Digression: David Hicks, Amnesty, Gitmo

With all the renters in the nation being left to the dogs by Howard and Co, and State Govts dithering ineffectually, DH feels it is churlish to complain about her lot, which is enviable while she's got it, but dont let any pollies hear about it, lest they sic the "downward envy" mob onto her in a classic divide-and-rule manouevre...

So, being relatively secure DH will for the moment devote herself to Good Works, and nothing seems more important than the David Hicks case.

Pay no attention to that silly bitch, Miranda Devine, who only lives to stick it to the "intellectual" suburbs, ie the people who pay for her bread and butter by continuing to buy the the SMH, even when it allows the likes of her to insult them. Now there we have a case of "upward envy" - she doesn't seem to have much of a brain for complexity, does she?

Anyhow, DH has said it before: personally she thinks David Hicks should be made an example of, to deter other young men with more testosterone than brains from throwing themselves into Islamo-fascist adventurism, but not at the expense of Australia's self-respect. She quotes with approval www.getup.org.au which states

Because the evidence against David Hicks will never really be tested in a proper court, we will never feel certain whether five years plus of punishment was given to an innocent or guilty man. Because unlike other governments, ours has failed to stand up for its citizen's basic human and legal rights - and that matters more than what kind of man David Hicks is or isn't.

The Federal Government has diminished Australia by legitimising an unfair and illegal system, by allowing an Australian, guilty or innocent, to be imprisoned year after year without trial despite serious reports of mistreatment and abuse; by failing to do what America, its allies and even its adversaries around the world did, which is to say "no citizen of ours will be treated this way."

Our Government should stand shamed, not smirking. And to help remind our Prime Minister where the Australian people stand, we've got a delivery planned: 17,000 postcards from you, plus 10,143 directly from voters in his own electorate, demanding David Hicks be returned home now. Collected in just ten hours by GetUp members, that's roughly one in every eight voters in Bennelong; people who, regardless of their opinion of David Hicks, have written directly to John Howard asking for justice.

That's because they understand something the Prime Minister apparently doesn't - that the values of a civilised society, including the prohibition against torture and freedom from imprisonment without a fair trial, are bedrock. They're w hat we fight for when our soldiers are sent to war; they're what we look to in times of uncertainty. They're part of what separates us from the dictators and thugs we condemn.

DH recommends that readers check out this video too, by the defence team at Gtmo: http://emedia.amnesty.org/usa-230207-eng.ram, Horrifying when we know that many of the inmates are completely innocent, perhaps in the wrong place at the wrong time, confessing to anything to get away from the United States ingenious methods of torture - being taped inside a sleeping-bag and hung upside down being the one mentioned in the tape. To think the DH has lived to see the West, to which her family escaped from Eastern European tyranny, to sink into such depravity in her lifetime