As Melville wrote in Billy Budd, "goodbye to you too, old Rights-of-Man!"

The following is an extract from an article by Adele Horin, published in the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday August 14.

I don't know if Mamdouh Habib is a good guy or a bad guy. But I do know that if the North Korean Government had captured him, held him without charge in an interrogation camp for years, and denied him contact with lawyers, family or friends, the Howard Government would be apoplectic.

Faced with such flagrant abuse of his legal and human rights, the Government would work hard for his return.

But when it is our friend and ally the United States that acts as a totalitarian power, the Government throws principle and decency to the wind. It is a scandal the way our Government has abandoned Habib, and fellow detainee David Hicks, to the legal black hole that is Guantanamo Bay.

This week Habib was allowed his first phone call with his wife and four children in the three years since his capture. Despite officials monitoring the conversation, the call confirmed reports Habib had been subject to beatings, sleep deprivation and abuses. He sounded a broken man. Convicted murderers and rapists get better treatment.

This is no way to treat a bad guy. But it is shocking to think Habib might be a good guy, innocent of whatever charge is eventually brought against him.

Yet his innocence is hardly a far-fetched prospect. Dozens have been released from Guantanamo Bay in recent months to governments that lobbied hard for their citizens' rights. They included a 90-year old shepherd, cobblers, taxi drivers and foot soldiers of the Taliban, conscripted to fight against their will. Of the 147 released, only 13 have been sent to jail, according to the Centre for Constitutional Rights in the US.

At the end of the US war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, as the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, put it, "they scooped up 10,000 people". These were not necessarily on the battlefield; some like Habib were far away in Pakistan; and most were picked up by the Taliban's enemy, the Northern Alliance, and handed over to the Americans. The Americans whisked some, including Habib, temporarily to Egypt, allegedly to be tortured.

Beginning in January 2002, hundreds of men and boys were sent to Guantanamo Bay, which has been described as "Dante's ninth circle of hell".

Yet in making Guantanamo Bay a rights-free zone for the nationals of 42 other countries, the Bush regime has taken us back to medieval times. Before the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, kings could throw a person in jail, with no charges laid, no lawyer, and no prospect of release; and now the American president can.

Against the recommendation of Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, who foresaw the repercussion for captured US soldiers, the Bush Administration also turned its back on the Geneva Conventions. These spell out how prisoners of war must be treated. Bush renamed his prisoners "enemy combatants" and said the conventions did not apply.

The US Government used September 11, 2001, to override 800 years of progress on human rights, the Magna Carta, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Convention against Torture. Rather than treating the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon as acts of terrorism or crime, with perpetrators subject to criminal law, it treated them as acts of war. But even so, it refused to abide by the international rules of war.

The Howard Government, obsequious as ever to the US, acquiesced without a murmur. It went further. According to a report in The New York Times last year, when the US Government wanted to hand Hicks back, the Howard Government refused to take him because there was no evidence Hicks had violated Australian law.

In contrast, Britain has succeeded in securing the return of five of its citizens. On arrival, one was immediately released, the other four held for questioning, and then released. With Tony Blair a red-hot ally in the war on terrorism, it is certain the five would have faced trial if they were bad guys. It appears they were innocent, deprived of their freedom for two and a half years because the US has dispensed with the rule of law.