What's Going On?

I don't quite understand why the courts in Britain have decided that this guy deserves to be a citizen.

An Australian jihadi, being held in Guantanamo Bay, has applied for British citizenship. This may be because while the Australian government was happy enough with the military tribunal system to deal with these enemy combatants, the British government protested. Before this, Hicks seems to have displayed no interest in being anything like remotely loyal to the Crown.

[Hicks] also loved the fanatical Islamist notion that the religion would sweep the world, subduing all those who resisted.

"Pakistan, Kashmir and Afghanistan (will) join together in a true Islamic state. The Islamic state is nearly completed. Love, David," he wrote.

Hicks couldn't wait to fight the infidel, even considering the possibility of martyrdom through death. "As a Muslim, I believe in destiny. I will always fight for the truth, Islam," he wrote.

Although his supporters have tried to portray him as some sort of happy go luck adventurer it doesn't really gel with his statements or the facts-

He fought for the Kosovo Liberation Army and in Kashmir before going to Afghanistan in 2001.

Despite all of this though, the British courts have fought the Home Office's attempts to block his citizenship-

Lawyers were advised in London early yesterday that the British Court of Appeal had refused to allow any further appeals from the British Home Office in the long-running case.

The news means the Home Office, which has twice lost to the Hicks legal team, must resume the process of making Hicks a citizen.

However, simply because he get's his citzenship it doesn't necessarily mean that the British government will have to press the US for Mohammed Dawood's release from Gitmo. Who's that, you ask? Why, that's the name that David Hick's goes by since his conversion to Islam. Strangely enough, the press never seem to refer to him by anything but his birth name.

According to the Wikipedia entry on Dawood he translated documents from Arabic to English at the request of Osama Bin Laden and, having received a great deal of terorist training, after arriving "in Konduz on 9 November 2001, he joined a group which included John Walker Lindh (the "American Taliban"). This group was engaged in combat against Coalition forces, and during this fighting he was captured by Coalition forces."

Hopefully the Home Secretary will have the sense to not do a single thing to aid his release from Gitmo. And why should he? Though Dawood obtained his citizenship by an accident of birth, he has displayed no behaviour which indicates that he is anything but an enemy of America and Britain- even going so far as to take up arms against coalition forces.