Yesterday, ABC's Jake Tapper and Luis Martinez reported:
This morning in Riyadh, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he spoke to Saudi Assistant Minister of the Interior Muhammed bin Nayaf about sending the roughly 100 Yemeni detainees currently in the detainee center at Guantanamo Bay to Saudi Arabia to the Saudi government's rehabilitation program for jihadis.
Gates said he spoke to Nayaf last night about "our positive impression of the repatriation program, the rehabilitation, repatriation program in Saudi Arabia. I think they've probably done as good if not better job of that than almost anybody and explored the possibility of some of the Yemeni detainees coming through that system. I think the notion would be if it worked at all it would be those with strong Saudi family connections or strong connections to Saudi Arabia."
As Bill Roggio noted a couple months back, 11 out of 85 most wanted terrorists in Saudi Arabia had been Gitmo terrorists who went through this rehab program. You should watch this PBS video Roggio linked to on the Saudi program. It's 8 minutes long, but well worth your time.
Some highlights: The PBS reporter introduces you to "Men who once set out to fight the infidel are now working out their problems with paper and crayons." The rehab program's director, as if he were a mother telling her child not to fight with a sibling, admonishes the terrorists that through coloring they should "Get that negative energy out on the paper. It's safe here. It's on the paper. It's not outside." PBS reports the good news that "only a handful, about 5 percent have relapsed trying to make contact with other militants."
One of the terrorists who's encouraged to abandon IEDs for crayons happened to have murdered 12 civilians in Iraq in a suicide attack (in which he survived after being thrown from the fuel truck he blew up). Asked by the PBS reporter what it's like to have their deaths on his conscience, the terrorist replied, ""It wasn't my fault. It's the fault of the people who planned the plot."
But, hey, if he can draw pictures of unicorns and sunsets, he'll probably do no harm once he's back on the streets, right?
As the congressional Republicans asked last week, Do you feel safer?
