David Edwards and Jason Rhyne, Raw Story

The first Guantanamo Bay detainee to be convicted by an American military tribunal will be released from prison on Saturday — but six years of harsh treatment in US custody leave him ill-prepared to readjust to normal life, a psychologist says.

Australian-born David Hicks, who was captured in Afghanistan in 2001, plead guilty earlier this year to charges of providing material support for al- Qaeda terrorists. As part of his plea deal, Hicks was transferred to Australia to serve out the remainder of his sentence.

Appearing in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Monash University psychology professor James Ogloff said that Guantanamo had left a broken Hicks to fend for himself in the free world.

“In some very restrictive regimes, and GuantÃ¡namo Bay will fall into that category, the environments are actually designed to break people down,” said Ogloff. “There’s no long term goal of rehabilitating people or having them return to the community. So the issues that the individual faces is, in fact, being broken into pieces and having to really be put back together.”

(Original Article)