Radiolab - The Other Latif: Episode 2

Episode Date: February 11, 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.   Episode 2: Morocco Latif travels to Abdul Latif’s hometown of Casablanca, Morocco, to try and find out: was he radicalized? And if so, how? Latif begins by visiting the man’s family, but the family’s reaction to him gets complicated as Latif digs for the truth. He finds out surprising information on a political group Abdul Latif joined in his youth, his alleged onramp to extremism. Tensions escalate when Latif realizes he’s being tailed.  Read more about Abdul Latif Nasser at the New York Times’ Guantanamo Docket.  This episode was produced by Sarah Qari, Suzie Lechtenberg, and Latif Nasser. With help from Tarik El Barakah and Amira Karaoud. Fact checking by Diane Kelly and Margot Williams. Editing by Jad Abumrad and Soren Wheeler. Original music by Jad Abumrad, Alex Overington, and Amino Belyamani.  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. See? See?

Yeah. I'm Lutthif Nasser, and this is the other Lutthif. Episode 2, Morocco. Over the past few years, since I discovered I share my name with a Guantanamo detainee, I've interviewed his lawyer, Shelby Sullivan Venice, 10 times. And every time I do talk to her, Hey.

Oh, hey. How's it going? Good. How are you? Sounds like you're being here. It goes something like this. So let me just run you through the laundry list of stuff we wanted to talk to you about. Kind of nervous.

No, no, no, no. I ply her with questions about new stuff I've learned or uncovered. What did he tell you? What percentage of that would you say is true and what percentage of that would you say is false? Mm-hmm. And she tells me what she can. Yeah. Which is never much.

Again, I'm kind of doing the internal like brain vet of classified information versus unclassified. Sure. Yeah. Take your time. So there's a distinction between information that I know, information I don't know, and information that is either classified or do classify that the client has told me. Yeah. So I think I can't answer that question at all, annoyingly. I'm sorry. Okay, that's okay. See, Shelby's in a tough spot.

As a defense attorney, she only wants to talk about stuff that helps her client's case, but she's only allowed to talk about stuff that's declassified. And the government mostly declassified stuff that hurts her client's case. So the stuff she can talk about, she doesn't want to. And the stuff she wants to talk about, she can't. And if by accident she talks about stuff she wants to, but can't, because it's classified, Not only could she be disbarred, she could face criminal prosecution. Yeah.

Prison time. I can't exactly speak to that. Um, unfortunately. It gets stranger when it comes to this one key document, a Department of Defense detainee assessment that surfaced in April of 2011. More leaked documents from WikiLeaks, this time concerning the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo, Bay, Cuba. It's the thing I found on the New York Times website that has the list of supposedly horrible things Abdul-Ladif did.

So this is the JTF Gitmo detainee assessment. I have a fairly certain that that's off-limits. Oh, that's off-limits? Because that document was leaked? I'm not supposed to talk about it, look at it, think about it, even though the world can see it. So weird. It's very odd. So that was the confusing space I was stepping into.

In any case, when I first sat down to investigate the story of Abdul Latif Nasser, I started with that document, the 15-page Department of Defense detainee assessment of him that Shelby couldn't talk about. It had a fair amount of detail. Not just about the bad things this guy supposedly did, but about his whole life. He seemed to bounce from country to country,

Morocco to Libya to Sudan to Yemen to maybe Chechnya to Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay. He felt almost like a forest gump of the war on terror. It was almost hard to know where to start. So I decided to take it from the top. If you look at the first paragraph of the section called Prior History, here's what it says. I'm going to paraphrase it because the writing is really bad. Detainee attended two years.

years at the Hassan the second university in his hometown of Casablanca. He studied chemistry and physics. But while a student, he was also an active member of the Islamic fundamentalist group, Jamath al-Adul-Wal-Isan. Then there's a footnote. Jamath al-Adul-Isan is, quote, an extremist religious group that wants to replace the Moroccan monarchy with an Islamic state. Essentially, the basic gist of this story is when we've heard a million times.

at this point. Young middle-class Muslim kid for some reason suddenly joins an extremist group. Is that what happened to Abdulaviv Nasser? Or is there more to that story? I decided the best way to find out

was to get on a plane. We're somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. To Morocco. To talk to the people who knew him best. The people who may have even seen that transformation. happened firsthand.

The family. I don't know. I don't know what I can say to the family that will make them want to talk to me. Two flights and 13 hours later, we land in Casablanca. Welcome tomorrow. Right now, we're in one of the local red taxis.

Did not imagine a left turn what's going to happen there. All right. We made our way to this, suburban neighborhood called Sidyuthman. That voice is Martina Bercher from Abdul-Latif's law firm Reprieve, who set up the meeting for us. We pulled up to this pretty modest family home, got out of the car, and walked inside. It was me, my producer, Susie Lactenberg, our interpreter Tarek, all following Martina, because she'd been there before.

She led us to a small, mosaic-tiled sitting room near the front of the house. Oh, shukron, shook on. We were told to just sit on some couches and wait for the family to come and say hello. But no one came. So we just sat there. It's this World Cup, Tommy. Yeah, of course. Tarek reminded us that the World Cup was on, and we could actually hear it playing in the other room.

I thought, okay, maybe that's what's happening. Or maybe they were suspicious of me. I mean, a guy shows up, says he has your relative's name, but comes from the very country that has held that relative for over a decade and a half without a trial. If it was me, I'd be suspicious, as Susie put it. I've never walked into a reporting situation so blind where you really don't know what the tenor of the conversation is going to be.

And then, after a few minutes that felt way longer than they were, An older man in a yellow shirt walked in. Martina says to him, Do you know who this is? This is Abdul Latif Nasser. He immediately just grabs me. Raps me in a huge hug. Other family members start coming in.

Start getting more hugs. Kiss. even from older hijab-wearing women who don't typically embrace male strangers. More and more relatives kept piling into this tiny room. Turns out Abdu Latif has seven siblings, and most of them have kids, even grandkids, so about a dozen relatives in all came out to meet me. In any case, after the greetings,

they cooked us some lunch, and it's called Bacilla. It's a special Moroccan dish. He asked if you can stop recording. They didn't want us to record lunch, so I set my microphone down and went to wash my hands. And one of the most striking things that's ever happened to me in my life happened next.

I got intercepted by a petite woman in a hijab whom I later learned was Abdul Latif's sister, Kathija. She saw me and just gasped and started crying. She started speaking air. really fast. I grabbed our interpreter Tarek. He told me what she said. She said that she'd known I was coming and she knew that I had her brother's name. But what she didn't expect was that I was his height, that I had his build, that I looked like him, and that I was around the same age that he was when she last saw him. Looking at me, she said, and actually would later say again and again,

she felt like she had gone back in time. You took them back 20 years into the past. It's like you are a younger, notar beloc. And out of nowhere, she grabbed my arm, switched into English and said, call me sister. Call me sister. She said, you are like my brother, you are my brother, my brother who was still to come. She said that you are like her brother who are waiting for to come. I see the innocence that's in his face, in his features that are similar to their brother. You are a new member of the family.

You are a brother of them. They have to know everything about you. They asked to see photos of my son back home. Is this a good one? Okay, here. This is my son. How beautiful. Just then...

Hi. Is this guy's age? One of the really little kids came to the room and hugged my leg. I kept laughing out of nervousness because it was a lot to take in. Not only did I remind them of their brother, they reminded me of my family too. Middle class home, religious iconography on the walls. I had to keep reminding myself I had questions to ask them. Difficult questions that I now wasn't quite sure how to ask.

Do you want to just test your mic for me? Check, check, check, check, check. But I need you to scoot closer to him if that's okay. We all gathered into a circle. The family decided that Abdul Latif's older brother, Mustafa, would field all the questions. Check, check, check, check. He sat directly across from me. Blue button-up shirt with cuffed sleeves, gray hair.

He runs a water treatment company for swimming pools. Probably the best way to start is I should tell you who I am, what we're doing, why we're here. And I'm in Canada. I was born and raised in Canada. I'm currently from East Africa. They were from from Tanzania.

But my roots go back to India. I live in Los Angeles, but the show I work for is from a different city, New York. I'm a work for, but you're a good much of the American government. I am not in any way affiliated or related to the American government. In fact, I'm a journalist. We're very skeptical of the American.

in government. So maybe the, my first question is kind of, who is Abdulteef Nasser? Can he tell me about him as a person? The first one of the most of the most of course of his story of Abdulyth Nasser. Mustafa told me that his brother was actually born and raised in his very house. He was a quiet, nerdie. kid. While the other two brothers would tussle with other kids in the neighborhood, Abdullahif always had his nose in a book.

He just wanted to read. I'd find him with a book here, a book there. It's because he was simply, he was smart, and he was into numbers and digits, and that's what drew him into maths and sciences. He reiterated something that Shelby had told me. He was the academic star of his family, of his neighborhood. His sister chimed in at this moment to point out that it was actually annoying how smart he was. And she hated that so much because he used to sit the bar so high. And she didn't like it because it was such a competition to her. The parents used to draw comparisons.

Oh, look at your brother what he did and you couldn't do the same. One thing I heard several times was that of the eight siblings he was clearly He was her favorite child Their mother's favorite He and his mom shared this bond

She was a very conservative lady So they used to pray together To practice the religious duties together He would wake her up in the mornings and they would pray together, almost as friends rather than mother and son. At the same time, everybody emphasized...

He was 100% secular academic, for the most part. His mom was the one who encouraged him to pursue a career as a scientist. You know, his parents ran home after seeing his grades posted and that he had passed high school and was accepted into college. I have to say the outlines of this were really familiar to me. My dad and I, I would wake up most mornings at like 4 a.m. to go to the mosque to pray, and I'd love to going

with them. He was also the one who pushed me to be interested in science. In any case, Abdul Latif, he was the first of his siblings to go to university. And his dream, according to Mustafa, his ambition was to pursue his studies until the very end. He wanted to go to Australia or maybe to Canada to pursue his studies. To Canada, really? Yeah. My home country. Mustafa grabbed a picture of Abdul Latif as a young man and handed it to me.

That was taken back when he was in university. Yeah. In the picture, you see a young, clean-shaven man, short black hair, angular jaw, kind of piercing eyes. He didn't really look like me, but I could see him being, you know, a good-like. looking older cousin of mine. You said look at the picture, this is not the picture of someone who will commit such things, who will be the subject of such charges.

Yeah, the charges. By this point it was almost the end of the day and I still hadn't asked them about that. One thing I wanted to ask about is because, and this is, I'm only asking because we found this in a, so there's the, you know, the U.S. government documents that have been released. They said that he was involved with that group. You know the group I'm talking about? The Moroccan group. The extremist group that the U.S. government says he joined in college,

Jamat al-Adul-Wal-I-San. Was he ever affiliated with that group? He was just from the information that I'm not sure of all right, They said that they were a subpoena. No, no one of Muslim, he was in that period. They said that maybe he was a sympathizer of the group, but he was not a member. And one thing that... Should we stop?

No, it's good. They said that the mor... Their house is right across the street from their neighborhood mosque. mosque. Abdul Latif's sister, Meluda, was clearly agitated by the question and just kept saying they cleared him. They cleared him. And Mustafa.

He's sure that his brother has done nothing wrong. to horse around every now and then, but it has nothing to do with any political groups or religious groups. Is everything okay? I feel like I'm getting a vibe that they're a little bit upset or something. I don't want to make sure. No. I decided not to push it.

So maybe we'd take a break until tomorrow. We had one more day of interviews, so I figured let's go back to the hotel, start fresh in the morning. On the way home, I replayed the answers I got to that final question about the group, that Abdul Latif sympathized with the group but was not part of it. Even Shelby acknowledged that he had been part of that group. But the other part of the answer, about how college kids experiment, try out things without fully meaning them, I get that.

When I was in college, I went to all kinds of religious ceremonies, Church services and sadders. At one point I even tried out being a Wiccan. Oddly, one of the places that that spiritual flailing took me was to Morocco. When I left my fairly devout home to study, I had a real crisis of faith. I started missing prayers.

So much so that I started keeping track of how many I was in the hole so I could make them up later. And the reason why I was slipping, was that I didn't know what my faith meant to me anymore. Whether and how much I wanted it to define me. By my second year of university, I decided the best way to figure it out was to study Islam, to major in it.

I signed up for a foreign study three-month course in Fez, Morocco. And I remember thinking, this is the place where I'm going to figure this out once and for all. When I got there, I realized this weird thing. What's your name? If I introduced myself as Latif,

my name is Latif. Nobody would call me by my name. Latif, it's a name of God. Yeah. You know, that God has 99 names. And Latif, it's a name of God. Yeah. The reason why, which was explained to me over and over,

is that Latif is one of the 99 names of God in Islam. It means the most gentle or the most kind. Whereas in a place like Canada, you can get away with naming a kid that. My parents found my name in a book from our mosque library. In a Muslim country, like Morocco, it's just plain weird. It's like naming your kid God. So you put Abdul in front of it. Abdel Latif, slave of Abdul Latif.

I am slave of Abdul Latif, slave of God. So Moroccans would only ever call me Abdul Latif. Because in Morocco we have the name, it's Abdul Latif. It was so weird to imagine, as university students, me and Abdul Latif, the other Latif, we may have been walking these same streets, going by the same name, asking ourselves the same kinds of questions just 20 years apart. Who am I? What does my faith mean to me?

What kind of future do I want? That said, I didn't join a radical fundamentalist group. I never even flirted with a group that was dangerous or violent in any way. Did he? And if so, why? An answer I definitely didn't expect after the break. This is Enrique Romero from the border town of Laredo, Texas. Radio Lab is supported in part by the offered P. Sloan Foundation,

enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www. This is the other Latif. I'm Latif Nasir. Casa Blanca, day two. Right. The day got off to a strange start. Oh, he's here.

He's here. Abdel-Latip's brother Mustafa picked us up in his car. Salam. He was happy to see us. Our interpreter, Tarek, sat in the front seat, while Susie and I sat in back with Martina. For the moment, there is a willingness to ask for the citizens. We started driving back.

back towards the family's house for the second round of interviews. There is this one guy where we already agreed that he can come back, yet he didn't come back. Martina and I were chatting. In my head, I was going over my questions for the day when all of a sudden, Mustafa, who was driving, started acting strange, speeding up, slowing down, making sharp turns seemingly out of the blue. Something was weird. sped through traffic.

When we finally got back to the house, Mustafa just pulled up to the curb, turned the car off, but didn't get out. So we all just sat there in silence, confused. Finally, we got out, walked into the house,

took off our shoes. Then Tarek turned to me and translated for me what Mustafa had told him. They were being chased by, I think, the police, but they were not wearing the uniforms. It was trying to lose them. It took different roads to lose them, but some of them eventually succeeded to find us. We looked out the door and parked across the street was a car. Three men were sitting in it, watching us.

Maybe the house is other constant control. Oh, really? Should we be worried? I'm not sure, Tarek said. The three guys in the car never came in. They just stayed there in the car, watching the house, taking pictures every so often. I would later call the Moroccan embassy in D.C. and ask them, like,

who were those guys? Were they police, intelligence? Were they monitoring the family? Were they following us? They basically said there's no way of knowing. But in the moment, I remembered what I had read in that DOD detainee assessment. that the Moroccan government had cracked down on that group that Abdul Latif may have been affiliated with. Is this what it would have been like for him?

Did they follow him? I looked at Mustafa and he was clearly spooked. I asked him. Everything's okay, he said. Not very good. convincing. Now, just to jump forward for a second, and then we'll come back to the family, I realized that this group that might have led Abdul Latif to be surveilled, I didn't really

know anything about them at all. I wouldn't learn about them until later, because when I got home, I ended up making some calls. Hello? Hey. Hi. Hey, how are you, Latif? How you doing? Can you hear me well? Yeah. Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you really well. Mohamed Dadawi. Professor of Political Science at Oklahoma City University. And Vish Sakthevel. I research on Algerian Islamist politics, and I'm a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. I read them passages from some of the leaked government documents, just to get a gut check from them about that group. Okay, so this is from the first one. Detainee was an active member of the Islamic Fundamentalist Group,

Jamath al-Adl-Wal-Isan. Detainee held a lower leadership position. Jamath al-Adul-Azan is an extremist religious group that wants to replace the Moroccan monarchy with an Islamic state. Jamat al-Adu-Wal-Isan is an Islamic fundamentalist group. Interesting description. It's interesting. I think the only thing that they got right about that is the name of the group, I think.

Really? Yeah. I mean, even anyone that knows a little bit about the organization would probably kind of raise an eyebrow with the characterization in the DoD report. Each of them separately told me the story of this group, how it dated back to a time when Morocco was a very repressive monarchy. This is the Morocco of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s when Abdul Latif was young. Those are known as the years of lead.

L-E-A-D? Yeah, exactly. So the years of lead. Lead, as in... The king, Hassan II, was a tyrant. He ruled as an absolute monarch. The king just ruled it with a very heavy hand. There was absolutely no room for dissent.

He jailed a lot of political activists. There was a lot of torture. Thousands have been tortured, killed and disappeared. And it was very repressive. So you had this very violent, quite western-leaning monarchy. And along comes a man named Abd al-Salaam Yassin. an elementary school inspector. In the Ministry of Education.

So basically he would go and inspect the methods, pedagogy of classes and so on. He got fed up, living under a brutal king, went through sort of a spiritual crisis, and eventually he formed an illegal political group, guided by three principles called the three knows. Which is no to violence and no to violent methods, no to secrecy and clandestine activity,

and no to foreign intervention or reliance on foreign forces, and so on. According to Vish and Muhammad, this was a pacifist group that was trying to overthrow the monarchy, but to basically bring about peace and free elections, and their methods? Marches. Sit-ins. You know, they would

have, you know, like, literacy classes, they would have soup kitchens. And to make it even more ironic, this group that supposedly started, Abdul Latif Nasser's journey to Guantanamo Bay was formed in part to demonstrate against unlawful detention of people for no reason.

The DoD report makes the group sound like ISIS. But when you look at it, it looks more like the founding fathers, except without the muskets. Learningness, it was a real, like, that was a, there was kind of almost like a journalistic whiplash where I was like, wait, what? What does it even mean to be radical if you're living in radical times? And even more than that, is this the kind of bogus intelligence

that are using to lock this guy up for 18 years without a trial? But, I mean, you're not seeing all of the other sources of information. This is Cynthia Storer. Former CIA senior terrorism analyst and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University. Cynthia is a bin Laden expert and has studied patterns of radicalization. And she told me, look, even if, the government was wrong here, even if this was a pacifist group, that might help the case that Abdul Latif got radicalized. It takes a long time. It takes many steps to become a terrorist. This is a

nice flip a switch and I'm a terrorist, right? The pattern we saw was that the beginning is innocent, some kind of I'm looking for something. And then the next thing is joining a good group that does social justice stuff. Trying to help people. Trying to help people, right. Give, you know, aid work and also protest. And the protest comes because they don't feel like they're getting done what they need to get done

with the aid work, right? And so I'll tell you what usually triggers the next step. Yeah. What normally triggers the next step is repression by the government. And in this case, that did happen. During the years of lead, Yassin did something suicide.

I was unprecedented. He sent the king an open letter. Demonishing the king of Morocco. The king promptly banished Yassin to a mental asylum. By the time Abdel-Lathif joined the group years later, Yassin had gotten out of the asylum. The DOD said that Abdul-Latif said that he and Yassin were attending a peaceful protest one day when they were both arrested.

And then, according to the government, that's when Abdul-Lathif left the country. Okay, this time I wrote down a bunch of my questions, so I don't forget any. One of the first questions I have, because I... Back to my visit with the family, I very cautiously brought this up with Mustafa. They said that the reason that he left was because there was a crackdown on that. He was affiliated with that group, and then there was a crackdown on the group, and then he left. Was that the reason?

Did that have anything to do with why he left or not? I don't have any We just saw the No Mustafa says Abkhazabeth Mustafa says Absolutely not true at all

Him leaving the country had nothing to do with this group which he disputes Abdu Latif was ever even a part of It had to do, according to Mustafa with his mom In the mid-1980s His mother, their mother

died, they say, of old age. Wow. And so how old was he when his mother died? She had he? Approximately 18 years old. And according to Mustafa... He was devastated when his mother died. Her death upended his whole life. On top of that, he got frustrated with his school.

Hated his teachers who he said were lazy, political. appointees, and he felt like a financial burden on the rest of the family. So he decided to drop out and move to Libya. His brother was in Libya and he was not married and had no children. There are more job opportunities there and they're very well paying jobs there. Libya's GDP at the time was five times that of Morocco's. And so then they would send money back here? Is that? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's sending money back to the family. And not only that, his plan, as best as I can gather, was while living rent-free with his brother, he would save enough money that he could apply to schools abroad and travel there to study.

So he takes a bunch of jobs in Libya, tried buying and selling things in the market, like shoes, clothes, building materials. Worked hard for two years. Pretty much all he did was work. didn't really make friends or go to the mosque. But here's the worst part. He didn't make much money. So now I'm trying to imagine what this would have felt like for him. You grow up the favorite, the only one to go to university,

dreams of advanced science degrees. But now you're broke in a foreign country, crashing on your brother's couch, feeling under-employed, your dreams of studying and teaching science slipping further and further away. And according to Shelby, things just got worse from there.

His brother went back to Morocco to be with his wife. Abduladif lost his place to live. And that's when the full-on existential crisis really kicked in. Like, what am I doing exactly? Like, that's making the world a better place or that's, yeah, like,

what point is there right now? You know, I'm living alone. I have this job. but like, what is my life? I understand that feeling. I think a lot of us do. He and I have spoken about this. And whenever he talks about those decisions,

it sounds a little aimless, like that he had this general idea that he wanted to kind of like discover Islam and find true meaning. And I don't think he knew exactly what that looked like. He knew that he wanted to, like, help others and that, you know. So did you want to be like an aid worker of some kind? kind or like i guess i'm i'm laughing at the the humor in such a very serious set of allegations

that have crippled his life the man didn't have a plan right he was just kind of like i want to live in a society that you know has this greater meaning and i'm like being like i don't know like understanding god better and like he didn't yeah i don't think he had a plan okay yeah you're right So we call this a cognitive. He's looking for a, it's a cognitive opening, right? Something happens in your life that makes you rethink what you believe in who you are. That's when people tend to get sucked into groups like cults or groups of a more radical framework. For those people, it happens to you.

It's when they're facing this kind of existential dilemma in their life generally. I am skeptical, by the way, and there are some people out there who say that they figured it out and they could totally predict what a person would decide to do, and I'm very skeptical of that. Uh-huh, yeah. Yeah. Right. I think what a person will decide is a mystery.

And so at that point, Abdul-Ladif makes kind of a mysterious decision. Even though he hadn't been going to the mosque regularly, wasn't the most pious Muslim, he seems to get this idea. What would it be like to live in a perfect Islamic society? one that wasn't based on the whims of a king or how much money you made selling concrete at the market

what kind of education you were lucky enough to access but rather how good and faithful a person you are you can sort of imagine the seed for it planted in him from the group he may have been involved with in university hoping for a pacifist Muslim utopia or perhaps the seed was planted even deeper a yearning to go back to the times he prayed with his mom before she died. Who knows?

Ultimately, Abdul Latif decides to move to a country where he seems to have known nobody. Sudan. This is at a time before Facebook, WhatsApp, when you really could disappear. And his family says, that's what happened. They completely lost touch with him. Didn't hear from him for about a decade. until in 2005 they get a knock on the door from a woman named Rose who worked for the Red Cross who told them, your relative is being held at Guantanamo Bay.

One of my questions, it's a kind of hard question, I guess, but do they believe that it's possible that their brother could have done anything like this? Like, could he have done anything wrong? Do they think, is there a possibility that their brother did anything wrong? She has no doubt that he has no doubt that he's an innocent person, what's in the American that's not a... There's not a... ...she has no doubt that he's an innocent person.

She, I mean, what's in the American documents is completely false. Let me ask this. There are times when good people, you know, they get confused. hang out with the wrong people? Do they think there's a possibility? They say he was with all these very bad people, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Is it possible? He was just running with the wrong people. It's possible that he fell a victim for bad people. Maybe took advantage of his innocence and his of his innocence and swayed him into the win, bad things. So it's, he doesn't rule that possibility.

Are you convinced, but are you convinced that he's a good person, a loving, helpful person? That's all I've heard, right? And in a way, part of the challenge of this story for me is that I can't talk to the person at the center of the story, I can't talk to him myself, so that's why I kind of have to talk to them. What's very difficult is that the person they're telling me about seems so drastically different from all those records. They're different people, you know?

But his sister Kathija reminded me again, they cleared him. Don't forget. He should be back home. Okay. Before we left, Katija and Mustafa took Susie and I up this narrow flight of stairs to the third floor to show us the room they built for Abdul-Latif

when they heard he was getting out. He's a tall guy, he's going to have to duck like me. Okay. Oh, wow. It was a tiny little room, about six feet wide, but it was fully furnished, big bed. This is newly built. This is newly built.

This is built for him. When he comes back, he finds a place where he can sleep. We walked over to a little window that looked out on a courtyard that was sort of between their house and the mosque, and there were a bunch of kids playing soccer. This is the exact place where they used to play football when they were still young. That's why he chose to have this window here

so he can remember all. the memories they had together. I thought about what it would be like for him if he ever does get out to look out this window. When for 18 years he hasn't had a window. We stood and watched the kids

play soccer for a while. I wondered, what makes one kid go one way and the next one go a different route? Myself, when I got to Morocco, I decided my faith was not going to be the center of my life.

anymore. I was going to keep studying. Maybe become an academic. Abdul Latif, from what I can tell, went in a reverse direction. But I still wasn't sure why. What happened next? What version of his life story to believe? Or even what the next steps were to try to tell the story. But as I was reading Abdul Latif Nasser's DOD report to Muhammad Dadawi, it would be interesting to see, you know, one he left Morocco, you know, what really happened to him? Going through his life story? Let's say you said Libya and Sudan.

His sense was, whatever happened to this guy, didn't happen in Morocco. It has to be later. It has to be later, Latif. I think it's later. It probably happened? Sudan, I think, you know, that's probably your best bit. In Sudan. Next time on the other Latif, Sudan.

This episode was produced by Sara Khari, Susie Lechtenberg, me, Latif Nasser, with help from Tariq al-Baraka and Amira Karaoud. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly and Margot Williams. Editing by Jada Boomrod and Soren Wheeler. Original music by Jada Boomerad, Alex Overrington, and Amino Belliani. Tune in next week, episode three, Sudan. Hi, this is Deborah from San Francisco, California. Radio Lab is created by Jad Abimrod with Robert Crulwich. and produced by Soren Wheeler.

Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, David Gabel, Bethel Hopty, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kilty, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Sarakari, Arienne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Shima O'Lealy, W. Harry Fortuna, Sarah Sanvac, Melissa O'Donnell, Tad Davis, and Russell Gragg. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris, and I'd really like to add, I will miss you, Robert.