David Hicks is a young man from Adelaide who was corrupted by al-Qaida propaganda and volunteered to train with them in Afghanistan. He left Afghanistan without having committed any terrorist or criminal act, then decided to go back to collect his meager belongings. Rather stupidly, that was after the terrorist attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. Captured by the Northern Alliance, he was handed over to the U.S. military and shipped to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where he has languished for 4 1/2 years.

Hicks' long detention without trial is a sad metaphor of how the "war on terror" lost its moral compass: It is wrong in law and morality, and bad politics to boot. Australia's failure to demand justice for him is an abdication of the government's responsibility to protect its citizens.

The designation of prisoners as "enemy combatants" and their confinement and treatment in Guantanamo raised serious questions about due process, fair trials and impartial justice. The whole point of Guantanamo was to take prisoners outside the protection of law. In November 2003, British law justice Johan Steyn famously described it as a "legal black hole," "a stain on United States justice." In effect Washington asserted the right to be able to arrest foreigners anywhere in the world, take them to Guantanamo and lock them up forever, with no court questioning its actions in an undeclared and never-ending war against unnamed enemies.