Funny Video, Unfunny Cause

Here's a comedian's spoof of what it would be like if Australian David Hicks who is currently detained at Gitmo appeared on MTV's Cribs:



Getup.org ruins this comedic video by advertising their website where you can petition for "David's" release. A visit to the site greets you with this message:

Already more than 55,000 people have joined GetUp's petition to the Australian Government, asking our leaders to bring David Hicks home. Vote David Out of the House now, and we'll add your name to the call!

Great. Let's just release poor David, it was obviously a misunderstanding. I should probably note some of the background in what led to him being in Gitmo, however.

First, let's stop calling him David. When he was taking up arms against America in Afghanistan he was known to his terrorist brothers as Abu Muslim al-Austraili (or Mohammed Dawood; remember it's a rule that a Muslim must have at least fourteen names.) According to the over-sympathetic entry on Wikipedia:

[Abu Muslim al-Austraili has been held] ... as an unlawful combatant by the United States Government at Guantánamo Bay for more than five years without trial. According to the U.S. government, Hicks served as a common foot soldier with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But that's just according to the US government, and we all know they would create and elaborate lie and waste man power and money imprisoning an Australian citizen they knew to be innocent.

Later, the man who would never take up arms against the US:

... traveled to Albania, where he joined the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a paramilitary organisation of ethnic Albanians fighting against Serbian forces in the Kosovo War, and served with them for two months.

For those of you who are unaware of the KLA they are an organization that:

... was accused of killing Serb civilians and Albanians perceived as being allied to the Yugoslav government. The Yugoslav authorities, the United States and other Western governments (prior to 1999) considered it to be a terrorist organization. Some former members were also widely regarded as being involved in postwar criminal activities and the destabilization of neighboring states in pursuit of a "Greater Albania".

I realize that they were on our side in that particular war, but their goals were far more militant than ours and their tactics were deplorable - yet Abu Muslim al-Austraili had no problem joining up, even posing in some of their bizarre Muslims-with-weapons porn:



I know this is getting winded, so let me get to the good stuff:

On 11 November 1999 Hicks traveled to Pakistan to study Islam. After a period of time he began training with the Lashkar-e-Toiba learning guerrilla warfare, weapons training, including landmines, kidnapping techniques and assassination methods.

Free David Hicks!

[US prosecutors] claim that, on an occasion when al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden visited an Afghan camp, Hicks questioned bin Laden about the lack of English in training material and subsequently "began to translate the training camp materials from Arabic to English". Hicks wrote home that he'd met Osama bin Laden 20 times. But he later told investigators he'd exaggerated. He'd seen bin Laden about eight times and spoken to him once.

It doesn't seem like an innocent Australian travelling through Afghanistan sightseeing would have met Osama eight times, but who am I to judge?

Unfortunately gov't cronies got to Abu's mom:

Hicks spoke to his parents from just outside the southern Afghan city of Kandahar in November 2001. "He said something about going off to Kabul to defend it against the Northern Alliance," Terry Hicks said.

Anyway, this "Free David Hicks" thing is just another cause for liberal sheep to jump on in order to demonize America. Abu Muslim al-Austraili has shown that he was willing to fight along side those who kill innocent civilians and went to Afghanistan to fight "the Northern Alliance" and met Osama Bin Laden almost a dozen times - if not more.

Side Note: As funny as the video is (and I know, it's only marginally funny) it has the classic trappings of liberal crap in its portrayal of Abu's cell. Here's an actual picture of the very cell he's housed in:



Note the cushioned bed. I guess he didn't have to curl up in that corner for two years. As Wikipedia notes, the window looks into a corridor (you mean he can't see the sky!?!?) and the inset picture is his reading room with no books in it! (He can't read poetry either!?!?!)

I can't believe these detainees even get reading rooms. I will note that there's a book in his main cell.