The first civilian lawyer allowed to visit a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said on Wednesday that his client was depressed, was enmeshed in an inadequate legal system that violated his rights and had been ill served by his home government of Australia.
The lawyer, Stephen Kenny, of Adelaide, Australia, said he had spent the last five days meeting with the detainee, David Hicks, an Australian who joined the Taliban in 1999 and was captured at the end of the Afghan war.
Hicks has been imprisoned in Guantanamo for nearly two years and is one of six detainees among the 660 held at the US naval base at Guantanamo who has been designated by US President George W. Bush as eligible to face charges before a military commission.
"It appears that [former Iraqi president] Saddam Hussein is being afforded better treatment and more rights than my client," Kenny told reporters at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, a civil liberties group that has opposed the US government's detention policies at Guantanamo.
Kenny said that while Hicks had not been mistreated "apart from the isolation and restricted access to the outside world," he was imprisoned in a moral and legal black hole.
While Saddam has the protections of a prisoner of war, the US military has said that Hicks and his fellow detainees are not entitled to that status because they were illegal combatants -- that is, they did not meet all the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, such as wearing identifiable uniforms.
Kenny said he greeted Hicks with the cheery Australian salutation: "G'day mate." Hicks responded by saying he had been expecting Kenny.
Kenny said that during his five days at Guantanamo, he brought grilled steaks to Hicks, who had complained of losing weight and the lack of meat in his diet.
He also delivered some chocolates and a jar of Vegemite, a savory spread favored by some Australians.
Kenny said Hicks had not "killed or injured any US or Australian government" personnel. He said he expected that Hicks might face some kind of conspiracy charge but had no sense of when or if that might occur.
Kenny would not comment directly on whether the military authorities had discussed a plea bargain with Hicks before he had a lawyer, but he said such an action would be reprehensible.
Other lawyers have said that officials at Guantanamo have held discussions with Hicks that could be construed as a plea bargain.
Major John Smith, a spokesman for the military commissions, said no prosecutor or judge had engaged in any plea bargain discussions with Hicks.
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