Official: Law prevents Gitmo prisoner from selling his story

CANBERRA, Australia -- Al-Qaida supporter David Hicks will be barred from selling his story when he returns to Australia from Guantanamo Bay prison camp, despite having broken no Australian law, the attorney general said Sunday.

Hicks will soon be sent to a prison in his hometown of Adelaide to serve a nine-month sentence after pleading guilty two weeks ago to aiding al-Qaida in a plea deal agreed on at the U.S. naval base at Cuba's Guantanamo Bay.

The deal includes the condition that Hicks not speak to the media for a year, and does not sell his story -- provisions that Attorney General Philip Ruddock has said will not be enforceable once he returns to Australia.

However, Ruddock said a separate Australian federal law against criminals profiting from crime through media deals will stop the 31-year-old former kangaroo skinner from selling his story about meeting al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, and his allegations of being tortured during his five years at the Guantanamo prison.

"We would seek to ensure that he would not be able to profit from any story that he sought to tell," Ruddock told Nine Network television.

The Australian government agreed to let the United States charge Hicks because his training with al-Qaida and the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba in 2001 did not break any Australian law at the time.

But the government had Hicks in mind when it passed legislation in 2002 that prevents lawbreakers from selling their stories if they have committed offenses that can be tried by a U.S. military commission, established by President Bush's order in 2001.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled those commissions illegal last July, and Hicks pleaded guilty to a fresh charge established under a new military justice system created by Congress in October.

Ruddock said the Australian federal law still affects Hicks' case.

"The advice that I have is that the legislation clearly does apply," he said.

Australian celebrity agent Harry M. Miller has estimated that Hicks' story could sell for $3.3 million.