In February, Vice President Cheney traveled to Australia to visit with his close ally Prime Minister John Howard, who pleaded for the release of the Australian Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks.

Last Friday, Hicks became the first person to be sentenced by a military commission convened under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, accepting nine months of imprisonment & a gag order preventing him discussing the case for 12 months.

The plea bargain itself was brokered by Susan Crawford, the top military commission official & a former Department of Defence inspector-general under then-Secretary of Defence Cheney, without the knowledge or input of the lawyers prosecuting Hicks.

Indeed, even the lead prosecutor expressed shock over the light sentence. Given the nature of the deal, suspicions abound that the plea agreement may have been an orchestrated gesture by Cheney to benefit Howard - who is trailing in the polls - in his re-election bid.

Hick's father commented that: "it is clearly a political fix arranged between Mr Howard & the Bush administration, to shut up Hicks until after the election in November."

Colin Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson said: "I'm not naive. ... I'm quite sure they worked out a plea bargain that...would allow David Hicks to return to Australia & satisfy Prime Minister Howard's needs."

One observer noted that the arrangement would be unconstitutional under U.S. law. The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan highlighted the questionable circumstances surrounding the plea bargain: "If you think this was in any way a legitimate court process, you're smoking something even George Michael would pay a lot of money for. It was a political deal, revealing the circus that the alleged Gitmo court system really is."