Obama Planning to Send Gitmo Prisoners to Saudi Arabia For "Rehabilitation"

Posted by Liliana Segura, AlterNet at 8:13 AM on March 13, 2009.

As he figures out how to shutter Guantanamo, President Obama is reportedly working out an arrangement to send prisoners to Saudi Arabia for "rehabilitation." The Wall Street Journal reports:

Some of the roughly 100 Yemenis held at Guantanamo Bay would go to Saudi Arabia under a plan being discussed by U.S. and Saudi officials, said people briefed on the talks.

Yemenis make up the largest national grouping among the roughly 250 inmates still at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo. U.S. officials believe addressing their fate is urgent if President Barack Obama is to make good on his commitment to close the prison by January 2010.

Some 30 prisoners are on track to be either sent back to Yemen or tried by the U.S. But the rest "pose a quandary."

The U.S. no longer wants to hold them, but it fears that Yemen's government lacks the means to rehabilitate the men, many of whom officials say pose a threat to the U.S. And American officials question whether Yemen has sufficient law-enforcement muscle to keep tabs on returnees.

The solution: Send them to Saudi Arabia instead.

U.S. and Arab officials said Saudi authorities have developed a program for Islamist extremists that is largely viewed as a success by U.S. and European counterterrorism officials. The program includes vocational training, family reunification and religious tutoring.

The program is housed at the "Care Rehabilitation Center," described as "a cozy chalet" outside Riyadh by Time Magazine, who archly labeled it the "Betty Ford Center for terrorists." ("Technically it's a detention center, but no one is forced to wear an orange jumpsuit or a blindfold." So it's, you know, practically a country club.) U.S.-style orange jumpsuits or not, Saudi Arabia is hardly known as a beacon of human rights. But others have a different concern:

U.S. officials say Saudi Arabia's rehabilitation program isn't fail-safe. Last month, two Saudi nationals who were released from Guantanamo and passed through the program appeared in a video as senior members of al Qaeda's Yemen operations.

In fact, it was in late January that an al Qaeda tape surfaced showing Said Ali al-Shihri and "a man identified as Abu Hareth Muhammad al-Awfi, who appears with a script at the bottom of the screen giving his Guantánamo identification number, 333. That number corresponds to a man known in Pentagon documents as Mohamed Atiq Awayd al-Harbi, who was also released to Saudi Arabia in November 2007."
"Both men passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for jihadists after their release," according to the International Herald Tribune. "That program has been seen as a model, and the Saudi government had previously said that none of its graduates had returned to terrorism."

In the video, Awfi warns fellow prisoners about the Saudi program and threatens attacks against Saudi Arabia.

The former Gitmo prisoners were released after some six years in U.S. captivity. According to the Christian Science Monitor, "As with most other Guantánamo returnees ... the men were charged with the minor violation of traveling to Afghanistan, a country Saudi passport holders are barred from visiting." In other words, if the men weren't actually jihadists before Guantanamo, they certainly are now.

"I cannot consider the program a failure if one or two who went through it did not comply," a representative of the Saudi Interior Ministry said in January.
Yemen has previously rejected the idea of sending Gitmo prisoners to Saudi Arabia -- an plan originally proposed by the Bush administration. According to the WSJ, "a State Department spokesman declined to specifically address the Yemeni issue but said the U.S. 'has been in contact with dozens of countries about resettling those detainees at Guantanamo Bay eligible for transfer or release.' Saudi officials didn't reply to requests seeking comment."

Tagged as: al qaeda, guantanamo, barack obama, saudi arabia, time magazine, wall street journal, yemen, christian science monitor, said ali al-shihri, abu hareth muhammad al-aw, mohamed atiq awayd al-har, care rehabilitation cente

Liliana Segura is a staff writer and editor of AlterNet's Rights and Liberties and War on Iraq Special Coverage.