Hicks challenges legality of US terror conviction Exclusive David Hicks: Guilty plea "under duress." Photo: Jacky Ghossein Former Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks has launched an appeal to overturn his conviction in the United States for the "invented" crime of providing material support for terrorism. Lawyers for Mr Hicks lodged the appeal papers in the US Court of Military Commission Review overnight arguing for a dismissal of the conviction because the offence was not a war crime at the time Mr Hicks was detained, and his guilty plea was made under duress because of his detention, torture, and abuse at Guantanamo Bay. His lawyers have argued that Mr Hicks agreed to plead guilty only because he did not have to admit to committing a crime and he would be allowed to return to Australia. Mr Hicks was captured in Afghanistan in late 2001 and turned over to the US, before being taken to Guantanamo Bay, where he was held for 6½ years before being convinced to give a so-called "Alford Plea," which meant he acknowledged the evidence but did not make any admissions. The plea deal was that he would be convicted in the US of providing material support for terrorism but would return to Australia and serve seven months. A team of lawyers for Mr Hicks, led by Stephen Kenny of Camatta Lempens, prepared the appeal after a landmark ruling from the US Court of Appeals last year that the charge could not be applied retrospectively. The court has already overturned the similar conviction of Osama bin Laden's former driver, Salim Hamdan, who, along with Mr Hicks, was tried by the US military commission at Guantanamo Bay. Mr Hicks told Fairfax Media: "I am looking forward to putting Guantanamo behind me, and this formal acknowledgment of the illegality of the Military Commission's system is the final step." The US appeal documents outline what happened to Mr Hicks in Guantanamo Bay. Over the course of more than five years, Mr Hicks was repeatedly beaten, sexually assaulted, threatened with deadly violence, injected with unknown substances, and subjected to an entire arsenal of psychological gambits, ploys and subterfuges that had as their aim the destruction of his personality. He was stripped naked, deprived of sleep for extended periods, cast into solitary confinement, contorted into shapes that no human body should be forced to assume, and told that he would never again set foot on his native soil ... Unless the word has simply lost its meaning in this new day, the abuse he endured constitutes torture.