Reeducating Osama Bin Laden's Disciples

President Obama has ordered the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay closed and his new administration is close to figuring out what to do with the 240 inmates still held there. Some, like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self proclaimed mastermind of 9/11, will undoubtedly be put on trial for their lives.

But more than half the so-called detainees will probably never go before a jury because the U.S. government does not have a case that will stand up in court. So what happens when a prisoner is set free from Guantanamo?

As correspondent David Martin reports for 60 Minutes, more than 500 prisoners were released during the Bush administration and one of the largest contingents was from Saudi Arabia.

So 60 Minutes went to Saudi Arabia to see what happens when these young men come home to the country that gave us Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers. What 60 Minutes found is a rehabilitation program that attempts to make solid citizens out of holy warriors by convincing them bin Laden has it all wrong.

The prisoners step onto the aircraft slightly dazed, their shackles and blindfolds having just been removed. On the long flight home they are checked out by a medical team and logged into the Saudi legal system. So far, 117 Saudi men swept up in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the months after 9/11 have come home from Guantanamo.

One of them, Khalid al Jhani, was once a disciple of Osama bin Laden. "I've been involved in this jihad thing since I was young. I was believing that I have to help the Muslims and this the right way to do - to perform jihad," he told Martin.

Jhani first went to Afghanistan in the 1990s and was with bin Laden in the Tora Bora Mountains during al Qaeda's last stand against the Americans.

Jhani said he even met bin Laden at Tora Bora; he also told Martin bin Laden left Afghanistan one day before he left the region himself.

That experience left him with an entirely different opinion of bin Laden. "He said 'Well, I'm not going to let you down and you are not going to let us down.' But I saw that in Tora Bora that when he left, so he left everybody behind him, you know," Jhani explained.

"He changes his story," Martin remarked.

"I call him 'flip flop,'" Jhani replied, laughing.

Jhani was captured in Pakistan and ended up in Guantanamo with hundreds of other so-called enemy combatants. Four years later he went home to Saudi Arabia, where he became a prime example of how the government treats one-time holy warriors it no longer considers a threat.

"After one month they call me and said 'Ok - go on, get your car.' I said car? Okay," he told Martin. "All the people that [have] been released from Guantanamo, they give them car to you know, to help them get in the society."

Then he met personally with Prince Mohammed bin Nayif, the head of Saudi Internal Security, roughly the equivalent in the U.S. of an ex-con sitting down with the director of the FBI.

"I went to his office and said I want to get married. He said 'Okay, about how much is going to cost and we'll take care of it,'" Jhani recalled.

Not only did they give him a car and gave him money for his wedding, the government was also going to pay for his house, Jhani told Martin.

A top aide to Prince Nayif, Major General Yousef Mansour, says the money, which adds up to tens of million of dollars for all the former prisoners, is not a hand out but a hand up.

"We want to keep him busy," Mansour said.

"These are people the United States called the worst of the worst," Martin pointed out. "Why would you trust the worst of the worst?"

"Those, after all, are our kids," Mansour replied. "And are you gonna let them stay in jails forever?"

Some Saudis have been in Guantanamo for seven years and Dr. Abdul Rahman al Hadlaq believes the longer a man is held there the harder he is to treat.

"They come out of Guantanamo hating Americans?" Martin asked.

"In the beginning yes. In the beginning yes," Dr. Hadlaq replied.

Asked if there is evidence that Guantanamo has made these men more radical, Hadlaq told Martin, "I think so, yes. Because, in their journey you know from Afghanistan to Guantanamo, they faced a lot of torturing. It's so important to deal with this issue of torture. They really need rehabilitation. And I think will have been successful in easing this anger, which is so important."

Torture of course is a loaded word, but at the very least the treatment en route to Guantanamo was rough and provided the raw material for al Qaeda propaganda videos to drum up new recruits.

"They are trying to play on the emotions of those young guys, to let them get very angry and say 'We want to do something.' Then those al Qaeda guys, they will tell them, 'We have the answer. We will help you. Let's put your hand in our hand and do something to protect our brothers and sisters and our Muslim women,'" Hadlaq explained.

The Saudis cracked down on al Qaeda as only an authoritarian state can. There are now more than 4,000 real or suspected terrorists in Saudi jails, and Chris Boucek of the Carnegie Endowment, who has studied the kingdom's internal security programs, says that's down from a few years ago.

"Ten, 11, 12,000 people who had been arrested and gone through you know interrogation or questioning and things like that," Boucek told Martin.

"So they just swept up everybody?" Martin asked.

"There were a lot of people who were, yeah, detained," Boucek replied.

Asked if there is any real organization of al Qaeda left in Saudi Arabia, Boucek said, "There are no first or second tier level operatives in the kingdom. They've all been killed or captured."

"We have hard approach. We have soft approach. Basically developing some programs to prevent this ideology from spreading to the society," Hadlaq explained.

A demonstration of a SWAT operation put on for 60 Minutes by the kingdom's special forces was as close as we could get to the hard approach.

But then the Saudis took 60 Minutes inside a compound on the outskirts of Riyadh and allowed us to get a first hand look at the soft approach.

There we met Dr. Turki Oetayan, a western educated psychologist, greeting men fresh out of Saudi jails.

The men at the compound will spend months listening to lectures until Oetayan and his colleagues declare them free of the impulses which incited them to holy war.

"I was giving them a lecture about the emotions, how they understand anger. I was trying to say anger is not, you know easy to control, especially in their cases," Dr. Oetayan said.

It's very much like anger management.

And then there's art therapy - a surprisingly modern concept introduced by Dr. Awad al Yami into a very conservative society. Dr. Awad says art gives his students a chance to express feelings they're not ready to talk about.

No one is more central to the rehabilitation of these ex-offenders than Sheik Ahmad Gelan.

Asked what he told them about Jihad, Gelan told Martin, "We told them that Islam doesn't want to send a message that our religion is a bloody religion."

Gelan confounds all your preconceptions about Muslim clerics as stern, remote gray beards. But he memorized the Qur'an when he was still a teenager and is the center's unquestioned religious authority. His job is to guide these men away from Osama bin Laden and back to what he calls true Islam.

"Most Americans, the one Saudi they can all name is Osama bin Laden," Martin told Chris Boucek. "And they all know that most of the hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis. Why should Americans take a lesson from the Saudis of all people?"

"A lot of these programs are about recognizing being violent is not a permanent state of ones life. Just as you become radicalized, and there's a process for that, some people go through another process where you leave violence behind. And I think that's the part that is really important," Boucek said.

But here's the most important part: 11 of 117 men returned from Guantanamo have shown up again on Saudi Arabia's most wanted terrorist list.

"You can call that a ten percent failure rate or you can call that a 90 percent success rate," Martin remarked to Major General Yousef Mansour.

"Ninety percent," Mansour said. "I always take the glass you say this is half full of empty, full."

General Mansour was not laughing when Mohammed al Awfi became a colossal embarrassment to the soft approach. Awfi came back from six years in Guantanamo in a back brace, went through rehabilitation, but then traded the back brace for a bandolier - and along with another graduate of the program showed up in Yemen on an al Qaeda video denouncing the Saudi government.

But according to the Saudis, Awfi's family convinced him to turn himself in and his next video was a full confession on Saudi TV. His cooperation with the government earned him some soft prison time, confined to an apartment where his family can visit.

Mansour acknowledged that Awfi broke the rules and violated the government's trust.

"He ran away. And now he's back and he gets to see his wife every day," Martin remarked. "He has to be the only ex-terrorist in the world who's living in an apartment with the permission of his government."

"Well, he's under the government siege. He can't go out," Mansour said.

America's top intelligence officer, Admiral Dennis Blair, has said the sight of former Guantanamo inmates showing up in al Qaeda videos "does not inspire confidence in the Saudi program."

But there is a more disturbing case which raises the question whether Guantanamo itself is turning out suicidal terrorists: Abdallah al Ajmi was a Kuwaiti and did not go through the Saudi program.

Two years after he was released from Guantanamo he showed up in a martyr video with an explosives-laden truck he was about to drive into an Iraqi army base in Mosul; 13 Iraqi soldiers were killed.

It is impossible to know whether a rehabilitation program like Saudi Arabia's could have turned Ajmi around.

"Now there is a suicide bomber who killed people. Doesn't that tell you that you just can't take the chance of releasing people from Guantanamo?" Martin asked Boucek.

"I think what that tells you is that when you release somebody you need to have a very, very thorough program to reintegrate back into society, right? I mean, the Saudis who have been repatriated thus far, to the best of my knowledge right now nobody has been involved in violence yet," Boucek said.

Boucek says the recidivism rate among Guantanamo returnees is better than prisoners released from American jails, but neither he nor the Saudis claim it can ever be perfect.

"Here's what some people would say. If we're talking about people who would strap a bomb on their bodies, walk into a marketplace and kill 50 people, you have to be perfect?" Martin asked Dr. Hadlaq.

"Let me assure you, these kind of people you are talking about they are not going to be out from jail," Hadlaq replied.

Produced by Mary Walsh