Serial - Serial S04 - Ep. 2: The Special Project

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

In 2002, an elite interrogation team secretly staged Guantánamo’s most elaborate intel operation — to try to get a single detainee to talk. To get full access to this show, and to other Serial Productions and New York Times podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, subscribe at nytimes.com/podcasts.To find out about new shows from Serial Productions, and get a look behind the scenes, sign up for our newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter.Have a story pitch, a tip, or feedback on our shows? Email us at [e-mail] 

These first two episodes of Serial Season 4 are free. But to hear the whole series, you'll need to subscribe to The New York Times, where you'll get access to all the Serial productions and New York Times shows. And it's super easy. You can sign up through Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And if you're already a Time subscriber, just link your account and you're done. Previously on Serial. I mean, I love Gitmo. Like, it's la-la land.

I try to explain everything I can and try to persuade them that we're not the people they're looking for. You're not going to get anything from us and we're going to just tire you down. Safe, legal, transparent care. Safe, legal, humane, and transparent. Transparent care and custody of detainees. Care and custody of the detainees. This guy right here, yeah, he's probably a horrible person that has either killed or caused people to be killed.

This guy over here doesn't know shit. From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm Dana Chivas. This is Season 4 of Serial, Guantanamo. One prison camp told week by week. Danny was living in Yemen in 2001. He was in his 20s, married, with two young daughters and another on the way, when he decided to go to Pakistan to get rich. I want to be, like, rich. Like everyone. Everyone wants to be rich. Do you want to be rich?

Totally. Okay, me too, but it's so hard. His plan was to export honey, but not just any honey. There's a tree that grows in the desert in Yemen called the sidr tree. It blooms twice a year, so the honey the bees make from the sidr tree is rare and expensive. Our country is most expensive honey in the area. It costs about $150 a pound. Unless you can get to Pakistan, where there's also Siddhar honey,

but it's much cheaper. A lot cheaper. What do you think? Danny says his plan was to go to Pakistan, buy a bunch of Siddhar honey, swap the labels to make it look like it was the more expensive Siddhar honey from Yemen, and then sell it at the higher price. So it was a little bit of a scam.

Yeah, something like that. But I was young. Let me just pause here and say, if you were an intel person investigating al-Qaeda in 2002, I see you and your raised eyebrow. I was in Pakistan doing honey sales and trade was considered a common al-Qaeda cover story, along with charity work and finding a wife in Afghanistan. So keeping that in mind, Danny was in Karachi doing something, staying in a cheap motel, or if you believe the American government, not a cheap motel, but an al-Qaeda safe house, when one night there was a knock on the door of his room.

It was Pakistani intelligence. They arrested him and about a dozen other men at the motel. Danny said they took him to some kind of a lockup, questioned him, beat him, and eventually handed him over to the Americans, who flew him to their base in Kandahar in Afghanistan. In Kandahar, the first time you came, they tried to give you shock. They threatened to rape me.

They threatened to rape you? Danny says he was standing in front of a table, facing an interrogator. The guards pushed him over the table. Yes, yes, take off his pants. Yes, yes, yes. And they asked him, just answer the question, have you seen Bin Laden? No.

Where is Bin Laden? I was like, you don't... If you ask him in that moment, are you Bin Laden, I will say yes. What did you say when they said, where's Bin Laden? What do you want me to say? I don't know. Where is he? Who cannot said, where's bin Laden? What do you want me to say? I don't know. Who cannot know where is bin Laden? I don't know. To Danny, this was an insane thing to be asked. He told me he was never in al-Qaeda.

He was just a victim of wrong place, wrong time. But even if, for the sake of argument, we say that Danny was in al-Qaeda, he would have been so low level that asking him to locate bin Laden would have been like asking a private in the U.S. Army to tell you where they keep the nuclear codes. Worth a try, though, because in 2002, the number one question on the collective mind of the American government was, where is fucking bin Laden? And they wanted to ask that question, and a lot of others, of the hundreds of prisoners they were picking up in Afghanistan and Pakistan and elsewhere. So Danny was shipped off to Guantanamo, where he was asked countless other questions, and where he was a pretty typical Guantanamo prisoner. Contrary to what the Bush administration was saying publicly, Guantanamo was not brimming with terrorist masterminds.

Those guys were either in hiding or in secret CIA prisons, or they were dead. The people who ended up at Guantanamo were mostly low-level fighters. Some weren't even in al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Some weren't fighters at all. They just got caught up in the indiscriminate sweep of the war.

Which meant the intel we were getting from this intel factory wasn't very good. The prisoners just didn't know that much. But by the fall of 2002, a year after 9-11, the leadership at Guantanamo was getting heat from Washington to get better intel, fast. We were desperate to stop the next attack. And the commanders at Gitmo had a few prisoners they suspected

actually were high up in al-Qaeda. If only they could get them to talk. Let me clarify something, because a lot of people, when they hear Guantanamo, think waterboarding. But that kind of torture, the most extreme physical abuse that was authorized in that era, that stuff happened at secret prisons, overseas black sites operated by the CIA. Guantanamo was run by the military, and military interrogators had different rules from CIA interrogators about what they could and could not do to a detainee to get information. But at Guantanamo, some of the interrogators and commanders caught wind of

what the CIA was up to and decided they wanted to try out less conventional interrogation methods too. They wanted the legal freedom, like the CIA had, to get tougher on some of their prisoners. And so, the Special Projects Team was born, an elite group of military interrogators and analysts and interpreters assigned to break Guantanamo's most important detainees. The story I'm going to tell you is about one of the strangest, most elaborate intel operations that ever took place at Guantanamo, to try to get one single

detainee to talk, just one. Told by the people who planned it and executed it, and by the target of the operation himself, a guy named Mohamedou Salahi. That's coming up after the break. Mr. X had been in the Army off and on for 16 years when he arrived at Gitmo in February of 2003. He'd already heard about the Special Projects team, even though they'd only been around for a few months. If you were on Special Projects, I mean, basically your shit didn't stink. You know what I mean? Like, you just, you could walk around like you were the shit, because you supposedly were. The reason I'm calling Mr. X, Mr. X, is because that's the name he used with the detainees.

And the only way he'd agree to do an interview was if we didn't use his real name, because what he did at Guantanamo was controversial any way you slice it, as you'll soon hear. Mr. X was only at Gitmo for two months before he caught the eye of the special projects team. He thinks in part because of his creativity in the interrogation booth.

Malevolent creativity, he would call it now. Like, one time he wrote a poem for a detainee called You Have Lost, something like that, and then made the detainee stand and look at it while the national anthem played on a loop for eight hours. He was elated when the special projects team asked him to join them. That's the word he used, elated. One of his first cases was Muhammadu Salahi, who's one of the most famous former Guantanamo detainees. Salahi wrote a book while he was at Gitmo, which was made into a Hollywood movie. The CIA and military intelligence suspected Salahi was a member of the Hamburg cell in Germany, which had produced three of the 9-11 hijackers.

The government thought Salahi had personally recruited them. Plus, Salahi's cousin was one of bin Laden's senior advisors in his inner circle. When Salahi first arrived at Guantanamo in August of 2002, he was questioned by the FBI. They knew he'd been in al-Qaeda in the 90s in Afghanistan. But Salahi said he'd left the group years before. The FBI couldn't get much more out of him than that. Mr. X thought he understood why. Because one day, he went to watch the FBI interrogate Salahi from behind one-way glass. I was like, oh my God, what is going on right now?

He couldn't believe how friendly it all was. They come in and there's all this greeting, a lot of hugging and this kind of thing. And they said, hey, we brought you a cake, I think it was, or something like that. Oh, thank you, my friend, my friend. And then one guy, I think he had an Irish last name, like O'Brien or something. I can't remember. He said something to Salahi and he was like,

oh, well, yes, my Irish barbarian friend. He has no fear of anything going on. He has no concerns or qualms about his future. Salahi, I should point out, is absolutely the kind of guy who would make friends with his captors. He's charming, has a wide knowledge of American pop culture and politics and idioms. He can create an easy familiarity with a stranger within minutes of meeting them. In the interrogation room, what Mr. X saw was Slahi talking circles around the FBI. Slahi was the one in control. But now things would be different.

The special projects team was taking over his interrogations, and their approach would be a lot less friendly. Because after months of legal acrobatics and hand-wringing over what is and is not torture, the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, had just approved a set of 24 techniques that military interrogators could use on detainees at Guantanamo. The Special Projects team was free to dream up ways to put them to use to get Slahi to talk,

as long as they got authorization for the harsher techniques. They began with an interrogation tag team. Three interrogators would take turns questioning Slahi for 20 hours a day, nonstop. They would appear in different roles. There was a woman who called herself Mary. She would play the good cop. A guy called Shally. He was medium cop. And then there was Mr. X, a character they invented whose purpose was to scare the shit out of Salahi.

I wanted to create a persona, a thing that was not human, that he could not relate to as a human being, that had total and absolute control. And that was, in many ways, like a monster at night. You know, the thing that haunts your nightmares. And when you're developing this character of Mr. X, are you talking it over with, you know, the team? Are you guys sitting in a conference room sort of whiteboarding it out? Like, how does that even work? 100%. That's exactly it. It's just, you know, you could, you could compare it to any kind of like, you know, a marketing team or

something, you know, hi, how are we going to reach our, our target audience, you know, and people bouncing ideas off each other and, no, that's not good, or that's good, but let's tweak it. And that's exactly how it went. Mr. X went down to the next, the Naval Base's Walmart-like store, and put together a costume. Coveralls, like a mechanic would wear, boots and gloves, a balaclava that covered his entire face except his mouth and eyes, and sunglasses, so there was no skin showing at all. Mr. X was 6 feet tall, 210 pounds, much bigger than Salahi. He towered over him in the small interrogation room. And then I acted in a way that, you know, showed him that you have zero control.

Like, I was 100% in control. I know who you are. I know what you're doing. I'm going to make your life a living hell. Mr. X put strobe lights in the interrogation room and blasted metal music, or the American national anthem, on a loop. The room was often freezing cold,

the air conditioner turned down as low as it would go, or brutally hot, the AC turned off in the middle of the Cuban summer. Sometimes Mr. X made Slahi stand for hours, and Slahi had a bad back, so this was excruciating for him. Mr. X wouldn't let Slahi pray. According to government reports, the team threatened Slahi. A member of the Special Projects team went to see Slahi in disguise, pretending to be a Navy captain who was working at the White House. He called himself Captain Collins, showed Slahi a fake letter that talked about Slahi's mother being arrested, that she might be transferred to Guantanamo,

where she'd be the only woman in an all-male prison. This tactic, threatening his mother, was later determined to be illegal. But the rest of it? The military said it was all fine. It was authorized. But Slahi wasn't changing his story, and they'd been at it for six weeks already. Mr. X concluded that Slahi was dug in. I think we were all pretty much convinced that he felt that he could outsmart us and that he could outweather us. They needed to go to plan B. And with the new and unprecedented freedom they had from the Pentagon, they could get creative, amp things up. They decided to move

ahead with a special, secret operation that would actually take Slahi outside, not just the interrogation booth, but outside the prison itself, to try to jolt him into a new psychological state. And what we decided was we wanted to recreate a psychological effect which is called shock of capture, shock of arrest. The shock of capture is this idea that a person is more likely to give up useful information when they're first rolled up in a raid or an arrest. Though I should note, it's a theory that some interrogation experts have told me is not backed up by research. But Mr. X told me he's seen it work. You normally can really get somebody to talk about anything truthfully right after they're captured.

Because, man, they're scared as shit. Everything's dropped and they just let it all out. So we thought, you know, how can we regain that? How can we bring us back to that place? Salahi had been captured two years before. Obviously, the shock of his actual capture had already worn off. So they would put him back into a state of shock with an elaborate ruse. They would make him think he was being taken from Guantanamo

and handed over to another country, a country that would torture him. There's a term of art for this kind of thing. It's called a rendition. This would be a mock rendition. But how to pull this off? At first, they thought about putting him in a helicopter and flying him around for a few hours. But that was deemed too risky. Too many people on the naval base would have to know about the operation for it to work.

So, came up with the boat ride. It was creative. I got to see. This is Richard Zuley. He was in charge of the special projects team at the time, Mr. X's boss. He was also the guy who had pretended to be Captain Collins. In his civilian life, he was a homicide detective with the Chicago Police Department. Zuley was a fan of this mock rendition. Boat ride was a high-speed boat ride for about three hours in the bay. Big, large circles.

Big enough where you couldn't really say, tell that you were turning. After a few hours in the boat, the plan was to stop at a little island in the bay and make Slahi think they were handing him over to the intelligence services of another country, like Egypt or Jordan. They'd drive him around the bay a little longer, and then they would take him over to the intelligence services of another country, like Egypt or Jordan. They'd drive him around the bay a little longer, and then they would take him back to land, to a new, isolated cell, one that had been altered to be as bleak as possible,

covered in tarp with no light coming in. He would have no idea where he was. It was an unknown. Like, maybe it's another country, maybe it's an island, maybe it's on the moon, you know, who knows? But you're not at Gitmo anymore. For the plan to work,

they needed actors to convincingly play the roles of foreign intelligence agents. They needed people who spoke Arabic with Egyptian or Jordanian accents. Conveniently, they had a few of those hanging around. How were you recruited into the mock rendition operation?

So it was just kind of a hallway conversation. That's the guy they cast as the Jordanian intel agent. I'm going to call him Nasser, which is how the detainees knew him. Nasser was actually a 22-year-old army engineer, an American and a native Arabic speaker, who was sent to Gitmo to be a linguist and ended up with a key role in the mock rendition operation. They just said, you know, we're going to talk to this other linguist and act like, you know, one of you is going to act like a Jordanian mukhabarat and the other is going to act like

an Egyptian mukhabarat. And you talk to each other about what you're going to do to him, how are you going to torture him, how you're going to, you know, just, you know, cuss him out and, you know, talk bad to him or whatever and just to kind of put some fear into him. And that's it. We'll just ride around the boat for a while and that's it. What did you think about the plan when you heard it? I didn't think much of it. I was like, okay, if that's what you want me to do, I'll do it. When I first heard about this plan, I have to say,

I thought it seemed extravagant. A little fantastical, a little reckless, a little stupid. Like a war game kids might invent in their backyard. Pretend to abduct a guy, pretend to take him to another country, pretend to hand him over to foreigners for torture. But who knows? Maybe it could work. Slahi couldn't do an interview with me for this story because he's under contract with a documentary film company. But a few years ago, he talked to a German reporter, Bastian Berbner, for a podcast he was making. The tape you heard earlier of Richard Zule, the head of the special projects team, is also from Bastian. I reached out to Zuley multiple times for this story. He never

responded. But both Slahi and Zuley told Bastian the story of what happened on the night of the mock rendition. It all began on a hot evening in late August. Slahi says he was in the interrogation booth with Mary, the good cop interrogator. He was eating dinner, an MRE, the military's field rations. That's what they fed him at the time. When he heard a ton of noise, like boots stomping and banging on wood. I did not know they were coming for me. They just came at me, beating from everywhere.

How many people? Two. A third one was a dog. Just beating me. Dragging me on the floor. Beating me everywhere. They broke my ribs. That's how they beat me.

What happened afterwards? I... Mary tried to stop them but they pushed her away. And then out. I couldn't see anything because they put stuff... They put shackles everywhere. And they dragged me because I couldn't stand so they dragged me over the floor and then I stopped breathing because Because every breath was like so painful through my broken ribs Really really painful

And then they were making fun because I was Like gasping for air. They were laughing so loud. And they were very violent. Slahi says they dragged him outside and threw him into a truck. While all this was going down, Mr. X was waiting outside in a convoy of cars. He got the word to go, and they took off, out the prison gates and into the scrubby no-man's land between the prison and Guantanamo's little downtown.

When they got to the boat launch, Mr. X got out of his car and saw Salahi for the first time that night. He was shocked. Door opens up. Mary's there, and they pull him out. Man I looked at him I was like holy shit his nose looked broke it was all bloody blood coming out of his nose um he had the goggles on but I could tell he his face around his eyes had to have been swollen he had his lip was busted up like it was fat and cracked and there was blood coming out of that.

And I was like, holy shit, what the fuck happened, right? It was not in the plan at all. At all. Mr. X was pissed. As scary as he made himself out to be to Slahi, he saw his job as purely psychological. A game he and Slahi were playing with each other as opponents, one that required strategy and cunning on the part of the interrogator. He says he never got physically violent. Legally, he wasn't allowed to. Besides, he had standards. There is something so base about resorting to violence that I really think that it is something that weak-minded people do.

It's just, it's beneath the interrogator position. Mr. X told me he asked Zuli at some point that night what had happened. How did Slahi get his injuries? But Zuli shrugged it off, said Slahi had resisted when the guards came in to take him away. And when Zuli was asked about it years later, he only remembered a cut on Slahi's lip. But regardless of Slahi's physical state,

the plan was in motion. Zuli, Mr. X, and a few others put Slahi on the boat, made him lie down on the bottom, and they all drove off into the bay. Slahi's arms were pinned to his sides under a life preserver, almost like he was in a straitjacket. He had blackout goggles on, earmuffs, shackles. His ribs were injured, possibly broken.

His face was busted up. And then... They kept opening my mouth. They raised my mouth, and they put pouring water until I feel like I'm all like drowned under the water. And they stop, and then I start choking. It's like salt water. It's not real water. It's not regular water. Slahi says there were two people handling him. One was holding my head, one was pouring the water.

So making sure I won't, because I kept moving, because I didn't want the water. But they kept pouring it, so they were holding down my head. Then when they did that, they filled me with ice. Ice down his jumpsuit. The ice was so painful because I'm bruised. And probably I have opening, but they put ice on it right away. So to heal it, to heal the wound. And then when the water ran out, they started beating me again.

This went on for... I don't know. Hours. Mr. X disputes some of what Slahi says happened. He says, yes, they did make him drink water, but just to keep him hydrated, and it wasn't salt water. He thinks Slahi smelled the salty air and felt the sea spray and got confused. Slahi says, no, he was not confused.

It was salt water. Mr. X also told me they did put ice down Slahi's jumpsuit. Again, not to torture him, but to keep him from getting heat stroke. But both Mr. X and Zully say Slahi was not beaten during the boat rides. It seemed they were committed to keeping him alive while simultaneously trying to scare him to death.

We were floating at one point. We stopped to float and I remember getting down by his ear and I'm saying, you remember, you know who this is, motherfucker? You fucked up. We got you down, right? So I was getting the by his ear and I'm saying, you remember, you know who this is, motherfucker? You fucked up. We got you down, right? So I was getting the height in that. I feel like it's fucking Mr. X.

I mean, I believe he genuinely thought like, this is it, I'm dying tonight. Like this, I'm going to die. His carotid artery was pulsing. He was sweating. And he was like, you know, like this mouth, like this slack-jawed kind of breathing fear. Like just, that will always stick with me. Like the fear was so palpable. Eventually, they pulled up to a small island.

Richard Zule, the head of the special projects team, dragged Salahi onto the land. This is where they met up with Nasser, the fake Jordanian intel guy, and the other linguist, the fake Egyptian intel guy. Salahi had earmuffs on to prevent him from hearing, but I had had little holes drilled in him. So he could hear,

although he knew he wasn't supposed to hear. People were talking, all is at me, like that's what you get terrorist and things like that. Then Mr. Zoli stepped up, came. I recognized his voice. He made a speech. We thank people who help us fight against terrorism. We thank people who help us fight against terrorism. Zuli was appearing in character again as Captain Collins, the fake White House guy.

He was talking to Nasser and the other linguist. Me and the other linguist are just talking shit about him, talking shit about what we're going to do to him, and saying, oh, we're going to do this, we're going to do that. You know, look at these guys. They don't torture. They don't do anything. Wait until he comes in our hands.

You know, we're going to do this and this and this and this. They didn't have a script, and Nasser would find out years later from reading Slahi's book that Slahi had already been in Jordanian custody once before. Rosser wishes he had known at the time. He thinks his performance would have been so much better. While all this was playing out, Mr. X was off to the side. He didn't have a part in this scene, so he got to take five. I sat off to the side, had a cigarette, and watched as individuals were around there playing their roles whatever those were okay can i ask you a weird question that just popped into my head sure um that night before you go to start this operation do you remember what you did did you have dinner

do you remember getting dressed do you remember how you felt like Did you have dinner? Do you remember getting dressed? Do you remember how you felt? Like, were you nervous? No, it's an interesting question. No, I wasn't nervous. I'll tell you, so it's a curious question, because there's, you know, a discussion about... My question reminded Mr. X of a documentary film he'd seen

about all these photo albums someone found of Nazi guards and staff at a concentration camp. And the photo album is just filled with these images of people partying, you know, drinking, eating, sunbathing, whatever, dancing, and otherwise conducting themselves in this very carefree and whimsical manner. And when they weren't doing those things, the most horrible things were happening on the face of the planet at the time. Right. And while I won't say that the things that happened at Gitmo were even remotely close to what happened in Auschwitz-Birkenau at all,

I will say that there is an absolute parallel to that dynamic. So you left the gate of Delta or Echo, whatever it was you're working. Camp Delta or Camp Echo, two of the prison compounds at Guantanamo. And then you went back to your place and you took a shower and you watched some TV and cracked some beers. You had something to eat. And then you went to the tiki bar or this club or whatever, and you drank and you had a good time. And then you went back to work and did the things that you did. So I don't remember what I did, but the night before the operation, I probably was chilling out, having beers and kicking it with my buddy. He didn't have anything to worry about.

After all, their plan had been approved by Donald Rumsfeld himself. Not only is it approved, authorized, but it's the right thing to do. Finally, around one or two in the morning, they took Salahi back to land, back to Guantanamo, to a new cell. He was spitting distance from where he had started the night, but they hoped he would think he was somewhere new, maybe a new country.

Salahi says he knew he was still at Gitmo. That part of the plan didn't work. Well, I'm not saying this as an insult, but Americans are not really the best in geography, so I knew it was still in Cuba. But Slahi also says it didn't really matter where he was. Also, what didn't make sense to me, I know wherever they take me, it would be Americans who are calling the shots. So Cuba or Egypt or Jordan, it would be Americans. Americans, who had already had him disappeared from his home in Mauritania, rendered to a Jordanian prison and then taken to Bagram. Americans who sent him from Bagram to Guantanamo, where he was treated to temperature extremes,

food deprivation, sleep deprivation, loud music, the national anthem, strobe lights, threats to imprison his family, to bring his mother to Guantanamo, where she'd be raped, to have him rendered again. That's the irony at the heart of this whole operation. The idea was to trick Slahi into thinking he was losing the protections of American values and decency and morality,

and being handed over to a country that will torture people for information. But of course, he was already in the hands of a country like that. Two weeks after the mock rendition, isolated in a dim cell, Slahi finally agreed to talk. What he told them, after the break. This is Sarah Koenig, host of The Serial Podcast. If you're hooked on this show, and I'm guessing you are, then I'm hoping my job here is pretty easy, to get you to subscribe to The New York Times

so you can listen to the rest of it. My father was an ad man who taught me the best ads are declarative, no puffery. So here goes. Serial shows are expertly reported and inventive. Nobody makes them like we make them. But Serial's great serials aside, when you subscribe, you get all the Times shows.

The Daily, Ezra Klein, Wirecutter has a new podcast. My advice, though, don't just get an audio subscription. Go big. Subscribe to the paper, all access, the whole magilla. Serial is part of the Times, so technically I work at the Times, and honestly I'm kind of cheap, but I subscribe for the news, obviously, and the games, and the cooking, and the magazine, and Serial. I think of the Times as a staple. Even my kids, who are not budding journalists and who don't even really listen to Serial, they both asked me for Time subscriptions. All the cool kids are doing it. So please,

sign up. You can do it through Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or if you're already a Time subscriber, sign in. It's worth it. Slahi's new cell was in an isolated part of the prison, Camp Echo. He had no one to talk to, no sunlight. In his book, he wrote that he could tell whether it was day or night by looking into his toilet. The water appeared lighter during the day. Eventually, Slahi would report hearing voices. Seems a little creepy, an interrogator wrote to a Gitmo psychologist.

His only interaction with other people was with the guards, who brought him his meals and barked orders at him, but nothing more. After two weeks of isolation, Mr. X says, Mary went in with a pillow and a Snickers bar, and he collapsed and wept like a baby, according to her, and said, I'm ready to talk. Slahi says he wrote out a confession. He includes a version of it in his book.

I came to Canada with a plan to blow up the CN Tower in Toronto. My accomplices were Ahmed, Mohammed, Hasni, and Raouf. After he confessed, Zuli went to see him. He just gushed information. He gave so much. Mohammed wrote an explosive simulation software that I picked up. It was labor-intensive, trying to transfer it from notes into reports to get them submitted. Ahmed provided the financing. Thanks to Canada Intel, the plan was discovered and sentenced to failure. He was so prolific that I got him a computer. I had it scrubbed, brought it into him, and we would finish our session and then we would

leave him with written assignments. And he would sit up and he would type 20 30 40 pages of response to some of these things he would create link charts he did amazing stuff I said the guy had a photographic memory or the next best thing I was supposed to bury a lot of sugar to mix with the explosives. It worked very, very well. All I can say is this. Everybody on the team got a Defense Meritorious Service Medal.

It's a high award in the American military. In that citation, it refers to the single most important source of information on al-Qaeda in Europe. So I think it played out very well. I admit that I am as guilty as any other participants and I am so sorry and ashamed for what I have done. Signed, Muhammad Walshullah. How much of that is true?

None of it is true. Shortly after he confessed, Salahi recanted. He later said he made things up just to get the torture to stop. Despite Zuli's assessment, over the last 20 years, this idea that the mock rendition was a huge success has largely fallen apart under scrutiny.

The military attorney assigned to prosecute Slahi for what amounted to war crimes. He resigned from the case when he found out about Slahi's treatment and concluded he had been tortured. Eventually, Slahi challenged his imprisonment in federal court, and the judge in that case, Judge James Robertson, saw a lot of the government's intel on Slahi. Judge Robertson wrote in his opinion that yes, while the government did show that Slahi was an al-Qaeda sympathizer, possibly even, quote, a fellow traveler, he

concluded that the government had not proven that Salahi was a member of al-Qaeda at the time of his capture. Even more, he wrote, quote, the government's problem is that its proof that Salahi gave material support to terrorists is so attenuated or so tainted by coercion and mistreatment or so classified that it cannot support a successful criminal prosecution, end quote.

He ordered that Slahi be released. The government appealed the ruling and kept Slahi at Guantanamo for six more years, until he was finally released in 2016, back to his home country of Mauritania. So, the Special Projects Team's interrogation plan for Salahi produced dubious intel, foiled a potential terrorism prosecution, and did untold damage to Mohamedou Salahi himself. What was the government's take on all of this? At first, in 2005, the Army investigated accusations of detainee abuse at Guantanamo and concluded there was, quote, no evidence of torture or inhumane treatment. But then, a few years later, the Senate released a report detailing the abuse of detainees, including Slahi, and laid the blame on Bush administration lawyers and top Pentagon brass. Today, what they did to Slahi, the mock rendition, the threats, the psychological abuse, all of it would be illegal. Congress has since passed laws to ensure that. Plus now, the official standard for interrogations for all government agents, not just the military, is the Army's Interrogation Manual, which explicitly

prohibits torture. So if the American government were a manual, which explicitly prohibits torture. So if the American government were a person, one might reasonably conclude these reports and this corrective action to be a kind of mea culpa, an acknowledgment that what was done to Slahi was wrong, a promise not to make the same mistakes again. But governments, of course, are not people. They don't have feelings. They don't have to take responsibility or issue apologies, at least not in the case of Guantanamo. The emotional baggage of that place

and time, which was not so very long ago, is still carried by the people who were its main players. Mohamedou Slahi, first and foremost. The members of the special projects team, they have not reached a consensus about what they did to Slahi. When Zuli spoke to reporter Bastian Berbner in 2021, he felt no ambiguity about the mock rendition operation or how it went down. In his mind, Slahi was al-Qaeda and they broke him, and whatever Slahi says about his confession today, the operation worked. Of course he has to recant everything. Of course he has to say he's tortured. Of course he has to recant everything. Of course he has to say he's tortured. Of course he has to say that everything was made up and everything was brutal. He was adamant. Slahi wasn't treated all that badly for a bad guy. Stop your tears and your hand wringing.

His condition there was not much different from the condition of prisoners that are in supermax in the United States. I'm not concerned about him. He wasn't tortured. He wasn't physically beaten. He wasn't tortured. He was beaten in the respect that we won, he lost in the mental game, in the mind game of trying to keep the information inside. Now, you can sit here and look at it 20 or 19 years later and say, oh, these terrible, terrible people, they made him feel alone. But the more important mission there was to get the intelligence and maybe save lives, maybe save your life. So, all right, I think we're done.

Zuli cut the interview short. After Guantanamo, Zuli went back to working at the Chicago Police Department. In the years since, according to court documents, he's been accused by multiple people of falsifying evidence and coercing confessions through threats and physical abuse, including four people whose convictions have been vacated. They've all filed civil suits. One case has been dismissed.

The other three are still pending. Zuli and the city of Chicago have denied the allegations. He's now retired. Nasser, the fake Jordanian torturer slash real Arabic linguist, says when he first started working with the special projects team, he wasn't all that bothered by their tactics. He thought most of the detainees would have gotten far worse treatment in their own countries. And I thought, you know, they brought this to themselves. We need to gather information. These are the people that we need to get it from. So any way we can get information that would complete our puzzle, we need to pull it. Looking back on the Salahi operation today, Nasser feels like, yeah, it was morally uncomfortable, but also admittedly creative.

He's not torn up about his part in it. He was a soldier doing his job. Mr. X, on the other hand, six months after he got home from Guantanamo, he had a psychotic break. The reality of what he participated in came crashing down on him. The psychological torture he inflicted on Slahi and other detainees. The fact that he hadn't reported up the chain that Slahi had been abused.

That crop of unextinguishable regrets, to borrow a phrase from Heart of Darkness. What he understands now about the interrogations at Guantanamo is that sometimes what happened in the booth wasn't actually about getting intel. What I have realized over the intervening two decades is that it was punitive. There was, because you'd go in with a person and they would like not want to talk to you. And they'd pray or whatever.

And then it was like, okay, you son of a bitch. So I'm going to do this for eight hours and I'm going to just make you miserable. But you wrote it up like you, you know, you wanted to believe that what you're doing was an attempt to actually break them. He'd finish his session and write up a report of what had happened in the interrogation booth, for the record. And just like that, through the alchemy of paperwork, his anger was transformed into professional practice. It was catharsis presented as craftsmanship.

And it felt good. Today, Mr. X has a lot of shame about what he did back then. He'll tell you that what he did to Slahi was torture, and that torture doesn't work. That torture produces untrustworthy, crappy intel. That he's haunted by the image of Slahi's face when he was taken out of the truck that night. But he still thinks Slahi was a terrorist. He thinks Slahi is manipulating everyone,

and always has. And that eats at him. And the fact that it still eats at him all these years later, that eats at him too. He just wants the guy out of his head. This whole thing, man, it's like, I still have resentment about this guy, right? Like, I still think, you know, that he's tendrils have insinuated itself in my, my being and in his, I'm sure. And I'm just, I'm tired of feeling like that.

Like, I'm tired of feeling like I'm angry at him for being who I think he is and not admitting it. I'm tired at the fact that we did what we did to try to make him tell us those things. And I'm just tired of thinking about it in general. Like, I just wish it could just really end. For his part, Muhammad Usahi says he's doing okay now, aside from recurring nightmares and debilitating PTSD. He got married to an American, had a baby, got divorced. A lot of Guantanamo detainees, when they're released,

struggle to overcome the label. So they try to keep it quiet, their time at the world's most notorious prison for supposed terrorists. Guantanamo's just not a great look when you're trying to settle down, have a family, restart a life. But Salahi hasn't run away from it. He was already something of a media darling by the time he got out of Gitmo, at least in the small world of Guantanamo media and Guantanamo darlings. He has nearly 41,000 followers on X, a best-selling book called Guantanamo Media and Guantanamo Darlings. He has nearly 41,000 followers on X, a best-selling book

called Guantanamo Diary, a movie called The Mauritanian. He gives speeches at conferences, does interviews regularly. And one of the messages he's been out there delivering is forgiveness. He befriended one of his guards, Steve Wood, who visited him in Mauritania. He's been in touch with other guards and interrogators, including Mr. Axe, though Mr. Axe wasn't interested in Slahi's forgiveness. The Americans took 14 years of his life, marked him in indelible ways. And now, this man, once accused of being a key player in 9-11, he's taken the moral high ground.

Though, after what was done to him, he didn't have very far to climb. Forgiveness, though, is a funny thing. It can be freeing, healing, to forgive. But it's also a power move, an acknowledgement that the person you're forgiving needs something from you, that only you can give. In that dynamic, the forgiver is on top. So forgiveness is also an act of revenge. And on that battlefield at least, Slahi is the victor. Serial is produced by Jessica Weisberg, Sarah Koenig, and me. Our editor is Julie Snyder. Thank you. Editing help from Alvin Melleth, Jen Guerra, Ellen Weiss, David Kestenbaum, and Ira Glass.

Our contributing editors are Carol Rosenberg and Rosina Ali. Additional research by Emma Grillo. Our standards editor is Susan Wessling. Legal review from Alameen Sumar. The art for our show comes from Pablo Delcon and Max Guter. Additional production from Daniel Guimet. The supervising producer for serial productions is Ndeye Chubu. Our executive assistant is Mac Miller.

Sam Dolnick is deputy managing editor of The New York Times. Special thanks to Susan Beachy, Jack Begg, Kitty Bennett, Stu Couch, Alain Delacarrière, Elisa Dogromadjieva, Mark Fallon, John Goetz, Jelko Ivanovic, Steve Kleinman, Sheila McNeil, Katie Mingle, Lauren Myers-Kaufmuller, Kirsten Noyes, Nadia Raymond, Steve Ladek, and Steve Wood.