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Howard must press for videos: Hicks' lawyer

May 22, 2004 - 2:58PM

Australia must press for the immediate release of video tapes of the treatment of Guantanamo Bay detainees, the lawyer of Australian terror suspect David Hicks said today.

The Pentagon is holding an unidentified number of video tapes capturing the actions of a US military squad assigned to subdue disobedient prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Hicks, 28, of Adelaide, and Mamdouh Habib, of Sydney, have been detained without charge at the US military base for more than two years.

Former cellmates of the Australians have claimed they witnessed Hicks and Habib being abused by their US captors in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay.

Hicks' Australian lawyer, Stephen Kenny, today said Prime Minister John Howard must immediately ask the US to release the video tapes.

''We have known about video tapes now for about a week,'' Mr Kenny said.

''We also know that there are credible allegations that the beating of David Hicks in Afghanistan was video taped.

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''If the Australian government is seriously interested in protecting the rights of an Australian citizen, they will immediately demand copies of those video tapes and make them available publicly.''

The Pentagon has also revealed that senior military lawyers in Washington raised objections to the use of interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay that were harsher than permitted under standard military doctrine.

As their protests grew in late 2002, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ended the use of such tactics pending a review which stretched from mid-January to mid-April last year, a senior civilian Pentagon lawyer told reporters in the United States.

The lawyer, who discussed the matter on condition of anonymity because details are classified as secret, said Rumsfeld in April last year approved new guidelines which won the military lawyers' blessing.

Those guidelines allowed harsher methods than the approaches used in Iraq because Iraq prisoners were deemed to be protected by the Geneva conventions but Guantanamo Bay detainees were not, the lawyer said.

''Guantanamo Bay was set up by the Americans to be beyond the law,'' Mr Kenny said.

''And it's very clear what happens when you tell people that whatever you do is beyond the law and no law can touch them.

''Unfortunately, it appears to be human nature that when you give people an option like that, they take it to excess.

''The Australian government's failure to insist on the Geneva Convention makes the world an unsafer place for all Australians.''

Mr Howard said yesterday the government was seeking a Pentagon response to the claims that Hicks and Habib had been abused while in US custody.

Hicks has been detained by the US since his capture among Taliban forces in Afghanistan in December 2001.

He was initially held by US forces at a prison in Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay in January 2002.

Habib, a Sydney father of four, has been held at Guantanamo Bay after being seized in Pakistan in October 2001 on suspicion of having terrorist links.