"This isn't a problem they can jail their way out of or shoot their way out of," Boucek said of the conflict and the teeming U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and elsewhere.
Bukhari Abdul Hakim, a round-faced man with a graying mustache whose conversation is punctuated by long pauses, spent six years at Guantanamo. He was one of 133 Saudi prisoners, including three who died, at the island jail. Hakim lost his construction job, became diabetic and missed the birth of his granddaughter. He wants to get married, but sometimes he confuses things; he despises the United States.
"The American government is a liar," Hakim said. "Why did they keep me all those years? I'm not an enemy combatant. I'm not a terrorist. . . . I don't want to talk about that time. I want to talk about now. My country. Everything is good."
But amid the good there's a gloom he can't quite shake. "What can I do? I have nothing," he said. "My government will help me buy a car so I can become a taxi driver. I'm 54 years old. I'm an old man. I can't do anything."
Juma al-Dossari, who has joint Saudi-Bahraini citizenship, has drawn pictures and talked to counselors about how to move beyond his Guantanamo years, which began with his arrest in 2001 on the Pakistani-Afghan border. He spoke of the "bad ideals" of radicalism, of how Bin Laden "used my religion and destroyed its reputation," of how he is trying to "fix" himself but sometimes seems lost.
"Before all this happened, I lived in Indiana in 2000," he said. "I worked in an Islamic center for a while. I like Indiana. I like American life. There is a difference between real Americans and those guys who run Guantanamo. I have to be fair, though. Some of the guards at Guantanamo were kind. They apologized to me."
He sat in a room where videos and slide shows were shown earlier depicting the rehabilitation center's successes. He wants to be one but seems not to want to sound programmed or rehearsed.
Voices of other men murmured just beyond his, all recounting their ordeals as the sheiks, psychologists and Interior Ministry officials lingered at the edges until the day was done. He did not mention his suicide attempts, including one in which he slit an artery in his neck.
"I cannot forget those six years," Al-Dossari said. "When the airplane came to take us back home, it was like a dream, a dream from prison to Saudi paradise."
jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com
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Times staff writer Carol J. Williams in Guantanamo Bay contributed to this report.
