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SYDNEY: The Australian government on Tuesday denied that it had forged a secret deal with US Vice President Dick Cheney to secure the release of Guantanamo Bay terror detainee David Hicks.
The 'Australian Taliban' was freed from US military custody in May after a surprise deal under which he pleaded guilty to providing material support for terrorism and was allowed to complete a nine-month sentence in Australia.
The latest US edition of Harper's Magazine reported that Cheney directly intervened to get Hicks a plea bargain deal after meeting with Australian Prime Minister John Howard.
"He did it, apparently, as part of a deal cut with Howard," the magazine quoted an unnamed officer involved in the Guantanamo military commissions as saying.
"I kept thinking: this is the sort of thing that used to go on behind the Iron Curtain, not in America.
"And then it struck me how much this entire process had disintegrated into a political charade."
Reacting to the report, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said Howard had made it clear to Cheney at a meeting in February that Hicks' case had dragged on for too long and he wanted a trial as soon as possible.
But the government played no role in negotiating the plea bargain, Downer told reporters.
"The plea bargain wasn't negotiated by – the fact of a plea bargain was something we certainly promoted – but the plea bargain itself was a matter between the prosecution and the defence," Downer said.
"The defence accepted the plea bargain, the prosecution accepted the plea bargain and David Hicks went to jail in Australia as a result."
Hicks spent more than five years in the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba after being captured in Afghanistan in late 2001, following the US-led invasion prompted by the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
The father-of-two admitted training with Al-Qaeda and Taliban forces in Afghanistan but his extended detention without charge threatened to become a serious political problem for Howard, who faces an election next month.
Prime Minister John Howard has fallen further behind his opponent ahead of elections on November 24 despite promising huge tax cuts, an opinion poll showed Tuesday.
After the first week of campaigning, Kevin Rudd's centre-left Labor Party stretched its lead over Howard's conservative coalition by two points to 58 percent, the Newspoll survey of 1,706 voters found.
The prime minister's Liberal-National coalition dropped two points to 42 percent of the two-party preferred vote, which strips out the influence of minor parties.
Hicks' father, Terry Hicks, said he was not surprised by the reports that Cheney and Howard had struck a deal following their meeting in Australia.
"The possibility is yes, that may have been part of it," he told AFP. "To me, it looks like it may have been.
"I've said all along this is probably very political, it fits the Howard government agenda."
Hicks, 31, is due to be released in late December, five weeks after the Australian election.
- AFP/so
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