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Yemen and national security

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Yemen didn’t feature in President Obama’s State of the Union address despite the country’s role in the attempted Christmas Day bombing of Flight 253. The White House has halted transfers of Yemeni detainees from Guantanamo back to their home country because it’s concerned that some of them might join terrorist groups operating in Yemen. Now Yemen says it will build a rehabilitation center for returning detainees to ensure that won’t happen. The World’s Katy Clark reports on the success rate of such rehab programs.

• In full: State of the Union address
• Audio Extra: Katy’s interview with John Horgan
• Yemen conference fails to excite Arab press interest
• On The World: Is Yemen in trouble?

Read the Transcript
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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WBGH Boston.  Nearly half of the 192 detainees still being held at Guantanamo Bay are from Yemen.  President Obama would like to send them home, but Yemen is battling a resurgent Al Qaeda.  It’s also where the would be Christmas bomber allegedly got his training.  The White House has suspended plans to send any Guantanamo detainees back to Yemen amid concerns some might turn to, or even return to violence there.  The government of Yemen says it is addressing that.  It’s planning to build an $11,000,000.00 center to rehabilitate returning detainees.  The money reportedly will come from the United States.  The World’s Katie Clark has our story.

KATIE CLARK: Yemen’s plans to build a rehab center for released Guantanamo detainees is a critical step toward both closing Guantanamo and fighting terrorism, that’s according to Sarah Mendelsohn.  She runs the human rights and security initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

SARAH MENDELSOHN: It is not inconceivable that as the year goes on, you’re going to have fairly soon a majority population at Guantanamo that are Yemeni.  If Guantanamo was a recruitment tool for Al Qaeda in previous years and still, a Yemeni majority at Guantanamo will be a recruitment tool for particularly AQAP, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

KATIE CLARK: Mendelsohn says figuring out how to reintegrate terrorists and would-be terrorists into society is an important next step in counter-terrorism efforts.  It’s hardly a new idea though.  Saudi Arabia has a state run reintegration program.  Yemen even tried it a few years back but people who studied these programs, John Horgan of Penn State among them, say there is no clear cut way to measure how effective they are or even what they’re trying to accomplish.

JOHN HORGAN: The assumption in the Saudi case and in the Yemeni case is that if you want to reduce the risk of these militants going back into terrorist activity, you first have to change the way they think.  Now, that is plausible logic, but it doesn’t necessarily seem to be holding up.

KATIE CLARK: Horgan says there’s a big difference between getting someone to disengage in terrorist activities and getting someone to abandon his beliefs.  Changing someone’s beliefs, he says, is significantly more challenging.  Horgan’s spoken to many former extremists.  He says they talk about a disconnect between what they thought life would be like as part of a militant group and what they actually experienced.

JOHN HORGAN: Most terrorist movements will rely on the glamour.  They rely on the kinds of street cred that young recruits attribute to these movements.  The reality is very, very different and there is enormous value to making this known.

KATIE CLARK: Horgan says you also have to give former terrorists something to do.  Men who go through the Saudi program are assisted in finding a home, a wife and a job.  They also get cash.  Keeping them busy is key to keeping them out of trouble.  Of course it doesn’t always work.  There have been numerous reports of graduates of both the Saudi program and a more informal on that’s been going on in Yemen returning to the fight.  Christopher Bosack of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace says there will always be that risk.

CHRISTOPHER BOSACK: There only way there’s no risk is by not letting anybody out.

KATIE CLARK: And in the case of many of the Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo, various judges have ordered them to be released.  Right now the focus is on how to do that with the least amount of risk.  For The World, this is Katie Clark.

MARCO WERMAN: You can hear an extended version of Katie’s interview with Penn State’s John Horgan at the world dot org.

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