Try as they might to bury one of the nastiest instances of political meddling in the course of justice, sooner or later the David Hicks case was bound to resurface as an unwanted pong for a desperate government.

The New York attorney and Columbia law lecturer Scott Horton, who has written tirelessly on Hicks's case for Harper's Magazine, reports that a military officer told him that the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, "interfered directly to get Hicks's plea bargain deal".

The timing seems to work. By the end of 2006 the Government was taking a lot of heat on Hicks and its hardline "terror boy" tactic was fraying. Cheney was in Australia in February this year, the same month that Hicks was charged after five years of nothing much happening in Guantanamo Bay. The next month the accelerator went flat to the boards - Hicks appeared before a military commission at 2pm on March 26 and by 8pm that evening returned to the courtroom, where it was announced that his lawyers had struck a deal with an official in the Pentagon. The prosecution lawyers were nowhere in the deal-making loop.