Yemen sets up rehab center for Guantanamo returnees SANAA

Yemen sets up rehab center for Guantanamo returnees SANAA: Yemen is setting up a center where more than 100 Yemenis are to undergo rehabilitation after their expected release from the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, state media reported yesterday.

The center is being built in Sanaa with US government assistance, according to the weekly newspaper 26 September, a Defense Ministry mouthpiece.
The move triggered outrage among rights activists who said the government’s plan to keep the returnees in a rehabilitation center in their home country only means re-jailing them.
In the new facility, the inmates would undergo a series of “edification programs based on moderation to shun extremism and terrorism,” said the paper, which is close to the president’s office.
Yemeni authorities are to receive the Yemeni Guantanamo detainees shortly after the center is built, it added.
The center would accommodate the inmates and their families, the paper said, citing well-informed official sources.
Khaled Al-Anesi, executive director of the Sanaa-based human rights organization HOOD, said the center would only be “another detention facility.”
“To rehabilitate a former prisoner, you don’t need to put him behind bars again,” Al-Anesi told Arab News. “The rehabilitation act is in the prisoners’ interest, but re-jailing them is not,” he said.

He said the returnees should be released immediately after they arrive in Yemen, and after that they could be sent through an educational program.
Al-Anesi further said that linking the handover of the detainees to the establishment of such a center would further delay their release form Guantanamo and “prolong their suffering.”
US President Barack Obama on his first day in office on Tuesday ordered the suspension of prosecutions at Guantanamo for 120 days.
More than 100 of about 250 detainees at the controversial prison camp are Yemenis. They have become the single largest nationality imprisoned at Guant-anamo as the prison’s population steadily declined from a peak of 600 in 2003. Only 13 Yemenis have been released from the facility since it was set up in 2002.

Khaled Al-Mahdi Arab News

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