Speaking of David Hicks

The terms of his plea bargain, as related by WaPo are pretty appalling, but very revealing.

The deal included a statement by Mr. Hicks that he “has never been illegally treated” while a captive, despite claims of beatings he had made in the past. It also included a promise not to pursue suits over the treatment he received while in detention and “not to communicate in any way with the media” for a year.

There's a concept in contract law called "coercive contracts" in which the parties occupy radically different positions of power. They are not enforceable. A lawyer, of course, is going to tell me this doesn't apply here, but why not? A plea bargain is, conceptually, a contract in which the parties operate from unequal positions of power. Both parties will abide by the terms as long as the benefits are seen to be roughly equal. This goes far beyond that.

Please don't assume that I'm defending David Hicks. If the allegations have any truth at all, he deserves to be in jail. I question the methods used in his case, as in the cases of all those detained at Gitmo and similar facilities (you didn't think Gitmo was the only one, did you?). Consider that over half the "dangerous terrorists" detained in Cuba have been released because there was no basis for their detention to begin with -- but not until the American public started making a stink about it. I have no patience with parsing "torture" and "coercive interrogation." That's a legalistic dodge. The problem as I see it is simply that, because of the techniques used by American interrogators and the abrogation of the most fundamental rights of the detainees, not to mention the questionable integrity of our national leadership, anything that comes out of these hearings is suspect.

We can't trust our own justice system any more.

(Crossposted at Politics.Wikia.)