What it's like to be home from Guantanamo Bay.

This is from the CBC It is interesting to note that some of the prisoners were sold to the Americans. I guess that is a good way to earn money in Pakistan and also get rid of someone you don't like.




NANCY DURHAM:
What it's like to be home from Guantánamo Bay -->
February 12, 2008
As the inmate population at the U.S. detention centre at Guantánamo Bay dwindles, there is a new problem developing for the home countries of those caught up like this in America's war on terror: What exactly do you do with hundreds of men who have been locked up without trial for years on end?
While many countries are just beginning to make plans, Saudi Arabia already has its procedure down pat. Repatriation Saudi-style is part of a complex de-radicalization program the country uses to help all ex-detainees re-integrate into society whether they're just out of Guantánamo Bay or insurgents picked up off the streets of Baghdad.
If there are Saudi nationals about to be released from U.S. detention, the government sends a jumbo jet to Cuba with psychologists and medical staff on board to help with the transfer home.
A government film crew documents the ritual in detail: Dazed looking prisoners now unshackled and dressed in clean white uniforms are welcomed on board and their treatment begins on the flight itself.
Upon landing, these men are reunited with family members and then sent to prison where they are interrogated and usually charged, often with having left the country illegally. Then they are generally sentenced to a short prison term where the psychological and religious counselling, which began on board the flight home, continues.
During their imprisonment, these men are given exams to write to try to gauge their state of mind and if they show promise at this they are eligible to attend a government-run rehabilitation centre north of Riyadh, where they are segregated — those from Guantánamo Bay, for example, are treated separately from those who were captured more recently in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Here they spend two more months in counselling and religious education, their last stop before freedom.
Colas on the lawn
During my visit to the rehab centre recently, I spent two hours with three former detainees from Guantánamo Bay, two of them Saudi and one originally from Bahrain.
They had been repatriated to Saudi Arabia just four months earlier. For most of the visit we sat on rich red rugs in a modest building in which the interior had been transformed into a striped tent. All three of the men — Juma al-Dossary, Bender Ahmad al-Jabry and Hamood, who declined to give his last name, were welcoming.
I asked al-Dossary, the 33-year-old from Bahrain, why he had been taken to Guantánamo in the first place but his answer was not very clear. None of the former detainees wanted to discuss the past. Whether it is the trauma of what happened to them, or the fear of putting their impending freedom at risk I do not know.
Al-Dossary suggested I ask the American government why he was locked up. I did, in fact, but repeated inquiries there went unanswered. His story is that he had gone to Afghanistan to help people, not to fight. And that during the sweep after 9/11, he was captured and, he says, sold to the Americans for $5,000 by people claiming he was a member of al-Qaeda.
As for his time at Guantánamo Bay, he repeatedly referred me to the internet and to his New York lawyer, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan who told me he had spent years worrying whether al-Dossary would even survive detention because he had tried to kill himself on more than one occasion.
"I worried because after years of being held in isolation he had become completely despondent and hopeless," Colangelo-Bryan said of his client. "It is such a personal relief to know now that he is home, that he is with his family and that he is feeling positive about life."
Living for today, or tomorrow?
There is something of a young Woody Allen about the 29-year-old bespectacled Bender al-Jabry who readily told me, smiling, that yes he did go to Afghanistan to train to fight with Chechen rebels, fellow Muslims, against the Russians.
Juma al-Dossary, a self-proclaimed romantic who tried to kill himself on 13 different occasions while in detention at Guantánamo Bay (Nancy Durham/CBC)
While in Afghanistan, he says, he was taken prisoner and sold to the Americans for $10,000. He says his torture started in Kandahar and continued for six years. He told me that while he was at Gitmo, he spent three and a half years in solitary confinement.
Both al-Dossary and al-Jabry say they live for the future now. Only Hamood, 34, said he could neither forget nor forgive his six-year ordeal.
His story is that he went to Afghanistan before 9/11 "just to help the poor people" and that afterward, when he saw "Americans threatening Afghans, Taliban and al-Qaeda," he decided "that's not my business" and left Afghanistan via the notorious Tora Bora region on the border with Pakistan, the presumed hiding place of Osama bin Laden.
Hamood says he turned to the Pakistani army for help, explaining that he was from Saudi Arabia and that he needed to call his embassy. "They told me 'OK that's fine, we're going to take you to a nice place to get some rest.'"
He shakes his head at the memory, explaining that he was then given to U.S. forces who took him first to Kandahar and then to Guantánamo Bay, in the American-controlled portion of Cuba, "asking myself for six years what did I do?"
Now he says, he keeps his anger under control. "But I don't forgive. I'm asking God to get me my revenge, soon, because I'm still a human being. How [can] I forget six years from my life? It's not a short time."
'I'm a romantic'
Ex-Guantanamo Bay detainees participate in art therapy sessions at rehab. Al-Jabry's work uses a bright yellow eye to represent Cuba in a sea of murky waters. His art therapist, Dr. Awad Alyami, says the "eye symbolizes seeing, observing things" and, studying the piece Alyami says, "things get confused for him so he just hurries up and leaves" the work unfinished.
Alyami also says the work shows al-Jabry is happy to be back among his family and people. "Most of them have told us they were not sure they would see their families again."
There were certainly times when al-Dossary thought he would never see his family again. When I said goodbye to him at the rehab centre, however, I left a man in an upbeat mood musing about finding a wife.
Then he added, "And by the way I'm romantic!" He insists he has forgotten the negative experiences of his detention since he has come home and that he has been "reborn" into a "new life" where every minute counts.
His first marriage ended in divorce and now he is getting reacquainted with his 13-year-old daughter. He told me his family comes first and he wants to spend as much time as possible with his mother, sisters and brothers. His father died while he was in Guantánamo Bay.