"In Saudi Arabia, al Qaeda has been destroyed as an organization, " said Abdulrahman al Hadlaq, the chairman of the committee that oversees the rehabilitation program. "What is happening now is a battle, a war, of ideas."

That's why the program enlists counselors such as Sheik Mohamed al Nejeimi. He's one of 100 state-backed clerics who counter radical teachings with moderate passages from the Koran, Islam's holy book.

The detainees pepper Nejeimi with easy questions such as when jihad is valid or how to fight tyranny within the framework of Islam.

But he said there's one frequently asked question that always stumps him: "Why did you let us go to Afghanistan to fight the Russians then, but won't let us go there now to fight the Americans in similar conditions?"

The government's reply is that jihad should be in the interest of one's homeland. Fighting the secular Soviets in the 1980s was permissible; fighting Kabul's Muslim- led government today is not.

SUCCESS STORY

Eager to highlight a success story, Saudi security officials recently introduced journalists to a short, wiry man they said had been detained at Guantánamo. They identified him only by a nickname, Abu Suleiman, and they refused to allow reporters to ask the man his real name.

It was impossible to verify his account.

Abu Suleiman said that when he was 20 years old and impressionable, he was recruited into a militant cell in the Philippines. With dreams of fighting alongside Chechen rebels, he received training in Afghanistan, where he met bin Laden "a few times" and where he was captured in late 2001 by U.S.-led forces in the mountains of Tora Bora.

In his four years at Guantánamo, one of them in isolation, Abu Suleiman said, he underwent severe U.S. interrogations "from the first day to the last day." When he was finally released last year, he expected even harsher treatment from the Saudi prison system.

Instead, Saudi authorities enrolled him in the then-nascent rehabilitation program and offered him a monthly stipend of $800. He's among 750 of the 2,000 graduates to be fully released and back in society.

Abu Suleiman jokes that his last vestige of Guantánamo is the near-perfect English he learned from his American jailers.

Now 33, he's a newlywed financial analyst working in Riyadh. The program found him the job and sent a representative to congratulate him on his marriage.

"I was shocked by the good treatment, " Abu Suleiman said. "They make it easy for me to forget what happened in Guantánamo."