RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Nobody was home at the dusty brown campus of the reintegration center for recovering Islamic extremists. The swimming pool was still. The lights were on at the gallery of art therapy works, but there were no visitors. Not a slip of paper was out of place at the psychological and social services unit.
The beneficiaries of the Saudi government program, which helps prisoners re-enter society, were on furlough for family visits for Eid al-Adha, the season of the Feast of the Sacrifice, leaving the place eerily empty, like a U.S. college campus on Christmas break.
Only a painting in the gallery offered a glimpse of the religious tolerance that is a hallmark of the program: It was of a woman smelling a flower, her hair uncovered and flowing, against the night sky.
The program, with its campus in Riyadh, and another in Jeddah, grew from a counterterrorism campaign that began in 2004 to re-educate citizens who had made their way home from jihadist training camps in Afghanistan and others influenced by them.
About 6,000 men have gone through some form of the program, among them 137 former detainees of the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, none of whom were convicted of war crimes.
The last Guantánamo detainee was sent to the program in 2017, just before President Donald J. Trump dismantled the office that negotiated transfers .Now the question is whether and how the center fits into President Biden’s efforts to close the prison at Guantánamo, which opened more than 20 years ago to hold terrorism suspects seized around the globe in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Over the years, the United States has held about 780 men and boys at Guantánamo Bay, with about 660 there at its peak in 2003. Saudi citizens were of particular interest because 15 of the 19 hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks were Saudis.
The Trump administration released just one prisoner from Guantánamo, a confessed Qaeda operative who is currently serving a prison sentence in Riyadh under an Obama-era plea agreement. The Biden administration repatriated another Saudi citizen in May, but under an agreement to send him for psychiatric treatment for schizophrenia, not jihadi rehabilitation.
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