SteveW wrote:We were in Afgahnistan at the particular time he was there, and he trained with Al Qaeda so clearly he was there to fight anyone who was against them.
You dont travel half way around the world to do nothing at all, he trained at terrorist camps in various locations around southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. Then, prior to that he fought in Bosnia. Obviously you can tell who is American and who is Australian in the mountains of Afghanistan from anywhere up to 1000 metres away !!!!!!! He knew what he was doing. He was there to shoot coalition troops which included Australians.
Steve, I wasn't aware "we" were officially in Afghanistan at that time , but I'll take your word for it. Whether we should have been is another issue. However, apparently what he did there or in Bosnia was not against Australian law at the time, which is why he is not being tried here where it would cause less adverse publicity than being held in Guantanamo Bay without trial does. I have no problem with the Yanks holding him as POW according to the Geneva Convention, but they refuse to apply those international rules.
Somewhere in Australia is a picture of me standing outside a mosque in Kuala Lumpur, with an obviously Muslim gentleman in a flak jacket, helping him hold his AK47. It does not establish me as a terrorist. It just indicates that I posed with the guy to make a cute picture because I'd just come back from a Dyak camp in the jungles of Sarawak and had a full beard too. It was taken about 10 years ago.
While I was in Sarawak I had weapons training - the Dyak taught me how to use a blow pipe and poison darts accurately. They also showed my how they had in the past preserved human heads. [They insisted it was an old art, not done in recent years.]
Some people do travel half-way around the world to do "nothing", having taken up some other "ism" and attending that group's indoctrination camps - some borderline intact and feckless people embrace Scientology, or Buddhism, instead of Islam, and get led into those groups' odd behaviour too.
Did he ever actually attack an Australian - or an American for that matter??