MICHAEL MORI
Viking, 2014, 292 pages, $29.99 (pb)
MURDER AT CAMP DELTA:
A Staff Sergeant’s Pursuit of the Truth about Guantánamo
Bay
JOSEPH HICKMANSimon & Schuster, 2015, 245 pages, $29.99 (pb)
Major Michael Mori was a Republican-leaning, US military
lawyer who “embraced the values I had been taught in scouts, sports, high
school, college, law school and the Marines”, above all the ideal of fair play. In 2003, Mori was assigned as defense counsel
for David Hicks, an Australian citizen captured by Afghan warlords during the
US-led invasion of Afghanistan following the Al Qaeda terrorist attack in New
York in 2001, and then detained in the US Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Mori, however, was confused about what, if any, crimes Hicks
was alleged to have committed. So, too, were
the prosecutors as Hicks’ imprisonment without charge, but with severe abuse, dragged
on for year after year as he faced certain future conviction by a rigged
Military Commission judicial process which junked all the basic rules of
evidence. Mori saw his priority as
getting a suicidal Hicks out of Guantanamo.
Faced with the dead-end of the kangaroo court, Mori had to
take Hicks’ legal and human rights to the court of public opinion, “the only
arena that mattered to politicians”, especially to Australian Prime Minister, John
Howard, in an election year (2007).
Howard had done nothing for Hicks for six years when it was in his political
interest to promote war and terror neurosis but with the electoral calculus
changed to parliamentary survival, Howard, in a “belated political move to
defuse the Hicks issue”, instigated a plea bargain with Washington which at
last got Hicks returned to Australia with a residual prison term.
The price Hicks was to pay for an end to his existence of fear, pain and despair, however, was
the tag of ‘convicted terrorist’ despite Hicks’ guilty plea being coerced under
extreme duress and, in 2015, ruled void in the US courts.
Mori, who retired from the military in 2012 and joined the
social justice section of an Australian law firm, played a vital role in
justice for Hicks but he reminds the readers of his valuable book that “it was
they, the Australian public, who got David Hicks out. I hope that the people of Australia never
forget that”.
Like Mori, Sergeant Joe Hickman was “a patriotic American”
and he was proud to finally get to “meet the enemy” as a guard in Guantanamo in
2006. “Keeping terrorists locked up was
an important job”, Hickman writes, but, like Mori, he also had standards,
namely a belief in “basic American principles of decency”, even towards those he
had been told were “evil men bent on destroying our country”.
Decency, however, was decidedly lacking in the “excessively
punishing” detention conditions, cultural insults and “Rodney King-style
beatings” of cuffed and shackled detainees.
The “mass violation of regulations” was disturbing to Hickman, a former
civilian prison officer, more so because the abuse by the guards was condoned
or orchestrated by senior officers. A
culture of lies and cover-up made Hickman “feel shame, both in myself and in my
military”.
What tipped him over the moral edge, however, was the murder
of three detainees. Ludicrously portrayed
as a triple suicide designed to damage the reputation of the US in an act of
‘asymmetrical warfare’, the deaths were, to Hickman, who was a witness,
probably the result of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ (torture, in any
decent person’s language) that “went too far”.
A US Navy investigation tried to bury the affair in a “dry,
heavily redacted, deliberately garbled” report, so Hickman felt compelled to
take his story public. With initial
caution (Hickman was a “lifelong conservative”), he approached the Seton Hall
University Law School whose professor (a “left-leaning wingnut from the 1960s”,
feared Hickman) and his students had earlier found that 92% of the almost 800 Guantanamo
detainees (including David Hicks) were not Al Qaeda terrorists at all.
Through forensic document analysis, the official Navy report
was shown to be a complete whitewash and Hickman went from wanting to punch the
lights out of “typical liberal college kids” to bonding with the “bright, young
legal researchers”.
Everybody else, sadly but predictably, failed Hickman in his
search for the truth about the deaths in custody. The US military command failed him. The Justice Department and FBI, under new
(Obama) management, failed him. The
mainstream media failed him. The cost to
Hickman was his career, retirement benefits and lifetime medical coverage as a
veteran but he refused to place a price on integrity.
As a Bertholt Brecht poem put it, the military man is very
powerful because,
“He can fly and he can kill.But he has one defect:
He can think”.
Major Mori and Sergeant Hickman thought deeply about the
wrongdoing they saw in the ‘War on Terror’.
They courageously acted for truth, justice and an ‘American Way’ other
than the one of lies, torture and killing.
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