Whether Australian David Hicks was part of the cowardly, cold-blooded, Islamist terrorist outfit, Al-Qaeda, is known only to one person and one person only: Hicks, himself. But the United States military commission, which was established by the perpetually bungling Bush administration, and whose legitimacy is challenged by the US Supreme Court the same court that had controversially installed George W. Bush as president in 2000 did not care if it had evidence beyond reasonable doubt to convict Hicks. But convict it did, and, to all extent and purposes, for all its glorified greatest democratic country in the world hubris, the increasingly desperate Bush regime will continue to convict other detained Guantanamo Bay terrorists.

In the end, though, Hicks pleaded guilty, just as it had been speculated days before his first hearing in the Gitmo,Cuba. His father, Terry, from the Adelaide suburb of Salisbury, said Hicks pleaded guilty because his son simply wanted to get out of the Gitmo hell-hole - and the torture that had been meted out to him by his American military jail-keepers since Hicks' capture in Afghanistan and his incarceration in Guantanamo over five years ago.

Bush, along with his former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, of whom Bush made his sacrificial lamb amid the failing American colonisation of Iraq, had strenuously claimed that none of the hundreds of terrorist suspects imprisoned in Gitmo had ever been tortured. In fact, they argued, the 'war prisoners' had been treated better than they themselves have treated by those they have killed and maimed in the course of their so-called Islamic jihad.

Given the Bush government's record for telling the truth, the Hicks verdict was aimed at saving Bush's face and that of Australia's prime minister John Howard, whose complicity in the Bush administration's compulsion to tell lies, whole lies and nothing but lies, is now, inevitably, under scrutiny ahead of the Australian national elections due later this year.

Kangaroo court

But what turned out in the Gitmo trial of the Australian the first to face what is widely known throughout the world, and certainly among influential media and the legal fraternity in America and Australia as a 'kangaroo court' has stunned and puzzled observers. It was the same kind of court, ushered by former Malaysian dictator, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, as he tried to bury his one-time protege, Anwar Ibrahim, on lies, deception and thuggery. Yet Anwar never pleaded guilty. For weeks leading up to the hearing, Hicks' lawyers had been hinting their client would plead not guilty. Then, on hearing the charge of providing material support to Al-Qaeda in 'court', Hicks' lawyer, US Marine Major Michael Mori, who has a huge following in Australia, said his client would 'reserve' his plea.

Forget Perry Mason and all the other regular US sitcom court-room dramas. The Gitmo trial of David Hicks was only the beginning of a drama far better than anything Hollywood writers could have ever scripted. For just as Mori had told Judge Kohlmann that his client planned to hold his plea, Hicks' father, sister, Lex Lasry QC, for the Law Council of Australia, Australian embassy officials, and one senior official representing Australia's attorney-general, Philip Ruddock, were hurried onto a waiting boat, crossed the bay to an airstrip where a Gulfstream jet with engines running awaited them.

They boarded the aircraft and was ready for take off when, suddenly, the door flew open. Patrick McCarthy, US commander of Gitmo, shoved his huge frame inside and announced there was now an imminent chance that Hicks will plead guilty. Then he waited outside the plane. Ten minutes later his phone rang: the court was ready to re-convene.

The Australian contingent, bar father Hicks and sister Stephanie, were ushered out of the plane and rushed across the bay on the Viper, the fastest water-craft laden with heavy machine-guns. What happened in the intervening period nobody will ever know at least for some considerable time thanks to gag order imposed by the military commission on Hicks. But the legal fraternity is clear about one thing: whatever the evidence against Major Mori's Australian client, Hicks has been kangaroo-ed.

Due process, the hallmark of the US justice system, guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution, was given either new meaning, short shrift or completely thrown out the window. It was certainly bastardized by the Bush regime in the same way Mahathir did of several political trials in Malaysia and Saddam Hussein had in Iraq and Mahathir's best friend Robert Mugabe has been doing in Zimbabwe. Bush circumvented bthe Fifth Amendment by declaring that Hicks was caught in a war, and the war crime is excepted in the Fifth Amendment from due process and Grand jury indictment. Australia's attorney-general Ruddock sang the same tune.

The plea bargain, not generally unusual in many legal cases, smelled increasingly of political interference from within the White House and Canberra. Most analysts think that plotting the entire process for Hicks was done between Bush and Howard well in advance. They were scripting the process and outcome. When US vice president Dick Cheney visited Australia recently, Howard was under growing pressure to bring Hicks home, even to face trial in Australia, rather than the Howard government forsake his rights to the US military for political expediency reasons than anything else.

Enormous pressure

In his next breath Howard began telling Australians he had put enormous pressure on Washington to speed up Hicks' trial in Gitmo, but that he would not have the Australian tried at home since Hicks was caught by Americans fighting an American war against terrorism. But wait one bloody minute: Did Australia not quickly sign up to Bush's extravagant lies and deception in 2001, and did Howard not rush Australian troops, though a tiny fraction compared to the Americans, to Iraq and Afghanistan?

The implication, by Canberra's reasoning, is that Hicks was fighting the Americans more than he was Australians. It's barmy logic, and there's nothing new about Howard's natural propensity to spin and deceive. Lies are the Howard government's second skin. The reasoning itself is as stupid as any that Howard has given in the face of his complete and blatant dereliction of duty towards ensuring the rights of all Australian citizens abroad, no matter what their circumstances. This includes Hicks, and especially Hicks. And that's the problem.

The Hicks sentence itself was surprising. Even Air Force Colonel Morris 'Moe' Davis, the assigned prosecutor, said he was surprised by the sentence. For one thing, the Hicks plea had been made behind Davis' back by veteran Defense Dapartment lawyer Susan Crawford. Bringing Hicks' case to the war-crimes tribunal first, and before all the procedural guidance could be ready, gave the impression that Crawford had stepped in to do Howard a favour at the expense of the commissions' credibility, which the US Supreme Court has slammed as another of Bush's all-time political shams.

As far as Howard is concerned, if it's good enough for Bush, it's good enough for him. Imagine, though, Davis' surprise. He had expected a two-digit prison time, at the very least, and even after taking into account the five-plus years Hicks had been interned in Gitmo. As it turned out, Hicks will serve just nine months in an Australian prison, probably the maximum-security Yatala, on the northern outskirts of Adelaide. He could be shipped back to Australia within 40 days, probably secretly, escorted home by US military guards, and in the same shackles he has been wearing in Gitmo. But wait: there's more. Hicks' final release from his sentence? New Year's eve, 2008 - after the Australian elections are done.

If Hicks is deemed such a dangerous terrorist, as Howard and the Americans claim, why the plea bargain in the first place, and why the sentence that says everything that is stupid about Gitmo, the Bush White House and Howard? Instead, in the light of America continuing to massively bungle and fail in its so-called war on terror, and an Australian federal election penciled in already, a secret political deal brokered between Washington and Howard in what ought to have been a credible legal trial does not seem the least bit fanciful or implausible. But the ones laughing the loudest are Islamic terrorists everywhere.

So much for American and Australian political and moral righteousness and ingenuity.

Hicks is bound by a gag order. He will not talk to the media about his time in Gitmo nor of any aspect of the trial, including the circumstance leading to his pre-trial plea bargain. Unlike earlier, he will not now claim his mistreatment by his Gitmo captors or the US government, and against whom he will also relinquish the right to sue. He will not sell his story, estimated to be worth millions, in any way. If he does, all sale proceeds will be confiscated by the Australian government. When he is free from prison, he can move around, including work. But he will be watched by the secret service, his movements most likely to be restricted by a control order imposed by Australia's Federal Court.

All this will happen in a year when Howard is trying to win his fifth term in office. The national poll is expected between September and November. The fact that the trial started and ended so amazingly rapidly smacks of Howard's political intervention, hypocrisy and more deception, for no credible reason whatsoever than to save his political neck and that of his increasingly arrogant government at a time when the opposition Labor Party is winning public opinion polls hands down. Howard is on Australians' noses. It's a stench he may not be able to eradicate any time soon, no matter how many gallons of Arabian perfume with which he douses himself.

Howard's form on economic management may be just enough to save his hide. But on all other aspects especially his intransigence over Hicks and the way he has strenuously and gallingly tried to publicly humiliate and indict Hicks through the media, his previous treatment of 'boat people', his lies over Siev X and Tampa still fresh in voters' minds, and how he routinely scare-mongers national security issues beyond all credible reason, the ballooning property bubble that is leaving many young Australians without ability to buy their own homes and about which he has left to the 'market' to decide their future, plus his intransigence over climate change, which, again, he is leaving to the 'market' to decide its short and long-term outcomes the Howard government's name is manure, and all by its own making, and with special help from Howard's best mate, the equally phony George Bush.

MANJIT BHATIA is an Australian writer who specialises in international and Asian economics and politics.