3AW NEWS: Convicted terrorist David Hicks says he was in the wrong place at the wrong time when arrested at Al Qaeda training camps.

Hicks denies ever meeting Osama Bin Laden saying the leader was a guest speaker at training camps.

Hicks has told Channel 10 he was tortured for up to ten hours at a time at Guantanamo Bay leaving him psychologically damaged.

DERRYN HINCH (MAY 24, 2011): Something has been gnawing at me since the weekend. And it came up again today when I saw the Herald Sun Page One picture of our latest casualty in Afghanistan. Sergeant Brett Wood.

It was part of a five-page tribute to the war hero and the Diggers fighting in Afghanistan. Including two of his patrol who were also seriously wounded in that roadside bomb attack. One may not survive.

So why hark back to the weekend? Well, while Wood and his fellow soldiers were risking their lives in the War Against Terror in what Kevin Rudd once called ‘this god-forsaken place’ a bunch of w--kers were giving a standing ovation to an Australian traitor.

A quisling called David Hicks was being honoured as guest speaker at the taxpayer-assisted Sydney Writers’ Conference to plug his new book. His craven rewrite of history about who he is and what he did fighting alongside the Taliban against Allied soldiers.

If you believe the born-again Hicks he was just a misguided tourist. Didn’t even know who or what al-Qaeda was until recently. That macho shot of him heavily-armed as a Kosovo mercenary? Just a lad fooling around for the camera.

Hicks sat alongside his now-proud Dad Terry as 900 people gave him a standing ovation and then queued to buy signed copies of his book.

There were no embarrassing questions from the media because Hicks refused to take any.

But if you go back to the letters he sent home from the front while training with the Taliban you get some answers.

He talked about undergoing weapons training that included ‘anti-aircraft and anti-tank rockets, rapid-fire heavy and light machineguns, pistols, AK47s.’ His words.

He went to Kashmir, courtesy of the al-Qaeda-connected Islamic terrorist group called Lashkar-e-Taiba. They’re the murderous mob who launched the multiple assaults on Mumbai in 2008 killing more than 160 people.

In his book Hicks says: ‘We did not fire upon Indian soldiers or any other people. We only engaged in the symbolic exchange of fire’. In that ‘symbolic exchange’ two children were killed.

Yet,  in a letter Hicks wrote in August 2000, he boasted ‘I got to fire hundreds of bullets. There are not many countries in the world where a tourist, according to his visa, can go and stay with the army and shoot across the border at its enemy, legally’.

And, about eight months later, in another letter he wrote:

"By the way I have met Osama bin Laden 20 times now, lovely brother, everything for the cause of Islam. The only reason the West calls him the most wanted Muslim is because he's got the money to take action."

Last year Hicks made a video appearance on Q & A. That was the night another ‘hero’ threw a shoe at John Howard.

In response to a Hicks question about Guantanemo Bay, the former Prime Minister said: ‘Isn’t it a great country that allows this sort of exchange to occur’.

And he was right. Under the Taliban, for whom Hicks was fighting, he would never  have received such freedom of speech. Or freedom of movement after pleading guilty to terrorism charges.

It is true that Hicks was treated badly. No person should spend five years in a jail without being charged. Justice delayed is justice denied. But don’t forget this man is a traitor. As Mohammed Dawood he ‘engaged in combat against coalition forces’.

That’s what he pleaded guilty to.

Watching people applauding this man in the ABC audience last year and again at the Writers’ Festival at the weekend made me cringe.

David Hicks is a traitor. Last October, I said: There are 21 reasons why Hicks should not be treated with respect let alone as some sort of martyr. And those 21 reasons each has the name of a dead Aussie soldier alongside it.

Sadly, today, you can now make that 24.

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