Free speech to remain chained at Guantanamo Bay, after Hicks returns
David Hicks was sentenced at the weekend, after being offered a deal in exchange for pleading guilty to the charge of providing material support to terrorists. As well as requiring that Hicks not allege mistreatment by US personnel at Guantanamo Bay, and that he not appeal his 7 year sentence – all but nine months of which has been suspended – that deal banned Hicks from speaking to the media for 12 months. In effect, this means that the key protagonist in one of the biggest political stories of this election year is gagged until after that election is over. Wendy Bacon, Program Director of Journalism at the University of Technology Sydney discusses the ban with The Wire, but first up, Professor George Williams, from the Faculty of Law at the University of New South Wales discoussed the free speech implications of Hicks’s plea, and whether anything like this deal has ever happened before.