SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — The re-emergence of two former Guantanamo Bay prisoners as al-Qaida terrorists in the past week won’t likely change U.S. policy on transfers to Saudi Arabia, the Pentagon said yesterday.

More than 100 Saudis have been repatriated from the U.S. military’s prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Saudi Arabia, where the government puts them through a rehabilitation program designed to encourage them to abandon Islamic extremism and reintegrate into civilian life.

The online boasts by two of these men that they have joined al-Qaida in Yemen underscore that the Saudi system isn’t fail safe, the Pentagon said. A U.S. counterterrorism official in Washington confirmed the men had been Guantanamo detainees. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose that fact on the record.

Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, said the U.S. sees the Saudi program as admirable.

“The best you can do is work with partner nations in the international community to ensure that they take the steps to mitigate the threat ex-detainees pose,” he said. “There are never any absolute guarantees. There’s an inherent risk in all detainee transfers and releases from Guantanamo.”

The deprogramming effort — built on reason, enticements and lengthy talks with psychiatrists, Muslim clerics and sociologists — is part of a concerted Saudi government effort to counter the ideology that nurtured the 9/11 hijackers and that has lured hundreds of Saudis to join the Iraq insurgency. 15 of the 19 hijackers who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, were Saudis, as is the mastermind of the attacks, Osama bin Laden.

A total of 218 men, including former Guantanamo detainees, have gone through the reintegration program, according to the Saudi Ministry of Interior. Nine were later arrested again, an “official source” at the ministry said in a dispatch from the official Saudi Press Agency. The report said some of the nine were former detainees, but did not give a breakdown.