Editorial Bear

Meet David Hicks.

David is a 31 year old former kangaroo skinner from Australia. For the last five years, he's been an inmate of controversial US prison complex Guantanamo Bay, after being arrested by US forces in Afghanistan.

David has the dubious honour of being the first Gitmo inmate to face trial for war crimes commited against the United States. He's shocked the international news community by pleading guilty to these charges.

I think the reason they're so shocked is because they've been reading too many of their own editorials.

I've written extensively on Editorial Bear about the slanted bias of the media. Nowhere is this more clear than in the trial of David Hicks. Read Yahoo's editorial here.

If you believe everything you read, David Hicks is a victim. Arrested and imprisoned in Afghanistan, this unassuming Australian was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's taken as a given in most of the recent news reports that he's innocent.

David's guilty plea is spun quite effectively into this hypothesis: The US Courts would have found him guilty either way.

It's unofficially accepted that the US War Tribunals are 'Show Trials' and since David Hicks would have been facing a guilty verdict either way, he might as well get a lesser sentence by pleading guilty.

But the fact is, all these news reports are wrong. David Hicks is not innocent. He's as guilty as sin and the plea he's entered in court admits to just a fraction of the crimes he's committed.

What's conspicuously lacking from any of the news reports about the trial of David Hicks are the facts about David himself.

Who is he? What was he doing in Afghanistan in the first place? Why was he arrested?

The biased media is so focused on attacking the American institution that they have totally glossed over the facts. And the facts are pretty shocking.

David Hicks was born in Adelaide, Australia. A former car thief and drug addict, he dropped out of school at the age of 14 and then drifted around the outback, working on cattle stations and as a kangaroo skinner in a meat packing factory.

He fathered two children with girlfriend Jodie Sparrow, before moving away from Australia in 1996 to train horses in Japan.

Failing to settle down in Japan, his next move wasn't back home. He flew to Albania, where he inexplicably joined the Kosovo Liberation Army, fighting the Serbs in the Bosnian conflict.

David finally found his calling in life. He wanted to be a soldier.

Hicks served with the Kosovo Liberation Army for a mere two months, having missed any of the actual fighting. Returning to Australia, he decided to follow his dream and applied to join the Australian Army. They rejected him on the grounds of his poor education.

Fortunately for David, there was a military force that was happy to accept him. In 1999, David Hicks converted to Islam, changed his name to Abu Muslim al-Austraili and moved to Pakistan to fight against the Indians in Kashmir.

Joining the Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorists, David was trained in guerilla warfare, kidnapping, assassination and the use of landmines. He fought in the 'controlled war' on the Indian border until the events of 9/11. When Lashkar-e-Toiba was disbanded, David joined another terrorist organisation - Al Qaeda.

Feroz Abbasi, an Al Qaeda terrorist and another Guantanamo inmate, reports the David Hicks was accepted by al Qaeda with open arms, becoming something of a 'golden child' who took it upon himself to translate the Al Qaeda training manuals into English to assist in recruiting more people to the cause of Islamic Fundamentalism.

In letters to his parents, Hicks claims he met personally with Osama Bin Laden on several occasions and gave important information about the travel habits of Australians, which may have played an important factor in the Bali bombings.

When the United States, in retaliation for 9/11, invaded Afghanistan, David Hicks was equipped with an AK47 and grenades and went off with his terrorist comrades to fight the coalition forces.

He was later captured by the Northern Alliance, the Afghanistan forces fighting against the Taliban. As an object of some curiosity, the Australian prisoner was handed over to US Forces on December 17th 2001.

A terrorist. A traitor. An enemy combatant.

How come Yahoo, the BBC - just about every western news outlet - fails to remember this? He's no friend of ours - yet so many people are so desperate to attack the US government that they'll support him and accept his allegations of mistreatment without reservation - despite the fact that they're proven to be exaggerated or entirely fictional.