Radiolab - The Other Latif: Bonus Episode!

Episode Date: March 3, 2020

The Other Latif Radiolab’s Latif Nasser always believed his name was unique, singular, completely his own. Until one day when he makes a bizarre and shocking discovery. He shares his name with another man: Abdul Latif Nasser, detainee 244 at Guantanamo Bay. The U.S. government paints a terrifying picture of The Other Latif as Al-Qaeda’s top explosives expert, and one of the most important advisors to Osama bin Laden. Nasser’s lawyer claims that he was at the wrong place at the wrong time, and that he was never even in Al-Qaeda. This clash leads Radiolab’s Latif into a years-long investigation, picking apart evidence, attempting to separate fact from fiction, and trying to uncover what this man actually did or didn’t do. Along the way, Radiolab’s Latif reflects on American values and his own religious past, and wonders how his namesake, a fellow nerdy, suburban Muslim kid, may have gone down such a strikingly different path. BONUS EPISODE Since we released the first episode of The Other Latif, we’ve been contacted by many new sources. Which is great! But it also means we need a little extra time to cobble together Episodes 5 and 6. So while we wait, Jad and Latif chat about Abdul Latif’s response to the series, a character who fell out of episode 4, and a tiny moment in Latif’s youth that helped put him on the path he’s on now. This episode was produced by Suzie Lechtenberg and Latif Nasser. Editing by Jad Abumrad and Soren Wheeler. With help from Sarah Qari. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate. 

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. See?

Yeah. Hey, everybody. It's Chad. We are hard at work on the other Latif episode 5. It's tied you over. It's just going to be a few more days. We wanted to give you a behind-the-scenes peek. It's a little bit of a making-of, a little bit of a director's cut. A little bit of a glimpse into Latif's brain.

That would be our Latif. Throughout the whole process of making the series, very often we will sit down in the studio and just kind of like brain dump to each other, as we call it. And I want to play you a little bit of one of those conversations that Latif and I had quite recently. I hope you enjoy it. The next episode of the series will be with you later this week.

But, yeah, okay. So Latif, Yeah. Here we are. We're working on episode five. It's coming out later in the week. Maybe it's a good time. We should say, if I can interrupt you.

Yeah, yeah. Go. No, no, go. Please. Like, we should say, because so many people who have been, like, reaching out to me, like, they think they're done. Like, like, they're not done. We're like, we're making them now.

Yeah. Like, we are frantically scrambling to make them. That's true. That is exactly why we're here in a way. Yeah. Because we're still in the process. But it's interesting. Like, I mean, one of the things we kind of hoped at the beginning was that as we started telling the story, people would reach out.

Yeah. And that has happened. I mean, who has contacted you in the last few? A lot of people. A lot of people. And that's kind of what I was secretly hoping when we decided to make it come out weekly. Like, and just people are popping up. People are a bunch of former people who worked at Guantanamo Bay.

One of the most difficult sources that I've been trying to find this whole time for years now have been other former Guantanamo detainees. And so finding one of these guys who was willing to talk, who knew Abdul Latif and who, you know, was just talk to a bull, it's been so difficult. And then like literally this morning I got a like a DM from a guy being like Hey, like I'm, I knew Abdel-Latif I'm willing to talk. Oh, and by the way, I know another guy who also knew

Abdul-Ladiv and he's also willing to talk. And like we, I literally just did an interview with him. And it's like this interview that had been eluding me for for three years now like a few days before this thing is supposed to come out. And like, I wish all of this stuff could make it in, and I know inevitably it can't. But yeah. Have you heard through Shelby or through anyone about Abdul Latif? Has he, does he know that this is happening? So he knows that it's happening. So far he does not, he has not heard it, but he's sort of, I think he's heard about it through his lawyer's Mark and Shelby.

And so he, yeah, apparently he, he's sort of encouraging about it. I mean, I can tell you, do you want to see the, I don't, have you seen this? Here, okay, I'll just read you the email I got from Reprieve. Okay. Hi, Lathif, I thought you might like to know that Mark, who's Shelby's colleague, met Abdul, last week for the first time since the podcast started. Mark described the episodes in detail and said it's being listened to widely

and picked up by CNN and in the New York Times. It's also, by the way, made front page news in Morocco. Abdu Latif was very happy to hear that people are listening and impressed that Christiana Amunpur

wanted to hear about it on her show. He asked Mark to pass on a message to you, to me. tell him to get his name out of Guantanamo. Whoa. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, like it.

That's spooky. Yeah. I don't know. How does that strike you? There's a part of me that's like, this is, that's not my job. I'm not a civil servant. I am not a bureaucrat. I'm a journalist.

I tell the story. I don't, like, it's, It's not my job to decide who's in and who's out. Although I, and that takes me to the other side of me, which is that I definitely have an opinion. I have an opinion that if the U.S. government came together and the nonpartisan career bureaucrats decided together with intelligence that I don't even have, that this guy should go home. I think we should honor that. Yeah. And I think that not honoring that is a crummy thing for us to do.

Coming up one of the stranger stories that we encountered in the series so far, this one didn't actually make the cut, but I'm going to play it for you after the break. This is Marnie Campbell from the beautiful banks of Lake Washington in Seattle, Washington. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www. dot sloan.org Jed here back with Latif.

One of the things that's been alternatively interesting and also deeply frustrating for us about making this series is that we have not been able to speak directly with the main character of our story. Abdul Latif Nasser is still held at Guantanamo Bay

and of course journalists cannot speak to detainees. So all we have to go on are the files. And on those files he does look suspicious at times. But it It does make you kind of wonder, and lots of fun and I have talked about this, what does a life look like on paper? I mean, like, have you ever wondered what your life would look like if someone tried to make a series about you based solely on what's written about you on paper? It's funny because so when you sign up to become a citizen, you have to tell them all the trips you have taken.

And so you have to like go through your life. And you have to be like, I made a trip outside the country here and outside the country there. and I go to Canada all the time, like, to visit my family. Is it every single trip, literally? Every single trip, yeah. Not only that, you have to list every single organization that you've been a part of, like any kind of organization, like a PTA or like a, like a homeowners association, whatever. Like, you have to list everything.

What you realize, like, even in looking over my own life, which I had to do for my citizenship application, like, things don't, on paper, nobody makes sense. Like, on paper, things are suspicious. Like, because you don't, you're not inside it. You don't see the motivations people have to jump from this country to this country. You know, like, why did this person go at this time to this place? Like, I don't know.

And when you don't know, things look suspicious. And, like, I get that. And so, and, like, I have this fantasy of, like, one day, Abdul Latif is going to get out. and I'm going to sit down with him, and he's going to, like, tell me all the things I got so wrong. Both for the, I'm sure there are things he'll say that are even more incriminating, and I'm sure there are things that are even less incriminating.

But, like, I'm sure there are so many things that I got so wrong, because you just can't know. Like, human lives are just so, they are, they're so, like, chaotic and expansive that, like, that no amount of, like, paper evidence of, like, a recounting, of someone's life can, like, capture the, the sense of it. Because sometimes there isn't even a sense of it to capture. Like, it's just the, like, vagaries of a life.

If you think about the information that undergirds, the world we're in now, like, this, like, sprawling endless war on terror, right? Yeah. Yeah. And you're like, where did it begin? Obviously, it began with 9-11, but really not. But let's just say, 9-11. And, but then it's just gone and gone and gone and gone. and the people who were chasing now weren't even born on 9-11.

And so, like, it's really hard to sort of plot the cause and effect or whatever it is. But you go all the way back to, like, the beginning, like, the information upon which it all sits. And one of the real revelations for me in just being a sort of a part of the team watching you report this out is that you got back to the paper, the original paper. Yeah, yeah. And then you look at what's on those. papers and sometimes it's the craziest freaking thing and you're just like wait what man yeah that's yeah and it's like exactly exactly like it's like okay so if i start with a guy but i can't access the guy so i can only access his file so i start with a paper about him and then in that paper there are a bunch

of names of other people who gave other information so then i use that to leapfrog to their papers right and then their papers like sometimes even you you use that you can leapfrog to another paper and And then, like, eventually you find there's something in those trail of papers that you're like, this can't be real. You'll get, we'll give me an example. Yeah. There was a piece of tape that fell out last week, like, of that section that where we were talking about the informants. Yeah. And, like, because I went pretty deep on a lot of those informants, like, both trying to talk to them, but also just studying their stories.

And their stories are shocking some of them. Like one of the informants who I wanted to talk about in last week's episode, but I didn't get a chance to because it just there were so many things. So we talked to one of Abdul-Lief's early lawyers, this guy, Clive Stafford Smith. He's the guy who actually founded that law firm reprieve. And who we will hear much more from in episode five, by the way. Oh, that's right. That's right. Exactly right.

So he told me the story of this guy. that he says gave information about Abdul Latif Nasser. It's, you can't make this up. So there's this guy. This guy's name is Ali Abdul Muttalib, Awayyid, Hassan Altayyah, Iraqi guy. So this guy, again, one of these, Clive calls them, I think he called them super snitches, but let's call them government informants. So according to Clive, this guy gave evidence about

So there was this one informant who had made a statement against Abdul Latif. And one of these guys wanted a benefit. You know, not only did he want to not be abused and he wanted televisions and things, but he wanted to be released if he was willing to tell stories. And the reason he said, and, you know, this is a bit off color, but he said, I want to be released because I have a problem. And my problem is I have a very small penis. And I want penis enhancement surgery. And I want to be taken to the United States for that to happen. And then he says in this thing, would you like to look? And I'm glad to say that the American interrogator says, no. Well, this is the sort of thing that was going on there where these guys would make up stories. And I think there was this particular person who in the course of 90 minutes,

an hour and a half, snitched on 92 prisoners. So, you know, more than one prison. And I think it was this particular one prisoner per minute with statements saying that they were Al-Qaeda or whatever nonsense that was used to hold these people in Guantanamo Bay for years. And this is, I've seen so much of this. And most of it I'm not allowed to talk about, but this I can because it's declassified. Wait. So he and his rationale for saying all these things about all these people was that he wanted, he wanted a bigger penis?

That was it. I mean, it's hard to believe, isn't it? Oh my God. I did not see that coming. It's like so complicated, right? Yeah, that's horrible. You're like, this poor guy. Like, I, I, you know, you're, you feel like you have this kind of deep-seated body image problem that, like, I don't, it's not my place to judge that.

Like, I don't, I don't care. Like, you deserve medical help and, and if you feel like you need it. But, like, but the fact that that is motivating, like, this very dark thing. thing, like this informant to say all of these things about all of these people that has really damning, like, it's like, this is just, this is not right. Lots of, I know you've told me this story before, but can you tell me the night of a thousand prayers story again? Yeah. So there's this special night in Islam called La Laital Khadr. It's the night of power, the holiest night for Muslims. which is supposed to be the night when Muhammad, the Prophet Muhammad, first got a revelation of the Quran.

And in our sect, at least, and I think most sects do something like this, what you do is that night you go to the mosque and you stay up all night. Literally, they leave out coffee beans for people to eat so that they can stay up, so if they can pray. Because that night, your prayers are more powerful than prayers on any other night. It even says this in the Quran. It's like there's a calculus to it, which is kind of funny. That every prayer you make on Lelaito Kudor is worth 1,000 months of prayers from any other night.

Wow. So if you feel like if you're like such an absurd thing. Then you can just, if you've missed a few, then you just wait for Laito Kudor. Totally, totally. Right, right, right. Yeah, it's also weird. Like it's like you're counting blessings or something. Like, it's funny that there should be an accounting there, that there's a number.

But, anyway. But, yeah, but, like, so people would always, like, everyone, my family, everybody would go to the mosque. And I wanted to stay up so badly. And there was one year, I must have been in middle school, I think. And I had a test coming up, like, or a quiz or something. And my dad found out about it. But I was like, no, no, no, because usually what I do is I pray all night and then I would stay home from school the next day because it was so late.

And then that, this one time I had this quiz and my dad told me I couldn't stay up for lethal gather because I had to, I had to go home for the quiz to sleep so that I could go back to school for the quiz. And it was like, it was a thing where I was like, I don't think you get the proportions here. Like, this is a, this is a, a quiz, like, I'm a fifth grader and this is. a quiz, like, versus a thousand nights of prayer. Like, this is my soul we're talking about.

Like, I don't think you are fully comprehending how significant this is. And you are like, like, you're forcing me to go home. You're, like, blocking me from, like, this chance that I'm only going to have so many of during my lifetime. And my dad, like, I don't know where, how he made the calculation in his brain. But like my dad, I don't know, he's like just this immigrant dad. He wants to, like he values education. He thinks it's really important. And that's a moment where he sort of, I think, did a calculus in his head and was like, I

it's more important for my kid to go to school and to do this quiz. That's so interesting. It's like, it's almost like he has to put his chips on the table in a way. Totally. Yeah. And he would never say that. If you asked him, I think, I mean, I don't know, I don't know exactly what he'd say. But I think, yeah, those are two of his, like, chief values and priorities on planet Earth.

Like, his value for his faith and his value for, like, education and his kids to get a good education. Like, those are, like, their neck and neck. They're really up there. And it's, like, funny because that one moment, it's like he had to, in a way, choose between them. Yeah. And that this guy, Abdul Latif Nasser, seems to have been the first. flip side of that. Like, he seems to have really wanted the same thing that I wanted. And his, his mom seemed to want the same thing that my dad wanted for me, you know, like, it's like,

send this kid to school, let him get a good education. Like, he's going to, he's going to, you know, that's going to be something our family can be really proud of. And this guy did not, he went to school, but it sort of crumbled for him there. He did not get that chance that, like, there was this moment when this guy, you know, he could have had this opportunity to, to study, to sort of build this, like, secular life. Yeah. And it sort of fell apart. And then, and then, and, and, and, and, and not to say that these are the only two ways that it can go, but like that, that he then, like, made his faith the thing that, that sort of anchored his identity and, and, and was the, thing that he would, like, move to other countries to try to find. That's it for now. The other Latif, episode five, is coming your way in just a few days.

In the meantime, here's the taste. All right, everybody, welcome to Guantanamo Bay. I really think that this place we're going, it's literally every single Muslim Americans' worst nightmare. Hi, I'm Stephanie Boyd calling from Williamstown, Massachusetts. Radio Lab is created by Jad Abimrod with Robert Krulrich and produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keith is our director of sound design. Susie Lechtemberg is our executive producer.

Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, David Gebel, Beffauty, Tracy Hunt, Matt Keelty, Annie McEwan, Lativ Nassar, Sarah Carey, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Shima Olialli, W. Harry Portana, Sarah Sandbach, Melissa O'Donnell, Tad Davis, and Russell Gregg. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris.