Khalid Sulayman Jaydh Al Hubayshi

Khalid Sulaymanjaydh Al Hubayshi is a citizen of Saudi Arabia who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba.[1] Al Hubayshi, who acknowledged some jihadists' activity, spent three years in Guantanamo, a further years in Saudi Arabia's al-Ha'ir Prison, prior to graduating from the Saudi jihadist rehabilitation program.[2][3] Several western journalists have interviewed him, and accepted that he appears to have successfully reintegrated into the mainstream of Saudi society.

Khalid Sulayman Jaydh Al Hubayshi
Born1975 (age 44–45)
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Detained atGuantanamo
Alternate nameKhalid Sulaymanjaydh Al Hubayshi
ISN155
Charge(s)No charge (held in extrajudicial detention)
StatusRepatriated

Background

His Guantanamo Internment Serial Number was 155. Joint Task Force Guantanamo counter-terrorism analysts estimate he was born in 1975, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He was repatriated from Guantanamo, on July 19, 2006.[3][4] He was repatriated with two other Saudis.[5] [6][7] Human Rights Watch reported that he was first held, without charge, in Riyadh's al-Ha'ir prison. He later went through the Saudi jihadist rehabilitation program, and, according to a profile in the Christian Science Monitor, his rehabilitation was a success.[2] He admits that graphic propaganda videos that depicted Bosnian Muslim civilian casualties that he saw when he was a student were what triggered his commitment to militant jihadism. He admits he traveled to Chechnya, to fight, and later traveled to Afghanistan. The Christian Science Monitor reported that "on his jihadi travels, he found himself trapped in a life he didn't deeply believe in. He felt he couldn't escape because of his past violations of Saudi law."

In an interview with the Washington Post, he expressed bitterness towards Osama bin Laden, who he felt had betrayed those who had been loyal to him, when he escaped to Pakistan.[3] He condemned al Qaeda's attacks on civilians.

Official status reviews

Originally, the Bush Presidency asserted that captives apprehended in the "war on terror" were not covered by the Geneva Conventions, and could be held indefinitely, without charge, and without an open and transparent review of the justifications for their detention.[8] In 2004, the United States Supreme Court ruled, in Rasul v. Bush, that Guantanamo captives were entitled to being informed of the allegations justifying their detention, and were entitled to try to refute them.

Office for the Administrative Review of Detained Enemy Combatants

Following the Supreme Court's ruling the United States Department of Defense set up the Office for the Administrative Review of Detained Enemy Combatants.[8] He had a Combatant Status Review Tribunal convened in 2004.[4] Normally, he should have had an annual Administrative Review Boards hearing convened, to review his status, but his reviews did not take place.

Formerly secret Joint Task Force Guantanamo assessment

On April 25, 2011, whistleblower organization WikiLeaks published formerly secret assessments drafted by Joint Task Force Guantanamo analysts.[9][10] His recommendation was three pages long and was drafted on January 31, 2004.[11] It was signed by camp commandant Geoffrey D. Miller and recommended that he continued to be detained.[12]

According to Andy Worthington, the author of The Guantanamo Files, his assessment says he acknowledges training at a camp in the Philippines, under Umar Al-Farouq in 1996.[13] Worthington said his file says he and a twin brother traveled to Pakistan in 1997, at the direction of Umar al Faruq, where he contacted Abu Zubaydah, who agreed he could attend the Khaldan training camp—a rival camp to al Qaeda's camp. Worthington said his file says he was jailed for six months when he returned to Pakistan later in 2007, and that he had to use a false passport to travel to Yemen, where a relative of al Faruq smuggled him back into Saudi Arabia. Worthington said his file says for the rest of 1997 through July 2001 he worked for the Saudi electric power authority, returning to Afghanistan with plans to get further training and travel to Chechnya, and that he spent most of the next three months training at the Derunta training camp, in Nangarhar.

Worthington says his file says he was captured near the Pakistan border with four other Arabs on December 14, 2002.[13] The file says US intelligence officials had suspicions about three of his brothers—based on what the file called "sensitive reporting". The file says his twin brother was suspected of involvement "... in a plot to attack US interests in Uzbekistan," The file says two of his elder brothers had traveled to the United States, where one of them had taken flight classes. Further, his file says he was suspected of being related to Khalid lbn Mohammed al-Jihani, who played a role in a suicide bomb plot in Riyadh in 2003.

Repatriation

Khalid was repatriated on July 20, 2005, with two other Saudi captives.[5][6] The two other men were Salih al-Awshan and Mishal Awad Sayaf Alhabri. According to a Human Rights Watch report, as of May 26, 2006, the three remained held, without charge, in Riyadh's al-Ha'ir prison.

Khalid was widely interviewed after being repatriated, and graduating from the Saudi rehabilitation program.[14][15][16][17][18][19]

Al Hubayshi is offered as a success case of the rehabilitation program, who met the Minister of Interior Affairs three times.[14][15] According to Al Hubayshi the Minister said, "Okay you made a mistake ... maybe following the wrong fatwa, being zealous. You are young, and you have been used. We will give you another chance. Are you going to take the chance or be stupid and miss that chance?"

On November 20, 2008, when Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, Al Hubayshi was quoted to offer an explanation as to why Ayman Al Zawahiri used racially loaded language to characterize the President-elect.[20] According to the Christian Science Monitor Zawahiri compared Obama to Malcolm X, and asserted that Obama, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice were the kind of black Americans that Malcolm X would have called "house negroes". The Christian Science Monitor quoted Al Hubayshi explaining that Muslims had hopes that Obama's election would be good for the USA's relationship with the Muslim world, and that this forced Al Zawahiri to try to come up with a criticism.

Khalid Al Hubayshi's Washington Post profile

"I couldn't sleep at night knowing that women were being raped and children slaughtered, just because they were Muslim. I had to do something.

— Khalid Sulayman Jaydh Al Hubayshi

Khalid Al Hubayshi was the subject of an article in the Washington Post on March 24, 2008.[3] In the article Al Hubayshi describes receiving training in Afghanistan, living within a broad jihadist community, within Afghanistan, helping to train fighters planning to travel to Chechnya, and an attempt by Osama bin Laden to recruit him to al-Qaeda. He described his long held reservations about al Qaeda. He described declining to be recruited into al Qaeda. He said that after the al-Qaeda attacks on the USA on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent American counter-strike on Afghanistan soon afterwards, Afghans blamed all Arabs for the counter-attacks. He ended up fleeing Jalalabad, and ending up digging in, in the Tora Bora region. He described Osama bin Laden's sudden retreat from Tora Bora as a cowardly betrayal. He asserted that the attacks on September 11, 2001, were a mistake because they had targeted civilians. Al Hubayshi is described as a former Guantanamo captive who has re-integrated into the mainstream of Saudi society.

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See also

References
  1. "List of Individuals Detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba from January 2002 through May 15, 2006" (PDF). United States Department of Defense. Retrieved 2006-05-15. Works related to List of Individuals Detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba from January 2002 through May 15, 2006 at Wikisource
  2. Christa Case Bryant (2012-05-25). "For Saudi ex-jihadis: a stipend, a wife, and a new life". Christian Science Monitor. Archived from the original on 2012-08-27. Retrieved 2012-08-27.
  3. Faiza Saleh Ambah (2008-03-24). "Out of Guantanamo and Bitter Toward Bin Laden". Washington Post. Archived from the original on 2012-08-27. Retrieved 2009-12-18. Khalid al-Hubayshi, who interviewed for a job with Osama bin Laden in the summer of 2001, now works as a controller at a Saudi utilities firm. He says of bin Laden, "There was no dignity in what he made us do."
  4. Margot Williams (2008-11-03). "Guantanamo Docket: Khalid Sulayman Jaydh al Hubayshi". New York Times. Retrieved 2012-08-27.
  5. "Saudi Arabia: Guantanamo Detainees Return to Limbo". May 31, 2006. Archived from the original on December 2, 2011. Retrieved May 23, 2007.
  6. Anant Raut, Jill M. Friedman (March 19, 2007). "The Saudi Repatriates Report" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on December 2, 2011. Retrieved May 23, 2007.
  7. "Guantanamo Detainees Return to Legal Limbo". Cageprisoners. 2007-05-27. Archived from the original on 2011-02-22. Retrieved 2011-02-22.
  8. "U.S. military reviews 'enemy combatant' use". USA Today. 2007-10-11. Archived from the original on 2012-08-11. Critics called it an overdue acknowledgment that the so-called Combatant Status Review Tribunals are unfairly geared toward labeling detainees the enemy, even when they pose little danger. Simply redoing the tribunals won't fix the problem, they said, because the system still allows coerced evidence and denies detainees legal representation.
  9. Christopher Hope; Robert Winnett; Holly Watt; Heidi Blake (2011-04-27). "WikiLeaks: Guantanamo Bay terrorist secrets revealed -- Guantanamo Bay has been used to incarcerate dozens of terrorists who have admitted plotting terrifying attacks against the West – while imprisoning more than 150 totally innocent people, top-secret files disclose". The Telegraph (UK). Archived from the original on 2012-07-13. Retrieved 2012-07-13. The Daily Telegraph, along with other newspapers including The Washington Post, today exposes America’s own analysis of almost ten years of controversial interrogations on the world’s most dangerous terrorists. This newspaper has been shown thousands of pages of top-secret files obtained by the WikiLeaks website.
  10. "WikiLeaks: The Guantánamo files database". The Telegraph (UK). 2011-04-27. Retrieved 2012-07-10.
  11. "Khalid Sulaymanjaydh Al Hubayshi: Guantanamo Bay detainee file on Khalid Sulaymanjaydh Al Hubayshi, US9SA-000155DP, passed to the Telegraph by Wikileaks". The Telegraph (UK). 2011-04-27. Retrieved 2012-08-27.
  12. Geoffrey D. Miller (2004-01-31). "Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD) for Guantanamo Detainee, ISN US9AG". Joint Task Force Guantanamo. Media related to File:ISN 00155, Khalid Sulaymanjaydh Al Hubayshi's Guantanamo detainee assessment.pdf at Wikimedia Commons
  13. Andy Worthington (2011-08-30). "WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released After the Tribunals, 2004 to 2005 (Part One of Five)". Archived from the original on 2012-08-27. Retrieved 2012-08-27.
  14. Caryle Murphy (2010-09-11). "In Saudi Arabia, re-educating terrorists held at Gitmo". Global Post. Archived from the original on 2011-02-23. Khalid Al Hubayshi, one of the first Saudis released from Guantanamo, said that he and his family were taken to the home of Prince Muhammad. There, he recalled, the prince told him and two other former Guantanamo inmates: "You are our people and we trust you ... and we hope you learn from the past. We are going to take care of you. You are going to get married. We are going to get you back to your jobs. Don’t worry about anything."
  15. Sonia Verma (2008-09-11). "Terrorists 'cured' with cash, cars and counselling". The Globe and Mail. Archived from the original on 2011-02-23. Mr. Al Hubayshi, now 33, is one of the first graduates of a controversial Saudi program designed to rehabilitate hard-core militants who have begun to trickle back home after serving time in U.S. detention.
  16. Faiza Saleh Ambah (2008-03-25). "From terror camps to day job; Saudi man fought with terrorists but now supports the political process". Hamilton Spectator. U.S. government documents and interviews with Hubayshi, now living in Saudi Arabia and working at a utilities company, provide a rare look into the mind of a man who trained for religious warfare, never fought in combat and now says he believes in the political process. But "if the government had not helped me marry and get my job back," he said, "I might be in Iraq now."
  17. Carlyle Murphy (2008-08-21). "Saudis use cash and counseling to fight terrorism". Christian Science Monitor. Archived from the original on 2011-02-23. The young Saudi's break with militant jihadi ideology was not as swift. It started in Guantánamo, but ripened only after he returned home in 2005 to an unexpected reception. Mr. Hubayshi was treated to a mix of forgiveness, theological reeducation, psychological counseling, prison time, and cash.
  18. Andy Worthington (2008-04-28). ""They All Knew He Was Crazy": The Strange Case of Gitmo Prisoner Abu Zubaydah". Alternet. Archived from the original on 2011-02-23. He explained that, while attempting to return home in 1999, he had been arrested and imprisoned by the Pakistanis, who confiscated his passport, and that he had then returned to his job at a utilities company in Saudi Arabia on a false passport. His return to Afghanistan in 2001 came about when he discovered that he was wanted for questioning by the Saudi authorities, and it was at the camp near Jalalabad, where he "adept at making remote-controlled explosive devices triggered by cellphones and light switches," that he attracted the attention of al-Qaeda.
  19. Caryle Murphy (2008-08-26). "A creative release for militant minds". The National. Archived from the original on 2011-02-23. They also have individual sessions with Islamic religious scholars. "A religious adviser speaks with you, and asks you what you believe and they discuss with you on what basis you believe in that, and they try to change your mind by convincing," says Khalid al Hubayshi, who was released from Guantanamo in 2005. "It's helped so many guys in the prison, they like it." Prisoners can request a sheikh to talk with, and request a different one if they do not like the one they are first assigned, Mr Hubayshi says.
  20. Caryle Murphy (2008-11-20). "Al Qaeda No. 2 insults Obama with racial slur in new video". Christian Science Monitor. Archived from the original on 2011-02-23. Khalid al-Hubayshi, a former jihadi fighter in Afghanistan who spent three years at Guantánamo, said Zawahiri no doubt felt compelled to comment on Obama's election because it was such an important event in the US.
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