Out Of Guantanamo, Back To Terrorism

Recidivism Rate Slowly Rising But Does Gitmo Fill Prisoners With Rage?

(CBS)  Saudi prisoners released from Guantanamo come home in style aboard a 747, checked out by doctors and greeted by senior government officials when they land. But they are not set free until they go through a rehabilitation program designed to rid them of any desire to join the ranks of holy warriors, reports CBS News national security correspondent David Martin.

So far 117 young men returned from Guantanamo have been through the program. But the number that really matters is how many have gone back to terrorism after being released. The Saudis say that number is 11.

Two of them showed up in Yemen in an al Qaeda video. One later gave himself up. The other has been linked to an attack on the American embassy in Yemen.

But the most horrendous case is that of Abdallah al Ajmi, a Kuwaiti who did not go through the Saudi program. Two years after his release from Guantanamo, he showed up in a martyr video with the truck bomb he drove into an army base in Mosul, killing 13 Iraqi soldiers.

"I am convinced Ajmi was not a bad guy before he got to Guantanamo," said his former attorney Thomas Wilner.

That is what makes the Ajmi case doubly troubling - the possibility raised by Wilner - that Guantanamo filled Ajmi with murderous rage.

"By the end of my last visit they had put a screen up in front of his cell because he was throwing urine and feces at everyone," Wilner said.

According to the Pentagon, 74 of the 534 detainees released from Guantanamo - almost all during the Bush administration - have gone back to some type of extremist activity. That works out to about 14 percent.

That rate has been slowly but steadily rising and Pentagon officials expect it to go still higher by the time Guantanamo is closed.