Radiolab - The Other Latif: Episode 6

Episode Date: March 17, 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 6: Washington, D.C. Despite being cleared for transfer back to his family in Morocco in 2016, Abdul Latif Nasser remains stuck at Guantanamo Bay. Why? Latif talks to some of the civil servants actually responsible for Abdul Latif’s transfer and they tell him a dramatic story of what went on behind the scenes at some of the highest levels of government.  It’s a surprisingly riveting story of paperwork, where what’s at stake is not only the fate of one man, but also the soul of America.   This episode was produced by Sarah Qari, Annie McEwen, Suzie Lechtenberg, and Latif Nasser, and reported by Sarah Qari and Latif Nasser. Fact checking by Diane Kelly and Margot Williams. Editing by Jad Abumrad and Soren Wheeler. Original music by Jad Abumrad, Dylan Keefe, Alex Overington, and Amino Belyamani.  Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate. 

Hey, this is Sara Khari. I'm a producer for a radio lab, and I'm part of the team behind the other Latif. For the past three years, we've been reporting out this series on Abdul Tif Nasser's life and why he's still stuck at Guantanamo Bay. And it is some of the most ambitious, complicated, grueling investigative reporting that we have ever done. Along the way, we've poured through thousands of pages of declassified and leaked documents. We've filed countless Freedom of Information Act requests trying to get the government to release information to us. We've conducted more than 70 taped interviews, so probably around 200 hours worth of conversations. And we've traveled the world from Morocco to Guantanamo Bay. to the Pentagon, to military bases, trying to get to the bottom of this story.

This is what we do at Radio Lab. We shine a light on stories that are important, that are personal, that try to totally rearrange your mental furniture. And we go deep in our reporting because we think that this kind of journalism matters. Here's the thing. The majority of our funding comes from you, our listeners. You guys make this show possible. This series could never have happened without you.

So if you've appreciated the other Latif and all of the other work that we do here at Radio Lab, please do let us know by supporting us with a contribution. We've made it easy for you to donate. Just text the word Latif, that's L-A-T-I-F to 701. And we'll text you back with a link where you can chip in with. your support. Whatever amount you choose is so, so appreciated. And when you make it a monthly contribution of $10 a month, we'll thank you with a black canvas podcast love tote bag. You can see a picture of it at WNYC.org slash latif. Thank you.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio from WNYS C. See? Yeah. Previously. They said that he was involved with that group.

You know the group I'm talking about? The Moroccan group. The only thing that they got right about that is the name of the group. Sudan was actually the place where he was overseeing the farming of sunflowers. I think he worked on Osama bin Laden's farm. That doesn't mean that he's a senior al-Qaeda character at all. Bin Laden was chased down. out of Sudan.

He didn't know bin Laden had left. His story falls apart. It's stupid. We came here to fight Americans, and we will keep fighting until we destroy them totally. We beat him, hung him up by his wrist. Everything we do here is consistent with Article 3, the Geneva Convention. Where you gradually dislocate your shoulders. Don't throw away law just because your blood's up.

Oh, go on, go on, go on, go on. I'm Latif Nasser, and this is The Other Lutth. Episode 6, the United States of America. Over the course of the last three years, as I've been reporting this story on Abdul Latif Nasser, I've been in the final stages of becoming an American citizen. In the past, I've reported on people who risked everything, including their lives, to come to this country. That's obviously not my situation. I didn't need citizenship.

I was born in Canada. I got a green card here in the U.S., which means I can live and work in this country very easily. It also means I don't get called for jury duty and have the perfect excuse every time someone accosts me outside the grocery store to try to get me to vote for something. But still, I wanted to become a citizen because I want to vote. I want to do jury duty. I believe in the American experiment. This constant striving toward the promise of values like equality and justice and freedom of speech. I think all of that is beautiful and righteous.

And sure, there are many times when this country falls short of those values, but you have the sense that it's generally stumbling in the right direction. The citizenship process takes years, and for much of that time, I've been reporting out this story. I talked in episode one about cramming for my civics test. By the time I'd passed that test and cleared all the other bureaucratic hurdles, I'd also tracked Abdul Latif's journey from Morocco to Sudan. to Afghanistan, to Guantanamo. Every other week, sometimes every other day, I had a different opinion about whether he was guilty or innocent or to what degree or honestly whether his guilt or innocence even mattered given what this country had done to him.

But at this point, I do have conclusions about what he did and didn't do. These are educated guesses based on the limited evidence I've been able to see. But here we go. Whether or not Abdul Latif Nasser went to Afghanistan to fight, I think he became a fighter there. I think he went to a training camp. I think he fought against the Northern Alliance. At the same time, I think he did not have anything to do with the bombing of the Bamian Buddhas.

I think he did not have anything to do with 9-11 or any of the attacks on the United States leading up to it. I think he did fight at Torabora and that he could fight. fled, was captured, and was sold for a bounty? I do not think that he was a terrorist mastermind. I think he was a low-to-mid-level fighter, who as far as I can tell, never targeted civilians, never killed any Americans. So what do you do with a guy like that? If he was a low-to-mid-level German soldier who fought in World War II, we would have let him go. But instead, we held him, with no due process, no trial, longer than some people in the U.S. who get life sentences actually serve.

And that's not even mentioning the torture. To me, all of that feels quite simply an American. And as someone who's trying to become an American, that really rattled my sense of what that word even meant and made me question what I wanted to do. I think your citizenship is... Just an interesting thing just because, is it part of the burden or the baggage? A couple of nights before my citizenship ceremony, I read the journalist Ben Taub's profile of

Mohamedu Salahi, one of the former detainees who was tortured at Guantanamo. The profile goes into depth about some of the twisted ways his interrogators tried to break him. I knew similar things were done to Abdu Latif. And so that night I sat down with my wife just to talk things through. It's like this jubilant moment for me. Like I get to have these like rights and responsibilities and all these things. And then yet then it's like I'm complicit in what's happening to this man in this place that like I don't. It's weird.

It's like it's like buying a bag of oranges or something and you know there's like a rotten one in there. And it's like, oh, like, I know why I'm getting this, like, because I want this and I've wanted this for a really long time. But, like, it's like, but I'm at the same time, I'm, like, staring right in the face as rotten orange. And it's like this thing where it's like you feel like the rot. It'll, like, it'll rot you. Like, it'll rot me. And that rot really has spread. It has mainstreamed terms and ideas.

Right now, the Trump administration is announcing a new regulatory. that will allow migrant families to be detained longer. Like indefinite detention at the U.S.-Mexico border. President Trump says Qasem Soleimani, Iran's top general whose killing he authorized. Like enemy combatants. Soleimani was an enemy combatant, waging war. Being targets in drone strikes abroad. And even by other governments.

More than a million Uyghurs and others belonging to various Muslim minority groups are believed to be detained in the Xinjiang region. China region. has argued that the Uyghur concentration camps are no different than what's going on at Guantanamo Bay. The orange jumpsuits evoking Guantanamo now used in ISIS recruitment videos. Even ISIS has used it in recent years. Now, the moment when I first heard about this story was oddly a moment that we seemed to be trying to turn it around. It was a moment when Abdul Latif Nasser actually had a chance to finally go home.

I'm here today to inform you that the Periodic Review Board by consensus determine the continued law for detention necessary to protect against a... He's free. He's free to go. Yes. But then, nothing happened with that decision. August, September, there were conversations with the State Department where I was being told that they still hadn't heard back. Fast forward to October, even in through November, we were nervous.

But it never actually occurred. to me that someone could mess this up. I'd always assumed that the order to transfer Abdul Thief Nasser just sat on some nameless, faceless, civil servants desk somewhere. His file shuffled in amongst other annoying paperwork, just another item on a to-do list of someone who really didn't care what happened one way or the other, lost in the bureaucratic void until it was too late. But as I dug deeper into what actually happened,

going down to D.C., knocking on doors, tracking down one person and then another and then another, I discovered this story was not the story I thought it was. It's a story of bureaucracy and paperwork, sure, but it's the most dramatic story of paperwork I've ever heard. A story where people way higher up than I expected really did give a damn. In some way, it's a story about the fight for the soul of this country. All right, she says she's good to go. Wonderful. Thank you for bearing with us for those last few minutes.

So the story starts for our purposes with this guy. Quite all right. Ambassador Daniel Freed. I was a 40-year veteran of the Foreign Service. Spent most of my time doing European security, especially after the end of the Cold War. But in 2009, when Obama became president, then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, reached out to Dan. And she basically said to me, look, you were in the Bush administration for eight years.

Why don't you help clean up one of the messes? And I, you know, I acknowledge that that was a pretty reasonable request. So Dan became a special envoy for Guantanamo closure, meaning it was his job to coordinate shutting this place down. Right. I found this, this new Republic article about you when you just took that job and had some great poll quotes. One pull quote was that you had the most thankless job in Washington And one was where it said that the work you had to do was Grueling work making the respected career diplomat

Something like a door-to-door salesman Pedaling the human equivalent of radioactive waste I remember that Well, it was certainly one of the oddest jobs I ever had The first order of business for Dan was to figure out like if we're going to close this prison down, we're going to have to convince somebody somewhere to take these people that we've labeled the worst of the worst. What kind of a sell was that?

Yeah, what would be your sales pitch? So what I did was go to governments and say, hmm, look, good news, you all hated get Mo under the Bush administration. And now is your opportunity to help get rid of this thing you called a terrible stay in America. All you need to do is just take a couple of these guys from Guantanamo. And they would often look at me cross-lined, like, we got to do what? You're saying to that country, look, we'd like you to accept some individuals that our

own Congress has barred us from bringing to our own country. This is Joshua Gelzer, who used to work at the National Security Council. That's a tough sell in many ways. Yeah, I was in the uncomfortable position. of asking countries to do something my own government would not. So just getting some of these countries, they even consider taking one of these detainees? It was not easy.

But, Dan says, to truly understand the diplomatic daring do that it took to do this job... You have to go back to what I call the original sin, by which I mean that Guantanamo was neither grounded in the laws of war nor in criminal justice. And once you have established a system outside of either international or U.S. law, which this was, then it's very hard to reintegrate it back into a legal framework.

According to Dan, he and his team were essentially trying to undo that original sin. And in some cases, to actually get these men through negotiations with these other countries, back under some of the very international laws that we had turned away from. Okay, so let's just, like, if you can, like, just run me through. And in Abdul Latif's case, you can see the government doing this delicate dance to try to make things right without ever admitting that they did anything wrong. So we'll start from the PRB.

Yeah. Dan had left the job by this time, but I did manage to talk to several people who actually worked on Abduladiv Nassar's case. I am Ian Moss. Ian was a staffer on the National Security Council at the time. Sometime in the summer of, I think maybe July of 2016, he's notified that he's been approved for transfer. He said, thank you, thank you, thank you, he just kept saying thank you. You heard that moment back in episode one. He's not even done with the you before he starts the next thank.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. And that notification to Abduladiv Nasser would kick off a flurry of activity in my office. That's Ben Farley. Yes. One of the guys coordinating all of this at the State Department. So that's the starting gun for your team. More or less, yeah.

First step. Figuring out where a detainee might go. Now, the PRB had recommended that Abduladiv be sent back to his home country of Morocco, which was a promising start. Morocco was a solid counterterrorism partner. They'd already taken other Guantanamo detainees.

And we have a strong bilateral relationship with Morocco. Abdul Dief had a home, a family, and a job waiting for him there. That's a pretty simple calculus, right? But this is a guy who's been at Guantanamo for almost a decade and half. So you can't just put somebody on a plane and drop them off. So step two, both countries have to agree to a set of conditions for the transfer. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so, so then what happens?

Well, then we begin the negotiations. Ben was the facilitator between Morocco and this big U.S. government interagency working group. So typically the way this would work is that an agency would raise a question. Sometimes little niggling procedural questions or just basic stuff. Like, are you going to keep him in your custody at all after he gets there? If so, where will you hold him? And then after you release him, how will you keep tabs on him? Stuff like that.

And then we at the State Department would reach out to our embassy in the foreign country. And say, can you ask Morocco? go this question, and they're like, Sure. And each question would go into this crazy game of bureaucracies. Right. Up and down and across agencies over here. And then our embassy.

Hand delivering a written communication to their embassy. Requesting the information. Then those communications have to go up to the top. And then across agencies over there, then back through the embassies, until an answer came back to Ben. And then we would go back to the interagency working group and we'd say, okay, is this good enough? Wow.

Yeah. You know, you ask a question. It may take three weeks to get an answer back. And in the midst of all of this, Donald Trump wins the 2016 presidential election. Yep. Okay, so you are seeing this unfold. You know Donald Trump has been elected.

You know that this is, this stream of transfers is going to get cut off. I mean, based on... Guitmo, right, Guantanamo Bay, which, by the way, we are keeping open. What he said during the campaign, yeah. I mean, we were all aware of that. And we're going to load it up with some bad dudes, believe me. We're going to load it up. You'd have to be naive to think that the policy objectives were going to remain the same afternoon on January 20, 2017.

Joshua Gelter again. It became clear that we had two and a half months to sort of do everything. Actually, they really only had one and a half months because Congress, jittery about letting these guys go, demanded 30 days to review every transfer before it gets carried out. So essentially, for Ben? You have to finish everything 30 days before the inauguration. Was there like a circle on a calendar somewhere where it was like, okay, this is 30 days out?

Yeah, we had a hard deadline, the 20th of December. So they've got 43 days to nail everything down. Were you feeling that clock? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. How did it feel? Like, how frantic was it? It became more frantic.

But nevertheless, it felt extremely focused. There was an escalating pace of meetings. This was in high gear. But the thing that made Abduladif's transfer more than just a bureaucratic nightmare on speed was the particular demands that our government was making of Morocco. You want to, and this is a Dan-free quote,

you want to give them a hug. Really? Yeah, really. What do you mean by that? You want them to have a job, you want them to have social services, you want them to have the best opportunity for a decent future.

Stuff that sounds an awful lot like things in the Geneva Convention. You want to transfer them into a situation that increases the likelihood that they will be able to live a productive life. For instance, if Abdulahif wanted to study computer engineering, the State Department would go ask Morocco, listen. What would you do to help facilitate that?

And on top of that, the State Department was focused on something that happened with the last detainee who had been sent there just a year before in 2015, a guy named Eunice Shakuri. There was a big row in the media following Mr. Chakuri's transfer. Morocco had promised to hold him for just three days. But instead, they opened up an investigation into him and kept him locked up for nearly five months. So, of course, we considered how the Moroccan government treated him after his transfer in our approach to transferring Mr. Nasser.

Because when it came to transferring these detainees, the State Department was demanding that Morocco follow American and international law. The United States will not transfer people into the custody of a country where it is more likely than not the transferee will suffer torture, cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. Like, all of a sudden, they're saying a rule that we tossed out the window at Guantanamo should now apply to Abdu Latif again. And of course, you can imagine all these other countries being like, uh, come on, you're telling us not to torture? after everything you did at Guantanamo? Now you're telling us what to do with our own guy in our own country, seriously? Sometimes the response back from the country was a bit standoffish.

There was maybe a sense of who are you to come asking me that question. So Ben and his team at the State Department are trying desperately to do the right thing. But again and again, they're haunted by what Dan? called the original sin, this lawless hole that we dug ourselves into. And all the while, time's running out. All right. So this is December of 2016. Team of the State Department is keeping their heads down. Just plugging away. And then new questions came back. When new questions came back from Morocco or new questions from the... Internally. Internally.

Yeah. Because there are also questions and demands coming from the Defense Department. who's like, sure, treat him right, don't hold them too long. But we want to know that Morocco has a plan to make sure Abdul Latif doesn't end up back in Afghanistan or running with ISIS or, you know, anything that would hurt the U.S. So there was a lot of back and forth on that. Oh, yeah. We're down to December 16th, 17th.

17th, 18th. Two days to go before the 30-day deadline to notify Congress. And every single question had been answered except for one. The Defense Department was waiting on one more piece of information from the Moroccan government. Like a trivial piece of information or a serious piece? I, in my view, the relevant questions had been asked and answered. and we'd gone through this already. Whatever this question was, we can't know.

It's classified. But we do know that the answer came back from Morocco too late. According to court documents, I found, the final all-clear from Morocco was received by the U.S. on December 28th, one week and one day late. A number of people I talked to who were directly involved said it was actually just one day late. Either way, the law said Congress needed 30 days to review the transfer,

and now that wasn't going to happen. But besides the fact that it was just a tiny bit late, it was ready to go. Like, the deal was essentially done. Secretary of State said, yes, I concur in this transfer. Attorney General said, yes, I concur in this transfer. The Secretary of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence concurred in the transfer.

and the chairman of the joint staff concurred in the transfer. And they thought, who knows? Maybe we can find a way around this 30-day rule. So Ben and Ian and their colleagues figure... We're going to run through the tape, right? So we're not going to slow down. We're going to continue our effort to the last day. Got it.

Like you're Yusain Bull running through the tape. Like, I'm not going to slow down right as I'm approaching the finish line. Exactly. And all they needed was one more thing from one. one more person. The Secretary of Defense had to sign off and say this deal makes sense. We had a word in government that's called the Stucky. I don't know if you have that in journalism, but the Stucky is the person who's stuck with doing something.

Once again, Joshua Gelzer. And this is what Congress, I think, was trying to do to the Secretary of Defense. He was trying to make the Secretary of Defense the Stuckey. In 2011, Congress, who had been pushing back against Obama's effort to close the detention facility at Guantanamo had passed a law saying that the Secretary of Defense had to personally sign off on each and every transfer. They wanted somebody whose name, quite literally, was on the line and whom they could ask tough questions about transfers, especially if those transfers later looked unwise. After this policy was first put in place, transfers under the next two secretaries

of defense, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, basically, basically came to a halt. They knew that if they okayed a release and then that guy then planned some new attack, it would be pinned on them. Leon Panetta has said about this provision, the fact that he had to sign off, that it, quote, required that I signed my life away. Now, in Abdel-Latif's case, the Secretary of Defense who had to sign off was Ash Carter. And when everything was all put together and put in front of him on his desk, he said no. The secretary didn't sign off on it, and as I understand said he wasn't going to. Secretary Carter wouldn't talk to us, so we can't really know why he refused to sign.

But we do know that several prior detainees sent to Morocco had actually left the country and gone to Syria when fighting broke out with ISIS during the Syrian Civil War. So you can imagine that if Carter saw any little teeny tiny question or uncrossed T or had any nagging doubt at all, he might have thought, no way I'm going to be on the line here. Or maybe he was just thinking, we're past the 30-day mark anyway, this just isn't my job anymore. Let the next guy be on the hook. Anyway, for whatever reason, he didn't sign it. So that's it.

Right? No. Because when we come back from break, Shelby's cell phone rings. This is Miranda Ballard calling from Nampa, Idaho. 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.s. I'm Latif Nasser.

This is the other Latif. And this is the point in the story where Shelby's cell phone rings. I'm standing outside the Applebee's. Christmas Eve, December 24th. The notice didn't go in and he's not going home. And I just

sunk to the ground. Merry Christmas. That just felt like a blow to the face. But Shelby realizes there's one last place that she can go to for help. The court. The court was the last recourse.

Like we've got the three branches of government, and they're all supposed to keep each other in check. Maybe she could convince the court to order the executive branch to release Abduladiv. So Shelby files an emergency motion in the federal district court of D.C. Asking the court to grant the writ of habeas corpus. A writ of habeas corpus is an order

that the government has to show up in court to give a reason to hold Abdel Adelaidev or else he's free to go. We're basically saying to the judge, look, you have this PRB determination in front of you that says, you know what, we don't even walk this guy. He doesn't need to be here anymore. So the government's reasons for holding him

that otherwise he'd go right back onto the battlefield, they don't hold water anymore. Because the PRB had said he wasn't a significant threat. The government cannot then, out of the different side of its mouth, argue that he should be detained. What reason could they possibly have for holding him if they've already said it's okay for him to go. Well, I mean, it was complicated for a number of reasons.

Now, the people like Ian working on Abdul-Ladiv's case, when they saw Shelby make that motion to the court, they immediately realized that it could potentially help them. If the habeas petition were granted. If the court sided with Shelby, then there would be no need for the Secretary of Defense to sign off. Yeah. Or for Congress to be given 30 days notice. Right. This could be an end run around the red tape.

All the government needed to do is not oppose Shelby's motion in court. They just needed to stay quiet. And if they did that, there was a good chance. The judge would grant the requested relief. The judge would say government hasn't stated a reason to hold him. So because of habeas, he's free to go. All Obama's Department of Justice had to do is back off. So when Shelby filed the.

motion, immediately a fierce argument broke out across multiple departments within the U.S. government. Now, the next part of this story I first heard about from a reporter named Jessica Schullberg, who's the one who told me to talk to Ian. And this is where the question of what to do with Abdel Adh Dilif gets bigger than I ever could have imagined. Because that fierce argument in the government, it all came to a head. Martin Luther King Weekend.

Oh, so that's like really close to the end. Yeah. I want to say it might have been a Saturday, I think. Six days before inauguration. At a meeting in, of all places, the Situation Room. A pretty impassioned meeting in the Situation Room. The one deep inside the White House that you see on TV anytime there's some big important secret mission going down. Wood panels and monitors and a big table.

And sitting around that table. I would say there were probably about eight of us. Mostly national security council staff. My previous boss at the State Department, the special envoy, Lee Wolloski, called in. So on one side of the table, you've got Ian. Myself and a number of colleagues internally argued, look, the U.S. government could simply decide

to not oppose the entry of a writ. Let's just do nothing. We're all simpatico here about the need to transfer this individual. If we do nothing, Abdulaf's lawyers will win the case by default, and he'll go home. But there was opposition from the Department of Justice. On the other side of that table, you had a faction arguing that no matter what we think about Abdul

the specific case, and we all agree he should go home, we have to fight the motion. Letting the court rule that we don't have a right to detain this guy would be like admitting that we were wrong to detain him in the first place. And by extension, that we were wrong to set up Guantanamo. And we can't admit that. And you can imagine a larger argument here. Legally, the war on terror is still ongoing. We still live in a world of people trying to hurt us

who wear no uniform, belong to no nation, and don't fight by the rules. And so we still need to be able to say who is and who isn't a threat and then to be able to act on it without having to justify ourselves. But we said we don't need to hold this person anymore. Why would you fight in court to continue to hold him? And so, and were fevers running hot here? Yeah.

My boss at the time, Steve Pompter made like a really, really impassioned argument. You're like banging the table. Yeah. We're talking about someone's liberty. An individual who at that point had been detained for 14 years. We have an opportunity to do what we can to transfer him. We should seize that opportunity if that's what our policy is. Here's how I think about that moment.

If Guantanamo really is this kind of original sin, the sin was that the government gave itself absolute authority to strip these men of their basic rights, their liberty. In that room, one side of the table was saying, for this guy in this moment, let's flip that. Let's write that wrong. Let's put his liberty first. And the other side was saying, no way. We had the right to take it away. and we can't go back on that. They don't want to seed

that the government has authority to hold these individuals. Did it feel like this final showdown? Like it was like it's either here or never? That's exactly what it was. And in the end, the Department of Justice didn't want to do it. They need to assert to the court

and to the world that they were right. They were correct. This man was detainable in the beginning. Given everything that our government has allowed to happen to these guys, it's really painful to consider that their release, even though the government wants it, like these men's lives mean less than a judge ruling against them.

I mean, so I think many of us were, I mean, we were frustrated and disappointed, but we did what we could and we tried to, you know, run through the tape. Ian and his colleagues decided, even though they lost that argument, they could try something else. To prepare a memo. To just put the question to their boss. This would have been for the attorney general?

This would have been for the president. The one guy who could tell the Department of Justice... To stand down. They wanted to take Abdulazif Nasser's case to President Obama himself. Mr. President, this is your policy. This is an opportunity to move another individual. What do we do?

He could have made the decision. I've been working for seven years now. to get this thing closed. And if you ask pretty much anybody, they would tell you that this was exactly the kind of thing that President Obama would sign off on. This is about closing a chapter in our history. President Obama was extremely invested in closing Guantanamo.

He really wanted Guantanamo closed. It is a rally and cry for our enemies. And the detainees moved. It drains military resources. He cared about it. He ran on it. The United States of America is still holding people who have been charged with no,

crime on a piece of land that is not part of our country. Is this who we are? But the memo for whatever reason didn't make it up. As far as we know, the memo they wrote never got to Obama. Someone who was in that room, someone who worked very closely with the president, made the decision not to put it on his desk. Um, Ian wouldn't say who it was. Out of the handful of people within the White House that it could have been, who had enough power to make that call, none of them would talk to us. I'm imagining there's a hallway between the situation room and the Oval Office, and that's where this...

Downstairs, but the... Okay, so there's a set of stairs where this kind of, this sort of, it stopped. Yeah. It didn't make it up the steps. Six days later... Ladies and gentlemen, the president-elect of the United States, Donald John Trump. January 20th. I Donald John Trump do solemnly swear.

President Trump takes office, and the gate slams shot. And it was the 20th of January 2017 when I visited Mustafa Nasser's family. Martina Berkshire, who works for reprieve, is the person who they sent to tell Abdel-Latif's family the news. So I was the one physically going there and telling them in person, no, this is not going to happen. We were seated in a small apartment done with traditional Moroccan tile walls and a quite generous guest room. We were seated there and Mustafa's wife, she prepared a traditional dish called Pastilla, which is a seafood dish, especially for me to bring them basically good news. I was seated in the middle of the family around this table of food

And when Martina started to explain what had happened They did not really believe the words that I was delivering They told me over and over again This must have been a mistake And Martina, I'm sure that you can figure out the way And the sisters, they were crying Abdel Wahab was there also, his older brother Who kept on saying, but he did nothing wrong

grieving is a process and it's grieving a decision that they probably won't see their brother again before they die or anything like this. They don't know. There was a cake. They still brought out all the food

because they couldn't comprehend it. Abdul Latif is still there. His case is still pending in the courts. But it's pretty clear that nothing will change unless or until there's a new administration in Washington, D.C. And so really this is the end of the story that I can tell about him, which is hard. Because the story that I have been able to tell has a giant gaping hole at its center.

Him. His voice. In all my searching, I've never heard it. I've had nothing more than what I could cobble together about him through other people and through dubious quotes in government documents. I wrote him letters, and they would come right back, return to sender. But I also sent letters to him through Shelby. And one time, he wrote back.

Shelby passed it along. Yeah, so I'll just do it. It feels like this was his place. And so while I was in Morocco, I went to the ocean, to a beach near his house, and I read it out loud. Dear Lutif, I was born on March 4, 1965 in Casablanca, into a fairly large family. I have two brothers and five sisters. Today I have a wonderful set of nieces and nephews. My family is very close.

I had a good life. I was blessed with a very loving family. They are my greatest gift. When I was younger, my parents always encouraged me to learn, and because of that, I did well in school. I liked reading. As a child, whenever I found money, I went to buy a book. I was the first in my family to get into college. I remember my parents telling me that I had been accepted into college.

The information is made public on a big board, and they saw the news before I did. I remember my mother crying with joy. I enjoyed science. I've always loved biology. I was talking recently about the story of my biology teacher in the crab. When I was 12 or 13, the teacher asked for someone to bring him a live crab for the class to study. So my friend and I, on the weekend, rode our bikes to Rukasha Beach and found one. We brought it into class the next week, and I will never forget this.

It bit the teacher's finger. And everyone laughed, and someone asked if the teacher would deduct for my grade because I brought him the crab. He did not. I went on to study biology in college. I wanted to be a teacher. Today, my family is just as supportive as ever. They've ensured that when I finally return home, I will have meaningful work so I can build my skills,

and I won't be a burden to those who love me. I will be able to work for my brother's small business at first, but what I want to do eventually is to teach. I remember Moroccan food, best food in the whole world, and the beautiful Moroccan shoreline and the sea. I've been here so long and I'm able to hear or smell the ocean from my cell but never able to set foot in it. I also remember the sounds of Morocco, the bustle of the city, the call to prayer. In Gitmo, we only hear the thud of boots.

When I get out of here and my foot touches the ground in Rabat, I will kneel and kiss the ground. I will arrive off the plane with my eyes open, not hooded, as I'm not hooded. as I was when I arrived here. It'll be the first time I walk freely without shackles. The experience for me will be like the smile of a baby first seeing its mother. I want to know what the future holds in Morocco. I don't want Morocco's name associated with Guantanamo. I don't want a bad reputation for Morocco, which today is an example to other countries.

The king sets a good example of Islam. Where in the Quran does it say a woman can't drive? Or be your lawyer or anything she wants? Thank you for your interest in me, in who I am. It's a good reminder that there is an answer to that that has nothing to do with Guantanamo. Sincerely, Abdulotif Nasser, ISN 244. I've spent so much time combing over the details of this guy's life as a reporter. But this story has also become personal to me in ways that don't.

don't make journalistic sense. And so when something big happened in my personal life, I felt like I needed to tell him. April 24th, 2019. Hello, Abdul Latif. Salam al-a-qum. I hope you're well. I wonder how you're doing,

how your family is doing. I'm still out here spending most days and nights at my computer working on this radio documentary about you. I have no idea what you. weather, when it comes out in the fall, they'll actually let you listen to it or not. I wanted to write to hear how you're doing, but also to let you know about something big that happened in my life yesterday. I took an oath to become a citizen of the United States.

I hereby declare on oath that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America. of the United States of America. So now I am a citizen. During the ceremony, I found myself thinking about you. And that I take this obligation and that I take this obligation to really, without any mental reservation.

The fact that I have actively decided to become a part of this country that is imprisoning you without a trial. For purpose of evasion, so help me God. So help me God. Soon I will have an American passport, which will have my and hence also your name on it. Perhaps that makes you wince.

Perhaps it makes you happy. Perhaps it doesn't mean anything at all to you. Hope to hear from you soon. And if I don't, Ramadan Karim in advance. Lathif. For whatever reason, he never wrote back to me. But he did tell Shelby to tell me, Congratulations.

This episode was produced by Sarah Kari, Annie McEwan, Susie Lechtenberg, and Lathif Nasser, and reported by Sarah Kari and Latif Nasser. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly and Margo Williams. Editing by Jad Abumrod and Soren Wheeler. Original music by Jad Abumrod, Dylan Keefe, Alex Overington, and Amino Belliani. That's it. This is Alan Rosetti Chal, calling from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Radio Lab is created by Jed Aberrond, with Robert Krollwich, 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 Bresler, Rachel Cusick, David Gebel, Sethel Hopti, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kilti, Annie McEwan, Lachif Nasser, Sarah Kari, Ariana Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Shima Oliai, W. Harry Fortuna, Sarah Sandbach, Melissa O'Donnell, Tad Davis, and Russell Gragg. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris.