"He did it, apparently, as part of a deal cut with Howard. "I kept thinking: this is the sort of thing that used to go on behind the Iron Curtain, not in America.

"And then it struck me how much this entire process had disintegrated into a political charade. "It's demoralising for all of us." Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said this afternoon that while Mr Howard did discuss the case of David Hicks with US Vice-President Dick Cheney, there was no secret deal.

Mr Downer said the Australian Government had long pressed the US to finalise the Hicks case, and Mr Howard discussed it with Mr Cheney when he visited Australia a month before the March 27 plea deal. But he rejected claims of a political fix.

"You can only do a plea bargain, of course, with the accused,'' he told ABC radio. "Dick Cheney couldn't do a plea bargain, or I do a plea bargain with Defence Secretary (Robert) Gates, or whatever. No, that is not how it works. It has to be done by the prosecution with the defendant. And that was what happened.'' Harper's magazine, launched in 1850, is the second oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the US. The contributor's article was published on the magazine's website yesterday.

Hicks, 32, is due to be released from Adelaide's Yatala Prison at the end of the year after agreeing to a deal in March. In return for a nine-month prison sentence in Australia, the deal required Hicks to plead guilty to a charge of providing material support for terrorism.

A month before the plea deal, Cheney visited Australia and Hicks, who had been incarcerated at the US military prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for five years, was a raging issue in Australian politics. Hicks' plea deal surprised observers at Guantanamo for his trial because it was not negotiated by US Colonel Morris Davis, the chief prosecutor for Hicks' military commission, but by the commission's convening authority, Susan J Crawford, a former top official of Cheney's Defence Department staff. Mr Howard, after the deal was announced, denied involvement in the plea bargain.

"We didn't impose the sentence - the sentence was imposed by the military commission and the plea bargain was worked out between the military prosecution and Mr Hicks' lawyers," Mr Howard said on March 31. After the plea deal was made public, Australian Greens leader Bob Brown said: "The message has gone very clearly from Canberra to Washington to Guantanamo Bay: don't allow Hicks to be released until after the elections and certainly don't allow him to speak".

Mr Howard rejected this too. "And the suggestion from (Greens leader) Senator Brown that it has something to do with the Australian elections is absurd," Mr Howard said at the time. AAP