In March 2007, Australian native David Hicks, who was a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, became the first person to be sentenced by a military commission convened under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Last February, Col. Morris Davis, the lead prosecutor in Hicks’ trial, told the Australian that the Pentagon “leaned on” him to rush Hicks’ trial, even though at the time he “had no regula More.. tions for trial by military commissions.” In an interview with WAMU’s Diane Rehm yesterday, Morris added details of how “political influence” was involved in Hicks’ trial. On January 9, 2007, Davis says the Defense Department’s general counsel, William Haynes, called him up and asked, “how quickly can you charge David Hicks?” Davis then noted that Haynes call came the day after “there was a meeting with the Australian ambassador” to the United States: DAVIS: So, the major pieces were not in place and I’m having the DoD general counsel calling me up, the day after there was a meeting with the Australian ambassador, asking, “how quickly I could charge David Hicks.” Bush administration political appointees were meddling in Hicks’ case in an effort to help their key conservative ally, Australian Prime Minister John Howard. In early 2007, Howard was facing a serious electoral challenge from Labor leader Kevin Rudd, who eventually went on to defeat him. Hicks’ incarceration at Guantanamo Bay was a contentious issue in Australian politics at the time. In February 2007, Vice President Dick Cheney visited Howard in Australia, where the PM lobbied for the trial to “be brought on as soon as humanly possible and with no further delay.” A month later, Hicks was sentenced and released back to Australia with critics airing suspicions that Cheney had interceded. In October 2007, an anonymous military officer told Harper’s Scott Horton that “Cheney interfered directly to get Hicks’s plea bargain deal” as “part of a deal cut” with Howard. Less..