The Reeducation of Abu Jandal

All teachers have their problem pupils. Hamoud al-Hitar's was a young man who liked to call himself "Abu Jandal," an Arabic nickname that means roughly "The Killer." The moon-faced, slightly paunchy Yemeni, whose real name was Nasser al-Bahri, had fought in Bosnia, Somalia, Chechnya and Afghanistan—all before his 30th birthday. For six years he worked as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, who once personally dressed one of al-Bahri's gunshot wounds near Kabul. In Afghanistan he got to know Mohamed Atta and several of the other 9/11 hijackers. When al-Bahri finally returned home to Yemen about a year before the attacks, "it was the first time in my life that I had a passport with my real name on it," the former jihadist told me one morning this spring when we met in the lobby of a Sana hotel.

Yemen's secret police, under pressure from American officials to crack down on local militants even before the World Trade Center attacks, didn't wait long to scoop him up. In December 2000, al-Bahri was arrested and locked in a small cell in the solitary-confinement wing of Sana's political prison. "I expected the worst torture," he recalled. Instead, one day the door opened and a figure wearing a white pillbox cap and flowing ceremonial robes stepped inside. The man dropped a stack of books—the Qur'an, volumes of the Prophet Muhammad's teachings—on the table. The only weapon he carried was his jambiya, the traditional Yemeni dagger that dangled from his waistband.

The visitor was Hamoud al-Hitar, a local judge who had been enlisted by the Yemeni government to try to reform the country's burgeoning ranks of Islamic militants. Al-Hitar's idea was to engage the prisoners in what he called "theological duels," challenging them to justify their beliefs by citing religious texts. Al-Hitar would then counter with his own usually more moderate interpretation of the same texts. If a militant seemed to be making progress, after a few sessions the judge would offer him a written pledge to sign in which he renounced violence. In exchange, the young jihadist would be given several hundred dollars and granted his freedom. Most, like al-Bahri, were put under a loose "house arrest," which meant that they could travel freely throughout Sana, as long as they checked in regularly with their parole officers. Nearly 400 prisoners attended al-Hitar's classes, repented and were released.

Now that President Barack Obama has pledged to close the prison at Guantána-mo Bay within the year, some Yemeni and American officials want al-Hitar's help again. Nearly half of the Gitmo detainees—about 100 of the 240 still incarcerated—are originally from Yemen. A new Yemeni rehab program would allow Obama to send them home with a measure of political cover—and a scapegoat if things go badly. Last year Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, announced that he had struck a deal with the United States to build a campus for the returnees, using U.S. funds. When I met with him one recent afternoon, Saleh told me that the Americans had promised him $11 million for the facility. The presi-dent insisted that al-Hitar would help direct the new program.

There is only one problem with all this: al-Hitar's program doesn't work. By 2004 at least some of the judge's graduates had begun showing up in Iraq, American officials warned their Yemeni counterparts. Among al-Hitar's students, the program was a joke. "To be frank, everyone was making fun of him," says one former prisoner, who gave his name only as "Abu Hurieh" to avoid drawing renewed attention from the secret police. "We all understood that it was just extortion to take money from the Americans. They were just playing with us." Even Saleh acknowledges that al-Hitar's program was only effective about 60 percent of the time. The flaw, in retrospect, seems obvious: a prisoner will say anything to get out of jail. "If Satan himself told me to sign, I would have," al-Bahri told me. Al-Hitar's program, he explained, "was completely useless."

The story of the judge and the jihadist is one more illustration of just how tricky the Guantánamo issue is becoming for the Obama administration. Last month both Republicans and Democrats in Congress voted overwhelmingly to reject $80?mil--lion in funding to close the prison, demanding that the White House provide a more detailed plan for where to relocate the remaining inmates. Right-wing commentators have effectively used the controversy to create a not-in-my-backyard backlash against the idea of resettling detainees in the United States, even in high-security prisons. Overseas rehabilitation programs like al-Hitar's seem—on the surface, at least—like an attractive alternative. But few foreign countries are eager to open their doors either. The ones that do want their countrymen back pose their own challenges, not least whether they can ensure that the detainees do not return to terrorism. Some American officials are now so concerned about Yemen's ability to absorb and reform its Gitmo prisoners that they are urging wealthier, more stable nations like Saudi Arabia to take the Yemenis instead.