The documentary, The President versus David Hicks, that screened on SBS on Saturday night had a lot of amazing stuff in it. For example, letter-writing is not as dead a form of communication as I had thought. Also, George W Bush is a brazen little hussy, my god. But, despite the horror induced by the various prejudicial statements, aired again during the doco, that he has made regarding the prisoners at Gitmo, the statement that shocked me the most came from Stephen Kenny, David Hicks' family lawyer and an upstanding, principled and reasonable guy all round. He managed to prove that, in times like these, 'logic will break your heart' [as the cd title goes]. The moment happened thus. He and Terry Hicks [go Terry] are in New York meeting with Michael Ratner of the Centre For Constitutional Rights, and they're all trying to figure out how long it has been since they began working together to gain access to, secure due process for, or at least establish whose laws had jurisdiction over and therefore needed to be applied to, the prisoners in Gitmo. They find that it's been a while; 19 months at that point in time. 19 months with no real progress. Which caused Stephen Kenny, in baffled bemusement, to comment,

"I thought it would be a short period of time, and suddenly, until now, I couldn't believe such a fundamental breach of law would continue for so long".

That's kinda bad. And heartbreaking.