US misleads on terror suspect: lawyer
Melbourne Age October 23 2003
By Fergus Shiel
US President George Bush had misled the Australian public about the capture of one of the two Australian terror suspects held without charge in Guantanamo Bay, a member of the men's US legal team claimed yesterday.
Last week President Bush said that the Australian detainees, Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks, had been "picked up on the battlefield".
But Melbourne lawyer Richard Bourke, who is acting in the US on behalf of detainees imprisoned at the US Navy base on the south-eastern tip of Cuba, said Habib was nowhere near a battlefield when captured. "In fact, Mamdouh Habib was detained before the US invasion of Afghanistan even began. He was picked up hundreds of kilometres inside Pakistan, apparently preparing to return to Australia," Mr Bourke said.
He said Habib had never been a combatant, instead having travelled to Pakistan to look for employment and for a school for his two children. He was arrested by Pakistani authorities on October 5, 2001, two days before the US launched its first aerial assault on Afghanistan and before ground fighting began. Later, Habib was taken to Egypt before being handed to the Americans, who took him to Afghanistan and then Cuba.
Habib's wife, Maha, has written to President Bush, saying her husband, whom she has not spoken to since his arrest, has never broken an American law. She writes that the youngest of their four children cannot remember their father. "He is a decent and loyal citizen of Australia, where he has lived for 19 years, and was in Pakistan on family business," Mrs Habib writes.
"His only crime was that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time."