Major Mori speaks at Angel Place
Saturday August 26th 2006, 12:12 am

Mori speaks at Angel Place (image: mgk:MachineGunKeyboard)

David Hicks’ US Marine defence attorney, Major Michael Dante Mori, spoke this evening to an audience of about 1100 at a meeting sponsored by GetUp Australia at the City Recital Hall at Angel Place. No other venue could have been quite so apt. Mori has a sense of justice burned into every synapse in his brain. If Hicks has any guardian angels, he can surely count Major Mori among them.

Mori told the Catch-22 tale of Hicks’ legal history with the King George Bush administration, including astonishing detail about the charges Hicks is said to be facing. Mori blew holes below the waterline in the USS Rumsfailed, big enough to drive a bus through.

Along with other detainees at Guantanamo Bay taken prisoner by the US military in Afghanistan, Hicks is classified as an ‘enemy combatant’ to avoid calling him a ‘prisoner of war.’ Mori asserts this was done to create a new class of persons with no rights or legal standing; prisoners of war indeed do have some rights under international agreements like the Geneva Convention.

Hicks is accused of being an ‘illegal enemy combatant’ because he was not wearing a standard uniform. Mori argues that standard uniforms were neither part of the kit used by the US backed Afghan ‘Northern Alliance’ or CIA operatives, many of whom wore tartan flannos from LLBean whilst shooting Taliban soldiers.

The charges against Hicks are fanciful, but this doesn’t seem to bother King George or Rumsfailed. Hicks originally stood accused of ‘attempted murder of US, UK, Australian and Canadian soldiers. However, according to Mori, at the time Hicks was taken prisoner, there were no Australian or Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan- and the Brits were 500 miles away. The very notion of charging a soldier with ‘attempted murder’ is impossible under international Laws of War. All soldiers’ job #1 is to kill enemy soldiers, not kiss and cuddle them. However, Hicks never shot at anyone- not even US soldiers.

The ‘military commissions’ which have now been ruled illegal by the US Supreme Court, were staunchly defended as ‘fair’ for years by John Howard and Phillip Ruddock. Howard & Ruddock have pulled the demonisation lever on Hicks mercilesslessly since 2001, with absolutely no basis in fact. Howard and Downer have abandoned an Australian citizen to torture in the hands of the US miltary, with no regrets whatsoever, in conditions to which the US military will not subject American citizens.

The Hicks matter is hypocrisy upon insult upon irreparably life-destroying torturous imprisonment, with no just cause- and no exit. Hicks could have been home years ago with no more than a single typewritten page from Alexander Downer.

David Hicks is a political prisoner of John Howard and the Liberal Party. Terrorism ooga-booga remains a pivotal part of the Liberals’ political strategy. John Howard sells Aussies down the river for perpetual re-election.

Don’t be fooled at the ballot box in 2007.

-weez


15 Comments so far
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Here’s a trackback. I can’t help but recall the shock and horror of finding out that the spokesman for the Taliban is now studying at Yale! What hypocrisy!

Comment by Rooster 08.26.06 @ 1:56 am

Rooster, it’s beyond hypocrisy- I haven’t actually got words for the depth of King George’s wrongability. I don’t think Americans have ever had an infiltrator from the forces of totalitarianism pretending to the White House.

What I can’t understand is why His Highness hasn’t been impeached or is in leg-irons pending extradition to The Hague for trial for war crimes. Americans are much smarter than this. There must be a massive interference in the system in pivotal positions of power for something like this to happen in the United States. It sounds like something out of a conspiracy theorist’s wettest dream, but I absolutely believe a fraud of improbably huge proportions has been committed against the American people.

I’m not quite ready to pin 9/11 on the neo-cons, but they most definitely have exploited the fear of terrorism to the fucking hilt.

Worse, the evidence for election fraud in the 2004 US elections is well and truly out of the tinfoil-hat zone. The same exit pollster whose results are relied upon to legally call the result of elections in Germany prior to all the votes being counted is the same exit pollster whose tallies indicated Kerry to have clearly won the race. In all precincts, where there was a discrepancy between the normally gold-standard exit polls and the actual result, the error margin swung to King George in 100% of the cases. Even if you flip a coin 100 times, you have a statistical chance of getting heads or tails in 50% of the cases. If the error always swings one way, you have a hidden interference.

Listen to this episode of Media Matters for a discussion of America’s worst nightmare come true.

Comment by weez 08.26.06 @ 9:55 am

Bleerrgghhh, weez. I think your comments are absolute, well not quite rubbish, a tad overblown. Yeah, Bush is crap, he’s a joke, and right up there Hoover. But that’s probably doing a disservice to Hoover. At least he was a fine engineer.

For my money Mori is the real hero of this story. He didn’t have to take the case on, can bale out at any time, and has jeopardised a comfortable career. Good on him for stcking his neck out.

Hope Mori wins on some fairly hefty matters of
principle and law, and Hicks returns home to fade into obscurity.

Comment by Christine Keeler 08.26.06 @ 10:59 pm

And I must say, those Marine uniorms do it for me every time.

That’s quite shallow, isn’t it?

Comment by Christine Keeler 08.26.06 @ 11:02 pm

NETWORK PROBLEMS:

A Global Crossing (gblx.com) network router in the Dallas-Ft Worth area, which is responsible for conducting traffic from machinegunkeyboard.com to Australia (and Oceania in general), has been down now for about 19 hours.

machinegunkeyboard.com is accessible to USA and some Australian browsers, but the majority of Oceania cannot access the site at present, at least without a proxy server located outside of the affected networks. I have been in contact with the Global Crossing NOC and am awaiting action.

Sorry for the interruption.

Comment by weez 08.27.06 @ 8:10 am

Astonishing how one email from me to the GC NOC gets the router fixed in 5 minutes… my host couldn’t manage the same in 19 hours.

Oceania is once again online for mgk & SHAO.

Comment by weez 08.27.06 @ 10:10 am

CK wrote:

And I must say, those Marine uniorms do it for me every time.

That’s quite shallow, isn’t it?

That’s not the shallowness I’m concerned about.

The parallels between Dreyfus and Hicks, not to mention Zola and Burnside, are so close as to be deja vu all over again. The similarities are plain and obvious. Your reactions have been knee-jerk, as though you were not familiar with either Hicks or the Dreyfus affair.

Comment by weez 08.27.06 @ 10:13 am

[…] On Friday night along with about 1099 others I made my way to the City Recital hall to a GetUp! gig to hear MAJ Michael Mori speak. […]

Pingback by The pursuit of justice » Suki Has An Opinion 08.27.06 @ 10:34 am

The trouble is, how many ordinary Australians give a rats arse about David Hicks? The usual media outlets have already declared him to be a terrorist and a threat. Further, I suspect that those Australians paying attention to and trying to do something about the issues of basic justice and fairness as they present themselves in Hicks’ instance and others, are actually finding themselves margianalised these days, or at least thats how it feels sometimes.

In the face of all that “Terrorism ooga-booga” (and what great description that is weez!), and its easy calls to situational ethics and its carte-blanche justifications for otherwise uncontemplatable compromises in the fundaments of a civil society… well it can look pretty depressing to those of us whose outrage isn’t shared by quite so many as we’d hope. Even when confronted by the facts.

I guess the trick will be to confront the “ooga booga” head on, and deflate it from the outrageous proportions the Tories and their kin have blown it into. Because as a whole I do reckon that Aussies, Americans and even the Brits are people who do care about whats right, and about social justice. And its time we got our governments back on exactly that track.

Comment by Marcus 08.27.06 @ 11:48 pm

Mamdouh Habib has defamation lawsuits flying all over the place on cause of certain media independently convicting him of being a terrorist. I hope David Hicks does just the same when he finally gets home.

I believe Mori was moved to take the Hicks case to the court of public opionion as there is now NO avenue of trying Hicks- fair or unfair- and King George has proven that he’ll fuck Hicks around until hell freezes over. It’s about time, too- Howard & Ruddock have been smearing Hicks in the court of public opinion for several years now.

Comment by weez 08.28.06 @ 1:59 pm

No, quite familiar with the details of both, weez. I just don’t happen to agree with, and you seem unable to cope with that.

Comment by Christine Keeler 08.28.06 @ 2:22 pm

It’s not your opinion that’s the problem, Christine. It’s your convenient inability to compare obvious facts.

Sayonara.

Comment by weez 09.01.06 @ 9:41 am

Nick has posted a relatively good quality mp3 version of the Mori presentation on the GetUp blog.

Comment by suki 09.02.06 @ 11:30 pm

Can you PLEASE FORWARD this to Major Mori as I can’t find his email address and so want him to know he is now one of us and we stand together.
THANKS, Keep it up
Dear Age,
Below is an email I sent to the Prime Minister and Philip Ruddock. As you can see I, like many Australians feel passionately about human rights. This is just another challenge we can rise and face, not just for David or now Major Mori, but for ALL OF US.
I would be interested in any legitamate action to bring us all together on this and look forward to hearing of any proposals to deal with this new injustice.
Major Mori stood up for one of us, it is now time for us to stand by him.

Dear Mr Howard,
As our Prime Minster you are now in the enviable position of addressing the issue of Colonel Morris Davis attack on Major Mori.
Major Mori, as Philip Ruddock has continually and rightly noted, has been a WONDERFUL advocate for David, AND WORLD JUSTICE in the purest sense of the word.
I will stand side by side with Major Mori, I would put my life in his hands and I, like many Australians trust him.
Colonel Morris Davis, has lost any respect given to a man of his station through this dispicable act. NOW you can have a chance to stand up for this amazing man on behalf of all Australians.
I look forward to seeing what happens.

Yours passionately and sincerely
Margaret Kennedy

Comment by Margaret Kennedy 03.05.07 @ 9:15 am

Margaret, if I were you, I’d try sending a message via GetUp or contacting Terry Hicks directly.

Comment by weez 03.05.07 @ 9:40 am



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