Puneet Varma (Editor)

Care Rehabilitation Center

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The Care Rehabilitation Center is a facility in Saudi Arabia intended to re-integrate former jihadists into the mainstream of Saudi culture. The center is located in a former resort complex, complete with swimming pools, and other recreational facilities, outside Riyadh.

Contents

According to Peter Taylor, writing in the BBC, the first nine Saudi captives in Guantanamo to be repatriated arrived before the program was set up.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown toured the facility on November 2, 2008, and spoke with several former Guantananmo captives. Brown is reported to have spoken with Ghanim Abdul Rahman Al Harbi and Juma al Dossari.

The Saudis had claimed a one hundred percent success rate, until two former Guantanamo captives released a threatening videos to the Internet in January 2009. Following the release of the video Saudi authorities took nine other former captives back into custody. The names of the nine re-apprehended men have not been made public.

On February 4, 2009, the Associated Press reported that Saudi authorities had listed eleven former Guantanamo captives on a list of 85 most wanted terrorist suspects.

Saudi Prince Muhammad bin Nayef bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, son of a deputy prime minister, and a deputy minister for security, had played a role in setting up the program. In late August Abdullah Hassan Tali' al-Asiri, a suspected jihadist, who had been named on the February 2009 Saudi most wanted list, said he wanted to meet the prince when he surrendered, turned out to be a suicide bomber. Some security officials were injured, but the prince escaped serious injury, and Al-Asiri was the only fatality. Yusef Abdullah Saleh Al Rabiesh, a former Guantanamo captive, who went through the rehabilitation program, went on record to express his gratitude to the prince, and to warn his countrymen against being influenced by extremists.

Program goals

The core of the program is to return extremists to the "true Islam." The program employs intensive religious instruction by deconstructing extremists’ interpretation of the Holy Qur'an. Following rigorous debate, Islamic scholars and clerics, many employed by Saudi Arabia’s universities, establish a foundation for different interpretation that brings extremists back in line to the true meaning of Islam. Saudi Arabia’s rehabilitation program is modeled after a similar program implemented in Egypt in the 1990s. Indonesia and Singapore, in turn, established rehabilitation programs based on the Saudi Arabian model. Program discussions focus on jihad (military and personal struggles), takfir (unbelievers), bay’at (allegiance) and walaah (loyalty to the Muslim community). The program, for example, focuses on how individuals can only wage jihad with government approval — specifically the head or ruler of state — and not through a fatwa issued by an ideologue aligned with a terrorist organization. Counseling and evaluation follows religious instruction. Determining whether former extremists are suitable for release is the responsibility of the Saudi Ministry of Interior and its security forces personnel. A condition of release is placing former detainees under a monitoring system similar to parole or probation. Many released detainees remain under constant surveillance. In June 2010, the Saudi Ministry of Interior determined that 25 of the 120 former Guantanamo Bay detainees who graduated the rehabilitation program returned to terrorist activities. Eleven of the 25 joined Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. However, the overall recidivism rate of more than 3,000 program graduates as of 2010 remains about 10 percent. Al-Qaeda had previously announced plans to target a key component of the program, which allows fugitive extremists to voluntarily surrender and become eligible for the program. Al-Qaeda’s announcement was intended to challenge Saudi Arabia’s official interpretation of Islam by attempting to draw wavering extremists who desire to give up terrorism back into the embrace of Al-Qaeda.

Success of the program

In its initial years the program was described as successful. Commentators suggested other countries, like Yemen, should run similar rehabilitation programs. One of the first graduates of the program, Khalid Al Hubayshi, continues to be cited as the model of a successful graduate of the program.

Batch 10

According to Peter Taylor the BBC found that the cohort of Saudis repatriated in November 2007 problematic. Taylor called this cohort "batch 10", and reported that many of these captives were not rehabilitated.

Ghassan Abdullah Al-Sharbi's criticism

On November 29, 2016, citing the transcript from his Periodic Review Board, Fox News reported, Ghassan Abdullah Al-Sharbi asserted, staff members at the centre had a “hidden radicalisation programme”. However, neither Fox or the other sites that repeated this report, explained why they thought Al-Sharbi could offer inside information about the operation of the rehabilitation program, when he was still in Guantanamo.

References

Care Rehabilitation Center Wikipedia