David Hicks
David Matthew Hicks is an Australian who attended al-Qaeda's Al Farouq training camp in Afghanistan. Hicks traveled to Pakistan after converting to Islam to learn more about the faith, eventually leading to his time in the training camp. He states that he was unfamiliar with al-Qaeda and had no idea that they targeted civilians. Hicks met with Osama bin Laden in 2001.
Later that year, he was captured and brought to the U.S. to be tried. He was then detained by the United States in Guantanamo Bay detention camp, where he reported undergoing torture at the hands of American soldiers, from 2002 until 2007. He was eventually convicted under the Military Commissions Act of 2006.
In 2012, his conviction was overturned because the law under which he was charged had not been passed at the time the actions he was arrested for were committed.
Early life
David Hicks was born in Adelaide, South Australia, to Terry and Susan Hicks. His parents separated when he was ten years old, and his father later remarried. He has a half sister.Described by his father as "a typical boy who couldn't settle down" and by his former school principal as one of "the most troublesome kids", Hicks reportedly experimented with alcohol and drugs as a teenager and was expelled from Smithfield Plains High School in 1990 at age 14. Before turning 15, Hicks was given dispensation by his father from attending school. His former partner has claimed that Hicks turned to criminal activity, including vehicle theft, allegedly in order to feed himself, although no adult criminal record was ever recorded for this.
Hicks moved between various jobs, including factory work and working at a series of outback cattle stations in the Northern Territory, Queensland and South Australia.
Marriage and family
Hicks met Jodie Sparrow in Adelaide when he was 17 years old. Sparrow already had a daughter, whom Hicks raised as his own. Hicks and Sparrow had two children together, daughter Bonnie and son Terry, before separating in 1996. After their separation, Hicks moved to Japan to become a horse trainer.He married Aloysia Brooks in 2009. Hicks appeared in court in April 2017 for allegedly assaulting a subsequent partner in Craigmore, South Australia but the case was dropped with legal costs awarded against the South Australia Police.
Guantanamo Bay
In 1999, Hicks converted to Islam and took the name Muhammed Dawood. He was later reported to have been publicly denounced due to his lack of religious observance. Hicks was captured in Afghanistan in December 2001 by the Afghan Northern Alliance and sold for a US$5,000 bounty to the United States military. He was transported to Guantanamo Bay where he was designated an enemy combatant. He alleged that during his detention, he was tortured via anal examination. The United States first filed charges against Hicks in 2004 under a military commission system newly created by Presidential Order. Those proceedings failed in 2006 when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that the military commission system was unconstitutional. The military commission system was re-established by an act of the United States Congress.In 2007, Hicks consented to a plea bargain in which he pleaded guilty to charges of providing material support for terrorism by the United States Guantanamo military commission under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Hicks received a suspended sentence and returned to Australia. The conviction was overturned by the US Court of Military Commission Review in February 2015. Revised charges were filed against Hicks in February 2007 before a new commission under the new act. The following month, in accordance with a pre-trial agreement struck with convening authority Judge Susan J. Crawford, Hicks entered an Alford plea to a single newly codified charge of providing material support for terrorism. Hicks's legal team attributed his acceptance of the plea bargain to his "desperation for release from Guantanamo" and duress under "instances of severe beatings, sleep deprivation and other conditions of detention that contravene international human rights norms."
Hicks became one of the first people charged and subsequently convicted under the Military Commissions Act. There was widespread Australian and international criticism and political controversy over Hicks' treatment, the evidence tendered against him, his trial outcome, and the newly created legal system under which he was prosecuted. In October 2012, the United States Court of Appeals ruled that the charge under which Hicks had been convicted was invalid because the law did not exist at the time of the alleged offence, and it could not be applied retroactively.
In January 2015, Hicks' lawyer announced that the US government had said that Hicks' conviction was not correct and that it does not dispute his innocence.
Return to Australia
In April 2007, Hicks was returned to Australia to serve the remaining nine months of a suspended seven-year sentence. During this period, he was precluded from all media contact. There was criticism that the government delayed his release until after the 2007 Australian election. Colonel Morris Davis, the former Pentagon chief prosecutor, later confessed political interference in the case by the Bush administration in the United States and the Howard government in Australia. He said that Hicks should not have been prosecuted.Hicks served his term in Adelaide's Yatala Labour Prison and was released under a control order on 29 December 2007. The control order expired in December 2008. Hicks still lives in Adelaide and has written an autobiography.
Religious and militant activities
Hicks converted to Islam, and began studying Wahhabism at a mosque in Gilles Plains, a suburb north of Adelaide. The president of the Islamic Society of South Australia, Wali Hanifi, described Hicks as having "some interest in military things", and that "after personal experience and research, that Islam was the answer".In 2007, Hicks explained his motivation to convert to Islam:
Eight years ago I converted to Islam. I was completely transformed by its pure expression of monotheism, its compassion, its sense of community, and its role as the religion of the oppressed and the wretched of the earth.
Kosovo Liberation Army
Around May 1999, Hicks travelled to Albania in order to join the Kosovo Liberation Army. The US military alleged that he undertook basic training and hostile action before returning to Australia and converting to Islam. The KLA did not accept Islamic fundamentalism, and many of its fighters and fundraisers were Catholic. In June 1999, the Kosovo War ended and the KLA disbanded as part of UNSCR 1244. Hicks described his time with the KLA as a life-changing experience and on his return to Australia, converted to Islam and began studying at a mosque in Gilles Plains in Adelaide.Lashkar-e-Taiba
On 11 November 1999, Hicks travelled to Pakistan to study Islam and allegedly began training with Lashkar-e-Taiba in early 2000. In the US Military Commission charges presented in 2004, Hicks is accused of training at the Mosqua Aqsa camp in Pakistan, after which he "travelled to a border region between Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and Indian-controlled Kashmir, where he engaged in hostile action against Indian forces.".In a March 2000 letter to his family, Hicks wrote:
don't ask what's happened, I can't be bothered explaining the outcome of these strange events has put me in Pakistan-Kashmir in a training camp. Three months training. After which it is my decision whether to cross the line of control into Indian occupied Kashmir.
In another letter on 10 August 2000, Hicks wrote from Kashmir claiming to have been a guest of Pakistan's army for two weeks at the front in the "controlled war" with India:
I got to fire hundreds of bullets. Most Muslim countries impose hanging for civilians arming themselves for conflict. There are not many countries in the world where a tourist, according to his visa, can go to stay with the army and shoot across the border at its enemy, legally.
During this period, Hicks kept a notebook to document his training in weapon use, explosives, and military tactics, in which he wrote that guerrilla warfare involved "sacrifice for Allah". He took extensive notes on, and made sketches of, various weaponry mechanisms and attack strategies. Letters to his family detailed his training:
I learnt about weapons such as ballistic missiles, surface to surface and shoulder fired missiles, anti aircraft and anti-tank rockets, rapid fire heavy and light machine guns, pistols, AK-47s, mines and explosives. After three months everybody leaves capable and war-ready being able to use all of these weapons capably and responsibly. I am now very well trained for jihad in weapons some serious like anti-aircraft missiles.
In January 2001, Hicks was provided with funding and an introductory letter from Lashkar-e-Taiba. He travelled to Afghanistan to attend training. According to Hicks' autobiography Guantanamo: My Journey, he was unfamiliar with the name Al-Qaeda until after his detainment in Guantanamo Bay.
Afghanistan
Upon arrival in Afghanistan, Hicks allegedly went to an al-Qaeda guest house where he met Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a high-ranking al Qaeda member. He turned over his passport and told them that he would use the alias "Muhammad Dawood".Hicks allegedly "attended a number of al-Qaeda training courses at various camps around Afghanistan, learning guerrilla warfare, weapons training, including landmines, kidnapping techniques and assassination methods." He also allegedly participated "in an advanced course on surveillance, in which he conducted surveillance of the abandoned buildings that had formerly been the US and British embassies in Kabul, Afghanistan." Hicks was sent to learn guerrilla techniques for the Pakistani L-e-T for use in disputed Kashmir.
Hicks denies any involvement with al-Qaeda. He also denies any knowledge of links between the camp and al-Qaeda. According to Hicks, he did not know of the existence of al-Qaeda until he was taken to Cuba and was interrogated by US military personnel.
On one occasion when al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden visited an Afghan camp, the US Defense Department alleges Hicks questioned bin Laden about the lack of English in training material and subsequently "began to translate the training camp materials from Arabic to English". Hicks denies this and denies having had the necessary language proficiency, a claim supported by Major Michael Mori and fellow detainee Moazzam Begg. The latter said that Hicks could not speak enough Arabic to be understood. Hicks wrote home that he had met Osama bin Laden 20 times. He later, however, told investigators he had exaggerated, that he had seen bin Laden about eight times and spoken to him only once.
There are a lot of Muslims who want to meet Osama Bin Laden but after being a Muslim for 16 months I get to meet him.
Prosecutors also allege Hicks was interviewed by Mohammed Atef, an al-Qaeda military commander, about his background and "the travel habits of Australians". In a memoir that was later repudiated by its author, the Guantanamo detainee Feroz Abbasi claimed Hicks was "Al-Qaedah's 24 Golden Boy" and "obviously the favourite recruit" of their al-Qaeda trainers during exercises at the al-Farouq camp near Kandahar. The memoir made a number of claims, including that Hicks was teamed in the training camp with Filipino recruits from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and that, during internment in Camp X-Ray, Hicks allegedly described his desire to "go back to Australia and rob and kill Jews ... crash a plane into a building" and to "go out with that last big adrenaline rush."