Petition defends Hicks from censorship bid

July 21, 2011
Issue 
David Hicks.

Julian Assange, John Pilger and Noam Chomsky have added their names to a new online petition in support of former Guantanamo Bay prisoner David Hicks.

They join scores of other signatories, including Greens MP Adam Bandt, human rights lawyer Julian Burnside, Liberty Victoria President Spencer Zifcak and Overland Journal editor Jeff Sparrow. Overland released the online petition on July 21.

The petition is a response to the announcement that federal prosecutors will move to seize the proceeds of Hicks' 2010 book, Guantanamo: My Journey, under the Commonwealth Proceeds of Crime Act.

It says: “Many Australians regard the treatment of David Hicks as an international outrage. What took place — what continues to take place — in Guantanamo Bay deserves more publicity, not less. If the government thinks it has done nothing wrong, it has nothing to fear from a full discussion of the Hicks case.

“The move against Hicks’ memoirs should concern everyone. But it is of particular relevance to writers and publishers, precisely because of the direct interference into publications with which the government politically disagrees.

“How can Australian publishers feel safe publishing material that is controversial knowing that the Australian government is willing to use laws to financially penalise perceived opponents? Fundamentally, this is an issue of political censorship.

“As lawyer Elizabeth O’Shea put it, ‘Anyone who believes in the right to a fair trial and freedom from torture should defend Hicks.’ The government’s application is to be heard 3 August in NSW. We’re asking those in the publishing industry to sign this petition (leave your name below or send us an email) because this action has alarming political and financial implications for writers and publishers everywhere.”

[For the full text of the petition and to add your name visit http://web.overland.org.au/ ]

Comments

"The petition is a response to the announcement that federal prosecutors will move to seize the proceeds of Hick’s 2010 book, Guantanamo: My Journey, under the Commonwealth Proceeds of Crime Act." Maybe he should release his book as Cory Doctorow does on boingboing.net. For free and ask for donations. Maybe even ask Cory to run it on his site? Release it on p2p, and in the intro ask for donations. Work your way around the punishment while embarrassing the Aussie gov.
Greed via secrecy & rumors. 7/24/11 Greed is the problem. Secrecy & rumors are the agents of manipulation to satisfy that selfish gluttony. It is no secret that greed is the basic problem. Information is controlled by a monopoly on ideas for the purpose of heaping capitol on top of capitol. Copy rights and patents are monopolies. To the creators, it seems, a just deal or right to monopolize on their idea but most of these tiny monopolies, created by worker or writers, end up in a vast vault owned by the elite. Your ideas are their property. Secrecy is the key to their power. They are The Elite. The elite are the bankers who control and even create our money through which they buy our minds and soles keeping us as their slaves. Banking is an old idea which houses a host of ideas on how to produce capitol by expending the least amount of effort or work. It is a very cut throat business. Some lucky heirs of this age old private business feel that they are superior and make statements like "the fittest will survive" thinking they are the fittest. What a joke that they think they are fit:?) They are arrogant with nothing but a bag of tricks to keep them hidden behind the curtain, as the wizard in "The Wizard of Oz". Fractional Reserve lending is but one example of those tricks. It is a loaning practice used by banks (now legal) and has become a common tool used by banks to print money without being required to have equal assets to back those loans. They are creating money in that process. So, what's the problem? Well, as I see it, there is no problem ---'THAT IS'---[IF] those banks practicing Fractional Reserve Lending are government owned operated by government paid employees with regular pay checks rather than million dollar bonuses to executives. But they aren't. If all banks were government owned or nationalized then all the profits, through reasonable fees and interest rates along with the fractional reserve lending practices, would go into the infrastructures of countries without imposing austerity measures to pay back to the IMF(wall street or the federal reserve[a private group of banks created in 1913 in the Federal Reserve Act signed into law by Woodrow Wilson who later confessed that he sold out the American economy the Banking cartels OR the Rothschild banking family]) and not bonuses into the pockets of executives there off. What, you may ask, does this have to do with David Hicks? These private bankers need places like Guantanamo to keep fear alive. They need terrorist to legitimize torture and drone attacks in all countries including the USA to scare people into being patriots to these illegal atrocities and to give up their rights and social benefits. During the times since the 911 attacks on the world trade center all citizens in all countries lost most of their rights – that is if they had them in the first place. These bankers are the culprits of torture and war crimes as they create their world order. They are the reason for the news media silencing. They’ve bought the elected officials through lobbyists who work for the Wall Street deep pocket corporations. Secrets and rumors are their means. Rupert Murdoch is the mouth piece for these private elite bankers. He is being exposed more and more through Wikileaks and other progressive internet news websites like Democracy Now or Global research. The banksters are being exposed by writers like Ellen Brown who wrote “The Web of Debt” and is actively trying to help create a national bank. She is starting by first trying to start a State bank in California just as the Bank of North Dakota has been a people owned bank since 1923. Through activists efforts we will eventually take back our original banking rights for the people. It defies all reason to allow private banking businesses create money with the click of a computer key by the trillions and then loaning that money to governments to be paid back to the bankster with the interest of his choosing. Then the people, innocent of the plunder of world economies, are supposed to pay this huge bill through austerity measures?? I don’t think so! Signing this petition is great but more details should be made available naming the criminals who are responsible for not only torturing David Hicks and the rest of his story but for the ruining of billions of peoples lives world wide for the sake of their precious greed. David Hicks’s copy right is null by the banksters who control the CIA and most secret organizations because they foot the bills with money they create out of thin air. Solving the bankster problem would go a long way in solving Mr Hicks's problem along with our own, not the least of which is freedom of speech. Terry P PS: It has been estimated that the Rothschild family fortune is over 100 trillion pounds. That is probably a conservative figure considering their two centuries of banking history. : And thank you Dean Henderson, Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Julian Assange and Simon Butler for much information about secrecy and the trickery spun within.
He is a convicted supplier of materiel support for terrorism - a charge he plead guilty to. If he didn't want the conviction, he could have gone with a not-guilty plea. And spare me the excuse that he just did it to get out of there. Perhaps he should have been given better legal advice. Hence due to his conviction he should not profit from his confessed crime. End of story. It's not about politics.
As reported in this article http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/48314 even the former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay insists Hicks' charge was a political favour from the Bush government to Australian government of John Howard. It says: "In a July 25 interview, the former chief prosecutor of military commissions at Guantanamo, Colonel Morris Davis, told Truthout.org’s Jason Leopold he thought Hicks was prosecuted as a 'favour' to the Australian government, then led by John Howard. "'Reasonable people could look at this [case] and see this was a favor for an ally,” Davis said. "'I don't think the facts are in dispute: to make this case go away it had to get done quickly. If there was an arraignment, then a trial would have likely been set for the fall [of 2007], about two months before Howard would have faced the voters.” Davis implied Hicks should not have been charged at all: “It was a terrible case. We told the world these guys are the ‘worst of the worst’. David Hicks was a knucklehead. He was just a foot solider, not a war criminal. "'But when Congress passed the Military Commissions Act they authorized prosecuting material support, which is what Hicks was charged with, as a war crime. You could prosecute everyone at Guantanamo under that theory.'"

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