David Hicks 2011
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More than seven years ago, Australian David Hicks, then 24, left Adelaide as a Muslim convert on his way to Pakistan to support the cause of Islam.
Just before 11am yesterday, he was home again ? escorted in the back of a van by motorcycle police, prison officers and a high-security response squad.
In Cuba's Guantanamo Bay, where he was held for almost 5½ years by US authorities who declared him a prisoner in the war on terror, he spent most of his time in solitary confinement.
In Yatala Labour Prison, in Adelaide's northern suburbs, he will also be in a small cell by himself, allowed out for exercise for one hour a day before his release in late December ? possibly in time to be reunited with his family for the New Year.
The dramatic return of the former Taliban fighter and convicted supporter of terrorism was not lost on Hicks, now 31, who landed at the RAAF base at Edinburgh, north of Adelaide, at 9.50am Adelaide time (11.50am NZT) after a secretive 24-hour flight from the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay.
"He did make the rather amusing comment ? there are not too many prisoners who get a world trip between stretches," Hicks' civilian lawyer for the past two years, David McLeod, said.
Hicks was grateful to be a prisoner of the Australian Government, after years as a prisoner of the US Government, a situation that, in the end, embarrassed both governments.
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David Hicks will be out of jail on New Year's Eve after an extraordinarily lenient plea bargain agreement meant that whatever sentence he got, he would only serve nine months of it in jail.
The Military Commission panel – made up of serving US officers – gave him the maximum possible sentence of seven years. Even that was a reduction on the statutory maximum of life imprisonment.
But the pre-trial agreement meant that six years and three months will be suspended. This means that he will be released on the last day of the year, and as long as he doesnt violate the terms of his agreement, he will stay out of jail.
The pre-trial agreement appears to have been designed with the Australian political calendar in mind.
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