Former Australian former detainee of Guantanamo Bay, David Hicks, stole the show this week at the Human Rights Awards ceremony in Sydney where he heckled Senator George Brandis.
“Hey, my name is David Hicks!” he yelled during the attorney general’s speech. “I was tortured for five-and-a-half years in Guantanamo Bay in the full knowledge of your party! What do you have to say?”
Senator Brandis apparently did not have much to say about it, walking off stage without responding.
Hicks’s outburst followed the release this week of a report by the US senate intelligence committee, detailing shocking torture methods that were employed at the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
Hicks was captured in 2001 by the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan for allegedly fighting for Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network. The Australian was subsequently interned by the US military at the infamous detention facility in Cuba.
Hicks pleaded guilty to providing material support for terrorism and spent six years confined at the Guantanamo Detention Camp. He spent the final year of his sentence in Adelaide’s Yatala Prison before being released under a control order.
George Brandis’s Liberal Party was in government at the time of Hicks’s detention.
Hicks attests that he was convicted on a statement of facts for which he never received any evidence. He further claims that he was severely beaten, sexually abused, forcibly drugged and subjected to extensive periods of solitary confinement by his American captors.
Such torture methods, among others, were confirmed in a damning report released by the US senate intelligence committee this week. Hicks says the report makes it more difficult for anyone to deny that torture took place at Guantanamo Bay.
“There are Australian officials …. who knew the entire time what was happening to me, and what the practices were in Guantanamo, even though they told the Australian public that everything was fine, that I was being treated humanely,” Hicks said, according to The Guardian.
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