The Reeducation of Abu Jandal

It is not hard to see why al-Hitar would be an appealing character to American policymakers looking for a way out of the Gitmo quandary. The judge is plucky, self-made, independent-minded and fair. "He's just a nice guy," one Western diplomat told me. Al-Hitar's original program inspired a number of copycats, including in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which has run its own relatively successful rehab facility for the past five years. In addition to the ideological debates, the Saudi program uses an elaborate system of carrots and sticks to keep former jihadists in line. When militants arrive at the rehab facility they're offered candy bars and videogames as diversions. Yet the punishments for relapsing can be harsh. When a militant is released, Saudi officials elicit promises from the inmate's family to keep him in line. If he returns to violence, the whole family can be punished.

To accommodate the former Guantánamo detainees, American counterterrorism officials began talking with Yemeni officials early last year about reinvigorating their own rehab program. "They wanted to do the Saudi model," says one senior Yemeni official, who didn't want to be identified discussing talks with the Americans. "We said, 'If you like the program, we'll do exactly the same'."

Even before Obama was elected, it was becoming increasingly clear that Guantánamo would need to be closed. A series of U.S. court cases found in favor of detainees' rights, including the case of Osama bin Laden's former driver, Salim Hamdan, who is a Yemeni. Fifteen Gitmo detainees were returned to Yemen, including Hamdan; many more would have to follow. Islamist opposition parties in Yemen began using the detainee issue as a cudgel to beat the ruling party, demanding the return of the prisoners. After Saleh's announcement last spring the government set aside a piece of land in the port city of Aden, according to a senior Yemeni official, and designed an elaborate campus that would include "mosques, schools, rooms where their wives could come and have sex with them."

But the money never arrived. "The Ameri-can friends promised that they'd help in financing, the cost of which is $11 million," Saleh told me, as we sat outside on the grounds of his palace in Sana. "So we are waiting for the funds." I asked what he thought the holdup was. The president slouched in his chair, knocked his knees together and offered a wan smile. "Maybe the Americans don't have the money now," he said. Another Yemeni official I had spoken with a few weeks earlier was less diplomatic. "I mean, what the f--k?" he complained. "This was your idea!" (U.S. officials insist that there was never a firm deal on the financing.)

American officials are rightfully hesitant about handing over large sums of money to the Yemeni government without guarantees that the funds will be spent as intended. For starters, the country is growing increasingly lawless. In April, CentCom chief Gen. David Petraeus told Congress that Yemen was a popular new haven for Qaeda militants. In March a suicide bomber detonated himself at a crowded archeological site, killing four South Korean tourists. A week later another bomber attacked a convoy of Korean officials who had come to investigate the earlier assault. (Nobody was killed in the second blast.) Some Americans have floated the idea of sending the Yemeni detainees through the better--established Saudi program instead. Obama's counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan traveled to Sana this past spring to meet with Saleh, and told the Yemeni president that Washington had growing concerns about Yemen's ability to absorb the detainees. When I asked Saleh about his meeting with Brennan, the president seemed annoyed. "We are not obedient soldiers of the United States," he snapped. "We don't say just OK to everything that they ask us. We're not [your] employees."

That much is clear. The Yemeni government has long had a complicated relationship with Al Qaeda. In the past, Saleh has used Islamic militants against his political opponents internally. It is common knowledge that Saleh enlisted former veterans of the 1980s Afghan war to battle his socialist enemies in southern Yemen during the country's civil war in the 1990s. And just last summer, Abdul Majeed al-Zindani, a Yemeni Islamist who is classified as a terrorist by the State Department, threatened to raise thousands of men to fight alongside the Yemeni military against rebellious Houthi tribesmen in the country's north, according to a Western diplomat.