Inside the Kingdom (49 page)

Several weeks later and still shackled, Khaled looked around as his captors removed his blindfold at the end of a long plane journey through the night. It was January 16, 2002.

“The weather was humid and the sun was high in the sky,” he remembers. “And we all asked the same question—‘Where is this place?’ Was it Turkey? Or Morocco? Were we somewhere in the Gulf? We knew that the plane had come down once to land in the course of the journey, and then had taken off again. The Marines were under orders. Straightaway they told us the line of the
qibla
[the direction of Mecca] so that we knew which way to pray—and we could work out north, south, east, and west from the sun. But they would not tell us where we were. So we searched for clues everywhere. We saw these strange white birds with webbed feet, and we noticed that the Hummers were painted the color of sand. We asked the Red Cross when they came after a month, but they said they were not allowed to give us information like that.”

In the end a British MI6 interrogator let Khaled in on the secret.

“When I asked where we were he pointed to the front of his hat, and I saw that it had ‘Cuba’ written on it.

“ ‘You could have gotten that anywhere,’ I said.

“ ‘As you like.’ He shrugged.

“ ‘Cuba?’ I said. ‘Fidel Castro? Bring me some cigars!’ ”

Khaled Al-Hubayshi was one of 137 Saudis detained at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, starting in January 2002, and he needed all his breeziness to survive.
¹⁸

“At first it was all confrontation,” he remembers, “—sheer, 100 percent aggression all the time. They hit us round the head and shouted. We went on hunger strike and threw shit at them from our buckets. But after a month or so most of us quieted down. I tried to work out how long I would be in this place. I reckoned four to six years—fifty, sixty, seventy months. It was no good hoping for a short time.

“So then I had to decide. Was I going to fight battles every day? You don’t have to love your jailer, but why not be human? Once we got to know them, quite a few of the Americans turned out to be very decent people. I still have their e-mail addresses. A lot of them told us they thought the war in Iraq was a dreadful mistake. And as for the Puerto Rican guards, they really
hated
the Americans. They saw themselves as Yanqee slaves. On the second anniversary of 9/11, they gave us the thumbs-up. At mealtimes they would get us special spicy food. ‘You are soldiers,’ they said. ‘You fought for your cause like anyone else.’ ”

The U.S. guards were replaced by rotation every six months.

“For the first week or so the new arrivals were always uptight and strict. Basically, they were scared. Then everybody mellowed out. In the end I was almost grateful for my time in Guantánamo. I developed this motto: ‘You will find rocks and stones across your path in life, and you can trip over them if you choose. Or you can use them to build yourself a wall of success.’ ”

Along with his homemade self-help slogan, Al-Hubayshi retains two enduring memories of Guantánamo.

“All day long we heard the braying and mooing from the crazies in Block D, the mental-health block. It was the only way they could survive, poor things, to pretend they were cows and donkeys or whatever. They went quiet every night at nine o’clock exactly. That was when the orderlies arrived with syringes. Then I remember the day that Donald Rumsfeld came to visit. He walked right by all of us in the cages, but he never turned his head toward us once. The man did not look us in the eye. I could see it so clearly. He was too embarrassed. I reckon America’s war director was ashamed of what America was doing.”

If the shock of the 9 /11 attacks brutalized official U.S. attitudes toward human rights, it had the opposite effect on the Saudi government.

“I had heard horror stories about Al-Haier,” says Khaled Al-Hubayshi, referring to the notorious Ministry of the Interior prison south of Riyadh. “But when I got there I was amazed. It was a five-star hotel compared with Guantánamo.”

After three and a half years in Cuba, Al-Hubayshi was included in one of the earliest batches of Saudis to be flown back to Riyadh, arriving in July 2005. He was driven straight from the airport to a cell in Al-Haier.

“The Americans kept us shackled and blindfolded till the minute we walked down the aircraft steps, and we dreaded what was waiting. But the Saudis were sort of soft and gentle. They made us feel welcome. I remember my first meal in Al-Haier: whole chicken legs! In Guantánamo they never once gave us meat with bones. They were scared we might shape the bones into weapons.

“In Al-Haier they let us phone our families, and mine came to see me a few days later. There were such tears. I scarcely gave a thought to my family when I went off to Afghanistan. But who stands by you when you’re in trouble? In the end you learn what really matters. The Interior Ministry brought me a new thobe to wear to meet my mother, and they paid for the family to stay in a hotel as long as they wished.”

Khaled was an early beneficiary of what would develop into a sophisticated Saudi government redemption program.

“I had to stand trial,” he remembers. “I was sentenced to fifteen months for having a false passport and leaving the country without permission. But when that was over, I was free. ‘We are going to help you,’ they said. A month later the government gave me a Toyota Camry and they got me my old job back as an electrical engineer. I was living in the world again.”

The architect of this surprisingly liberal and progressive reform program is the interior minister’s son, the earnest and bespectacled Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. Resembling a combination of math professor and English vicar, the forty-eight-year-old prince does not look like a security director, but he has become something of a pioneer in terrorist redemption techniques. Bearded Guantánamo graduates flock beaming to the prince’s Sunday majlis in Riyadh, while human-rights delegations fly in from around the world to study the rehab program that now bears his name.

“Everyone has a good thing inside him,” says the prince. “These young people have been sick. We view their problem as a virus in the brain.”

The prince is no softy.

“Security is a red line,” he says, “and no one should cross it. If you do, you must take your punishment. Every extremist in our program has been tried and convicted and has served his sentence. Among our detainees we have about 20 percent who refuse to change. They are the hard nuts who cannot be cracked. They have to stay behind bars until they can satisfy a court that they have corrected all their false beliefs. But we try to help those who are willing to be helped. We bring in psychiatrists. We bring in clerics to show them where they have misread the Koran. They have a lot of religion lessons. We bring in all the family—father, mother, wife, brothers, sisters. We try to transform each detainee from a young man who wants to die to a young man who wants to live.”

Whenever a young Saudi is killed in a terrorist incident or blows himself up, the prince receives the grisly DNA evidence, then gets on the phone to the dead man’s family before the names are published.

“I give them my condolences and those of the government. I try to explain to them that their son was a victim. He was taken advantage of by abnormal ideologists. We don’t want him seen as a hero, or any sort of idealized example to his family or tribe. They have lost a family member—we have lost a citizen. Some of them hang up. Sometimes they call back. We take care of all those families. We show an interest because those mothers and fathers are victims—and we know that if we don’t take care of them, there are others who will try to step in.”

The families are the focus of Prince Mohammed’s program.

“This is how our culture operates,” says the prince. “In the West a young man is independent of his family when he is eighteen. Here a man of thirty will do what his father or mother says, especially when the whole family is agreed. Some people say that our rehab program is too soft—that we should build a sort of Saudi Guantánamo to punish them. But that is just what Al-Qaeda would like. When people say we are spoiling these young men, that is music to my ears. If we used the old, harsh ways, then they would draw sympathy and the extremists would take advantage of that to try to get more people involved in terrorism.”

The prince says he was saddened but not disheartened by the news in February 2009 that two of the graduates of the Saudi rehab program left the country soon after their release and went to Yemen to join active cells of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The Ministry of the Interior has published a “wanted” list of no less than eighty-five radical young Saudis who are thought to be outside the Kingdom.

“Having Al-Qaeda in Yemen is obviously very dangerous,” says Prince Mohammed. “It is like having Afghanistan along our southern border. There are four hundred miles of mountains where terrorists can slip across and be in Jeddah or Riyadh or Abqaiq [Aramco’s principal petroleum processing plant] in a matter of hours. It is a major security threat. But we are ready for them. That is our job. The reason why they have all gone abroad is because our security is so tight at home. Nowadays they know that it is us, not them, who can count on the support of the community—and that is the battle that really matters. We are building a national consensus that extremism is wrong. In the last few months we have had nine young men surrender themselves because their families brought them in. Whoever wins society will win this war.”

In fighting its war, the Ministry of the Interior has resorted to a novel tactic—marriage. No Saudi official will admit on the record that the Kingdom’s terrorist problem might boil down to sexual frustration, but if a social system bans hot-blooded young men from contact with the opposite sex in their most hot-blooded years, perhaps it is hardly surprising that some of them channel this frustration into violence. One cornerstone of the extremist rehab program is to get the “beneficiaries,” as they are called, settled down with a wife as soon as possible. The Ministry of the Interior pays each unmarried beneficiary 60,000 riyals (some $18,000), the going rate for a dowry, or bride price. The family arranges a marriage, and whenever he can, Prince Mohammed turns up for the wedding.

When Khaled Al-Hubayshi was released from Al-Haier prison early in 2007, he wasted no time finding himself a bride at government expense.

“The government has been good to me,” he says. “So why should I not be good to the government?”

Today Khaled lives in Jeddah in a well-appointed apartment filled with stylish furniture, a flat-screen television, and a coffee machine on which his wife brews him a brisk cappuccino every morning. Afghanistan and Guantánamo are distant memories. He then gets into his government-purchased Toyota Camry and drives off to the electrical company, the very model of a settled, hardworking Saudi citizen.

But not every young Saudi who went to Guantánamo ended up so happily.

Yasser Al-Zahrani grew up on a rambling farm on the Taif Plateau, overlooking Mecca. There were sheep and goats; he learned to ride horses, and he loved playing football on the faded green Astroturf pitch in front of the house. His name came from the Arabic word for “easy,” as he was an easy delivery for his mother, the elder of his father Talal’s two wives.

“He was a funny guy,” remembers one of his cousins. “He had a lot of friends. Yasser could make a stone laugh.”

The boy was a good student, so his father had not expected the phone call he received in 2001, a few weeks after September 11. Calling from Karachi, Yasser explained that he had broken off his computer and English studies in Dubai. He wanted to help the Muslims. Like many pious young Saudis, Yasser saw 9 /11 as the start of a new jihad. He was already on his way to Afghanistan.

“I was surprised,” remembers Talal, a black-bearded colonel in the Mabahith, “but I was accepting. Yasser told me it was his duty to God. He knew that he had to go.”

Then a few months later the phone rang again. It was a Saudi official calling to tell Talal that his son was being sent to Guantánamo—one of several dozen young Saudis who had been handed to the U.S. authorities by troops of the Northern Alliance following the epic battle of Janji.

“ ‘Get up, you shit!’ ‘Shut the fuck up!’ We learned a lot of English swear words,” remembers Abu Fawwaz, a friend who was captured alongside Yasser after Janji. “The Americans seemed to enjoy waking us up in the middle of the night, or interrupting our prayers. I suppose they needed revenge for 9 /11. They made us stand in line for an hour—forbidden from going to the toilet. Men peed where they stood. They tried to frighten us with dogs. Before we flew to Guantánamo they shaved off our hair and beards. That was the signal that told us we were going to travel—when the soldiers came round with the electric clippers.”

Yasser and Abu Fawwaz arrived in Cuba in the same early weeks as Khaled Al-Hubayshi. The U.S. government records of Yasser’s interrogations reveal that he misled his captors—he failed to tell them it was the attacks of 9 /11 that inspired him to go and fight jihad. He told them he arrived in Afghanistan before 9 /11.