Free Hicks; Charge Downer!

While Howard and his ministers try out ethnic jibes to distract us from their government giving or allowing financial support to Saddam, can anyone in that government tell us why it is allowing a foreign power to jail an Australian without charge for over four years now? David Hicks is still in Concentration Camp X-Ray, while the AWB heads and their government minders live high and free.

AWB, the Australian Wheat Board, has been caught paying Saddam bribery money prior to the Australian (and British and US) invasion of Iraq. The justification for the war was that the boycotts were insufficient to reign in Saddam's capacity for Weapons of Mass Distruction. The boycotts were insufficient precisely because our own AWB was subverting it with greasy kickback deals. The AWB is overseen by the government, but of course now no one can remember anything about it. Meanwhile, David Hicks, a young Australian adventuring abroad and caught up in Afganistan, kidnapped and sold to the US by Pakistani opportunists, still languishes without charge or hope, in a military hell-hole that Bush claims exists magically outside any legal jurisdication, in the hope that he and his warmongers will be able to get away with the sort of sick shit they have been caught doing in Iraq.