theory, and said the Government had been demanding the trial since 2003.
"I'm glad it has reached a conclusion," he told ABC radio. "I think there are all sorts of different views in the community.
"First of all there is the view he clearly could not have done anything wrong and we hate the Americans and all that. There were people who thought that David Hicks should just be strung up and he was just a horror, and there were people in the middle - which is where I was really - and in my view it was always that the trial had taken too long."
But the process, and the dismissal yesterday by Presiding Judge Colonel Ralph Kohlmann of two of Hicks' three lawyers, continued to fan outrage in Australia.
Democrats leader Lynn Allison described the commission as a kangaroo court, and Greens leader Senator Bob Brown, comparing the process to the former Soviet Union, said: "The court is nowhere near the level of justice that we expect in a Western democracy."
Amnesty International also attacked the commission, accusing it of making up the rules as it went.
According to the evidence against Hicks, he trained and fought with the Kosovo Liberation Army for the final two months of the Balkans war, converted to Islam back home in Adelaide and later joined the Islamic terror group Lashkar-e Toiba in Pakistan.
Later he also trained with al Qaeda, saw and once talked to Osama bin Laden, and after the September 11 terror attacks slipped into Afghanistan, where he was captured by a Northern Alliance warlord and handed over to US troops for US$1000. Hicks says he did not fight against Western forces.
He has also claimed to have given statements under duress and to have been tortured, beaten, subjected to sleep and sensory deprivation and to have had unknown medication forced upon him.
Hicks has been in solitary confinement since March last year.
US authorities have rejected the allegations of torture and mistreatment, and Canberra has accepted Washington's assurances.
Yesterday, before he was led into the courtroom, he met his father, Terry, and sister, Stephanie, in an emotional reunion for three hours. Hicks wanted to hear news of his two children, and Stephanie gave him family pictures and two novels.
In an angry exchange, Kohlmann dismissed his civilian lawyer, Joshua Dratel, and one of military defender Major Michael Mori's assistants. But after an initial hearing, another specially-convened sitting saw Hicks plead guilty under a deal that will provide his eventual ticket home.
