Hicks’ Guantanamo Case Riddled With Secrecy

A few quick words today on David Hicks’ plea agreement. Hicks was one of the group of four Guantánamo detainees for whom the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a habeas petition in the district court in 2002, and it was his case (with those of others) that went to the Supreme Court in 2004. He is now represented by Josh Dratel and Dan Mori.

Hicks was charged with providing material support for terrorism by providing himself to the Taliban forces as a foot soldier. The charges themselves are amazingly mundane—they say he received military training, wasn’t such a good soldier, and fled the front line fighting at every turn (perhaps this detail explains why the Convening Authority for the military commissions rejected additional proposed charges involving actual shooting at American forces).

What does it mean to provide “material support

Giving human rights training to the Kurds in Turkey, for example, can be a crime—they’re on the list, and there’s no real opportunity to get off of it. The statute doesn’t require intent to further the criminal ends of the group, so in that sense it is far broader than the prosecutor’s traditional best friend – conspiracy – and, unsurprisingly, the domestic statute has thrice been ruled unconstitutional by the district court in Los Angeles where we are challenging it.

Hicks was thus faced with a nebulous charge to defend against, and with a tribunal system that allowed classified evidence he could never see, hearsay, and evidence extracted from others through torture to be used against him. Beyond that, last Monday two of his three lawyers were kicked off the case – one, Josh Dratel, because he refused to agree in advance to be bound by any restrictions the military decided to put on him in the future (“a blank check on my ethical obligations as a lawyer