Muhammad Dawood (aka David Hicks) Update: a slap on the wrist. “Hicks gets nine-month sentence,” from Australia’s ABC News Online (thanks to JE):
A US military tribunal has sentenced confessed terrorism supporter David Hicks to seven years in jail but he will only have to serve nine months.
The tribunal judge accepted Hicks’s guilty plea as part of an agreement that limited his sentence to seven years in prison, in addition to the five years he has been held at the US base at Guantanamo Bay.
The deal allowed all but nine months of the sentence to be be suspended.
Hicks will serve the sentence in Australia and the United States must send him home by May 29….
Lead prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Chenail had told the tribunal Hicks had knowingly sought out an organisation bent on attacking the United States and acquired dangerous skills.
The prosecutor, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Chenail, says Hicks freely joined a band of killers who slaughtered innocents.
“We are face to face with the enemy,” he said.
First conviction
Hicks, who has become the first war crimes convict among the hundreds of foreign captives held for years at the Guantanamo prison camp, had pleaded guilty to supporting terrorism in an agreement with US military prosecutors.
Hicks, originally from Adelaide in South Australia, acknowledged he trained with Al Qaeda, fought against US allies in Afghanistan in late 2001 for two hours and then sold his gun to raise cab fare and tried to flee by taxi to Pakistan.