They never apologise, never explain. The great trick of the Tories has always been to crawl from the ruins of their folly and error and to march on, unabashed, as if nothing had happened.

They're at it again with David Hicks. A US Appeals Court ruled on Wednesday that the charge used against him, of providing material support to terrorism, was invalid. It could not be applied retrospectively.

This so-called crime was invented five years after Hicks was alleged to have committed it. Quite a few people argued this at the time, most notably his American lawyer, US Marine Major Dan Mori. It was obvious in 2007 that the Bush administration was rigging show trials on trumped-up charges.

But, oh, the hullabaloo from the Tories then. Supporters of Hicks "were either brainwashed or brainless," cried The Daily Telegraph's Piers Akerman. Mori was "the darling of the latte-lappers".

Knitting furiously as the tumbrels rolled, The Australian's Janet Albrechtsen shrilled that Hicks's "team of grandstanding Gitmo lawyers and extended human rights supporters always understood they needed a strategy of obfuscation, mystique and delay".

Writing in this very newspaper, the unlamented Miranda Devine railed against "the naive hysterics who believe he is a tortured innocent as well as those glory-seeking civil rights lawyers who have attached themselves to his case".

This lot and more, propagandists all, could never get it into their fat heads that it wasn't support for Hicks per se. It was support for his right to a fair and speedy trial. It was disgust at the supine Howard government cynically abandoning an Australian citizen to the whims of such unprincipled thugs as Bush's vice-president, Dick Cheney.

They will not admit they got it wrong, of course. That would be to hand a victory to the "inner-city types" who darken their days and haunt their nights.

Mike Carlton

It would have taken the skills of a first-year law clerk in the Attorney-General's department to advise that the case against David Hicks was a big no-no. It didn't need an appeals court in the United States this week to tell us this was a dodgy political prosecution.

Being fitted-up for a war crime for things he allegedly did before the crime was put on the books required some heavy-handed manipulation.

Hicks was charged in 2007 with ''material support for terrorism''. This related to ''engaging in combat against US forces'' in Afghanistan in 2001.

The Military Commission and the offence itself came into existence in 2006, by an Act of Congress after the 2001 version of the Military Commissions was struck down by the US Supreme Court as unconstitutional.

So on an elementary level the timing in all this was way out, and the stitch-up required high-level intervention.

Don't take my word for that. Take the word of the man who prosecuted David Hicks at Guantanamo, Colonel Morris Davis.

In a 2008 interview that Davis gave to the independent investigatory media organisation Truthout, he said that when he was appointed a prosecutor he made it clear to his superiors in the Pentagon that ''the one case I did not want to start with was David Hicks''.

He explained: ''We told the world these guys are 'the worst of the worst'. David Hicks was a knucklehead. He was just a foot-soldier, not a war criminal.''

Colonel Davis (retired) said that in January 2007 he received an urgent phone call from the top lawyer at the Pentagon, William ''Jim'' Haynes, who asked him: ''How quickly can you charge David Hicks?''

It was the first time that the general counsel at the Pentagon had ever called him about a specific case and he felt it was decidedly ''odd''.

At this point, the Manual for Military Commissions had not even been produced by the Defence Department. The manual implements the law and spells out the elements of the crimes charged under the Military Commission Act.

It did not exist at the time Haynes (who Bush was trying to shoehorn onto a US appeals court) was pressuring Davis to charge Hicks, who at this stage had already been in Guantanamo for more than five years. Davis said it would probably take two weeks to charge Hicks after the manual saw the light of day.

''Two weeks,'' Haynes replied. ''Two weeks is too long.''

The rush was on for the reason that John Howard had an election that year and his government had nominated David Hicks as Australia's terrorism poster-boy.

There was mounting distrust in the electorate that an Australian had been held in cruel circumstances in Cuba, without charge, for an extended time.

After years of insouciance by the electorate, Hicks has become a hot political potato and the menacing rhetoric of the attorney-general, Philip Ruddock, and Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, was wearing thin.

Hicks was charged in February 2007 with material support for terrorism, or MST. The next month he had entered into a plea deal and by April he was out of Guantanamo and into the Yatala Labour Prison in South Australia to do a further nine months and not to be released until after the November election, subject to further restrictions.

Davis said that Haynes and vice-president Dick Cheney's adviser, David Addington, had negotiated the plea deal without his involvement.

He felt the whole thing was designed to bolster John Howard's electoral prospects by making the Hicks case go away.

Well, it did not go away.

In July this year the Commonwealth prosecutors had to drop a proceeds-of-crime case against Hicks over the publication of his memoir, Guantanamo: My Journey.

This ill-conceived prosecution had been egged on by the shadow attorney-general, Senator George Brandis, and some bone-headed editorialising in the Murdoch papers.

The common law and the Evidence Act both say that an admission of guilt cannot be put to a court if it was provoked by ''violent, oppressive, inhumane or degrading conduct''.

Even a cursory look at Hicks's book showed that he was subjected to ill-treatment and the prospect of indefinite detention if he didn't sign up for the charge.

Yet on Wednesday we have relics of the Howard era drilling into us the old theme song that Hicks was an associate of the Taliban, which beheads people who don't agree with them.

Now we have the decision from the DC Circuit court in the Hamdan case, by three conservative Republican-appointed judges.

Hamdan had his MST conviction overturned. Unlike Hicks, he had not taken the plea deal, but was convicted and did time - convicted after the Pentagon rejigged the panel hearing his case so as to get the right result. He's now back in Yemen driving taxis.

Just think about the implications of what the US was trying to do with people like David Hicks.

It is saying that anyone in the world, who has suitable radical connections and who is in a war zone fighting against Americans, is guilty of a war crime.

This is a significant departure from the Geneva Conventions and the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, quite apart from the US constitution. And yet we signed up to this shameful fix.

See also - David Hicks Book Banned In The USA? - Has the US Banned the Autobiography of a Former Guantanamo Prisoner?

Stench Of Hicks Prosecution Lingers As Court Exposes Its Flimsy Basis