The Pentagon on Thursday formally accused an Australian citizen being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with a single charge of providing material support for terrorism, setting the stage for the first military trial of a terrorism suspect under legislation that Congress passed last year.
The charge alleges that David Hicks, 31, a one-time Outback cowboy and kangaroo skinner, was in league with al-Qaeda at the time of the U.S. attacks on Taliban forces in Afghanistan in 2001, had met with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and had joined Taliban and al-Qaeda forces fighting U.S.-allied forces in Afghanistan on Nov. 9, 2001. Hicks was captured as he was attempting to flee to Pakistan.
Under new procedures, which Congress approved after the Supreme Court ruled that an earlier Pentagon trial scheme was illegal, Hicks must be arraigned within 30 days. His trial must be within 90 days after that, meaning his case will go before a military commission by July.
It would be the first U.S. war- crimes trial since World War II.
The decision to charge Hicks only with supporting al-Qaeda was something of a surprise. Prosecutors initially also had charged him with attempted murder, alleging that he had directed “small-arms fire, explosives or other means and methods with the intent to kill diverse persons.” The Pentagon offered no explanation as to why the charge was dropped.
Hicks’ defense attorney, Marine Maj. Dan Mori, slammed the prosecution, charging that Hicks had been held for five years at Guantanamo on “made-up offenses.”
“David has been charged with only one offense: material support of terrorism,” Mori said. “Such a charge has never existed in the laws of war.”
Hicks is among the best- known captives at Guantanamo, in part because his five- year detention without trial has stirred controversy in human- rights circles in his homeland, a staunch war-on-terrorism ally of the Bush administration.
The eight-page charge sheet casts him as an illegitimate warrior trying to repel the 2001 U.S. invasion that toppled the Taliban.
It describes the Christian- born Hicks as a globe-trotting convert to Islam who fought as a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army in the Balkans before traveling to Pakistan in 1999.
It says he traveled in 2001 to Afghanistan, where he attended al-Qaeda training camps, stayed in a residence that also housed shoe-bomber Richard Reid and met bin Laden, to whom he complained about a lack of English- language training materials.
Later, near Kunduz, he allegedly spent two hours on the front line before it collapsed and was forced to flee. Also present at that battle was American John Walker Lindh, who’s now in a U.S. prison.
