The Daily - From Serial: Season 4 - Guantánamo

Episode Date: March 30, 2024

Maybe you have an idea in your head about what it was like to work at Guantánamo, one of the most notorious prisons in the world. Think again.

Hey everyone, it's Sabrina. As you know, sometimes on the weekends, we here at The Daily bring you episodes of other shows made by our colleagues at New York Times Audio. This weekend, we've got the first episode of Serial's new season, Season 4. This time, the Serial team's telling a story that maybe hasn't been on your mind recently, but as they'll show, it's one of the most important, fascinating, and complicated criminal justice stories in our country. And that's Guantanamo Bay. So here they are with that first new episode. And for all the rest, search Serial wherever

you listen to podcasts or in our New York Times audio app. Happy listening. our New York Times audio app. Happy listening. Over here at Serial, we love criminal justice stories. Guantanamo is the most astonishing one we've ever seen. Guantanamo is a prison and a court that we made from scratch right after September 11th. We were at war in Afghanistan fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and pretty soon we'd captured thousands of men. Our makeshift holding cells in Afghanistan couldn't handle them all. We needed a safe place to keep them, away from the chaos, so we could sort them out. And the place we chose was Guantanamo Bay, 8,000 miles away from Afghanistan, in Cuba. We already had a sleepy naval base there. We've had it since 1903. There's plenty of room,

and this part was crucial. The Bush administration figured because the base was in Cuba, on foreign soil, the prisoners we delivered there wouldn't have access to U.S. courts. That was the innovation. We wanted leeway to hold these guys for however long we wanted, and mostly we wanted to interrogate them, however we wanted, to find out what they knew, especially about al-Qaeda. Because we didn't know a ton about al-Qaeda back then, and we were petrified they were about to blindside us again.

So that was the idea. Guantanamo wouldn't be a traditional POW camp. It'd be a new thing, with new rules. The problem, well, there were many, many problems. But the problem that dogged Guantanamo the whole time, and which became apparent pretty quickly, was that these weren't the guys we thought they were. All told, 780 Muslim men and some boys were held at Guantanamo. And even the ones who were Taliban or al-Qaeda,

they were overwhelmingly low level, like foot soldiers. Other prisoners, we never figured out exactly who they were or if they posed a threat to us. Our intel wasn't so hot. We'd shipped all these prisoners to Guantanamo without a solid plan for letting them back out. to Guantanamo without a solid plan for letting them back out. Many people sat there for two, three, five years, and some 12 years, 14 years, 16 years. We didn't know what to do with them. 30 men are still held at Guantanamo. And the cost? The last time someone tallied it up, $13 million a year per prisoner. Guantanamo is probably the most expensive lockup in the world. Astonishing, no? Dana Chivas and I, Dana's worked on previous seasons of Serial. She's going to be my co-host

this season. Dana and I have been trying to do a story about Guantanamo for years, almost a decade. Our first attempt was in 2015. Sarah and I had flown down to Guantanamo, or Gitmo as it's often called, for the official media tour, the only way we could see the prison. The experience was strange, almost as soon as we arrived. We were picked up at the airport by two soldiers from Public Affairs. Would any of you guys like to stop at the small little mini-mart real quick? On this side, it's just a small one just to get if you want a snack or something. They also have souvenirs there, but you'll have another chance to get more souvenirs on the other side.

Um... Guantanamo has three gift shops. Recently, the gift shops did a collaboration with Disney, so you could bring home a T-shirt that says Guantanamo Bay with a Minnie Mouse on it. Or one with palm trees that says, It don't get mo' better than this. For the mindful, there was a coffee mug with a simple mantra. Be here now, Guantanamo Bay.

We passed up the souvenir offer on day one. Maybe you caught Sarah's hesitation in the tape. Um. Because how inappropriate. But by day three, Oh, I'm totally getting a bobblehead. there we were, shelling out cash for Fidel Castro bobbleheads

to bring to our loved ones back home. To be at Guantanamo is to be worn down into a if you can't beat them, join them posture. It's a company town. A company is the U.S. military. Everything in the town belongs to the U.S. military. The car wash, the high school, the bowling alley, the ground zero paintball range. And of course, the story of Guantanamo, that they tell you at Guantanamo,

about what they're doing. That also belongs to the military. Our mission today is to provide safe, humane, legal, and transparent custody of the detainees here. They didn't talk about the history of the prison, why it's here, what went on here, who's still being held here. They talked about the mission.

And they kept it tight. From the camp commander all the way down the chain. Our public affairs escorts, a medical officer, a guard. Safe, legal, transparent care. Safe, legal, humane, and transparent. Legal, transparent care and custody of detainees. Care and custody of the detainees. Providing compassionate care for these detainees.

Transparent care, custody, and control. The U.N. has said the treatment of the detainees at Guantanamo is, quote, cruel, inhuman, and degrading, and that their detention and past torture are violations of international law. But at the prison itself, what we heard from our military

tour guides was about how well cared for the detainees were. They can give their own clippers, toothpaste, soap. They also get some snack-type items based on their compliance. It's not that anyone was unprofessional or impolite with us. The soldiers we spent the most time with, the public affairs escorts, were considerate hosts, picking us up a little after 6 a.m., engaging in small talk. Sarah and I spent a lot of time oohing and aahing the sights they pointed out. Look at the color of that water.

Yeah, it's amazing. Commenting on the weather. It's really, really, really hot. Is Afghanistan hotter, I'm sure, right? Yeah. Volumes hotter? Well, yes, volumes hotter. While behind us sat two prisons housing 122 men, the vast majority of whom had been there for more than a decade without charge.

This is beautiful. This is so pretty. It's like a garden. My tolerance for all this polite chit-chat wore thin. Standing on a cliff above the sparkling sea, next to a small building where the adolescent prisoners were once held, I had a tiny meltdown. I think I'm hitting the part of the day where the fucked-upness has just gone to my head.

What'd you say? I think I'm hitting the part of the day where the fucked upness has just gone to my head. What'd you say? I think I'm hitting the part of the day where the heat and the fucked upness of everything is just taking out my sensibility. What do you mean? I don't know, I just feel loopy from all of it. Oh, you do? Well, it's exhausting because you're pretending. Everything is pretend. That's what I'm saying. We're in a play and we're playing our part. Everyone's doing their part.

It's the pretending that's making me lose it right now. Recently, I looked back at my notes from that time. I'd written, Went to some lookout area. I pretended to give a crap about the view. You could see naval thingies in the water, used to tie up battleships in the bay. It was a nice view, for sure.

Lots of hills. Some green, swampy, mangrove-looking things out on the bay. And then, It really is like theater. You're pretending to report, or else you're pretending to report the story they're telling you. And they're pretending to believe that the story you're doing is the one you've told them you're doing. You're pretending to believe all the bullshit they have to tell you. And they're pretending that they're believing that you're believing it. And everyone knows the only information you want is stuff they either don't know or couldn't or wouldn't talk about, even if they did know.

Everyone acts chummy and yucks it up, including us. What we wanted to know is what the people working at Guantanamo thought about Guantanamo, how they saw their jobs. They were part of something extraordinary. So I was asking pretty much everyone I met what they thought about the detainees and their status. Sincerely asking. Does this place feel like it's winding down?

A lot of the prisoners have been cleared to leave. They aren't even supposed to be here anymore. How do you feel about that? And they'd look a little stricken. They said things like, I don't know, I don't have any personal feelings, you know, toward these people. Or this line of questioning makes me completely nervous. One guy told me it was unfair of me even to ask. We started to give up on the idea we could have a normal conversation with anyone.

Lucky for us, one of our public affairs escorts was a delightful ray of sunshine in the form of Army Specialist Raul Sanchez. Raul was cheerful and chatty. He seemed looser than the other escorts. We're like a Disneyland employee. That was a joke. Definitely a joke. It's nothing like Disneyland. They have no churros here, so...

Within an hour of meeting him, we'd learn Raul was from Arizona, newly married. He was leading a group for LGBT service members, co-hosting a show over at the radio station. And he seemed genuinely interested in the history of Guantanamo. So after a couple of days, I pitched my question to Raul. Raul, I said, some of these guys have been cleared to leave for four or five years now.

And yet all around us, there's this massive apparatus to sustain their confinement. Do you ever struggle with that idea? I never struggle with the idea because I feel that we have pushed our limits so far to make such a humane environment for them that every day we're trying to seek new ways to to try to make this place a better environment to make it a better living situation that's oh my gosh poor baby raul that is present day Raul Sanchez, years after Sarah and I met him at Guantanamo. I played him that same tape you just heard, of him answering Sarah's question about the detainees. He told me he remembered that conversation.

Oh my gosh, because she caught me. That question caught me. That was in a moment where I was realizing things, and she caught me, which is why I don't sound as quickly eloquent as I usually do. Yeah. You know, I heard myself. You didn't sound as canned. No, I didn't have a canned answer because I was agreeing that they should just leave.

In that moment, I felt like, at least I feel right now in my heart, what I wanted that moment was just for you to take me back home with you guys and take me off the island. Yeah, I felt trapped. I felt trapped because I couldn't say anything. I couldn't know. I was now, in that moment, I was now lying. Raul, of course, couldn't tell us any of this back then.

He was still on the job. That's why we never did a story in 2015. We couldn't get anyone to open up to us. But even as Guantanamo faded as a topic of national discussion, we kept thinking about it, wondering what was going on down there. We figured there has got to be a way to do this story. We even tried writing a TV show about it, a fictionalized version of Guantanamo, which, humbling.

But while we were researching it, we had all of these fascinating off-the-record conversations with former personnel and former detainees. And so we started to wonder, maybe enough time has passed. Enough people are back in civilian life. Maybe they'd be willing to put some of those stories on the record. So we tried again. Contacted guards, interrogators, commanders, lawyers, chaplains, translators, also former prisoners,

more than 100 people. And a remarkable number of them said, OK, I'm ready. Here's what happened. There's been great journalism about the legal maneuvering to justify Guantanamo and about the detainee abuse, about the politics and policy. But what we were after were the insider stories. A history of Guantanamo you could only get from the regular people who went through it. The people caught inside a justice system that at its core was made up.

What were they thinking? If they could speak as themselves, for themselves, what would they say now that they couldn't say then? A lot, as it turns out. From Serial Productions and The New York Times, this is Season 4 of Serial, Guantanamo. One prison camp told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig.

And I'm Dana Chivas. Before we get back to Raul, we just want you to hear what Guantanamo is like, Before we get back to Raul, we just want you to hear what Guantanamo is like, how it feels to live there and work there and be imprisoned there, from a bunch of people we've talked to. It's the backdrop to all the other stories this season. For example, maybe you have an idea in your head of what it's like to work at Guantanamo. Put that aside for a second.

I mean, I love Gitmo. Like, it's la-la land. Jake Meyer was 25 when he arrived at Guantanamo to work in military intelligence. You know, you're on 42 square miles. You've got, like, five great beaches. You know, it's always summer. You don't have much to worry about. You know, like, there weren't any worries. You know, I didn't pay any taxes. I didn't pay any rent. You know, if you wanted to go scuba diving after work, I mean, you could be at the beach geared up and in the water in 20 minutes. Guantanamo, for years, was portrayed as a key component in the war against terrorism. But it also happens to be on a Caribbean naval base, stocked with booze. I partied my ass off in Gitmo.

Everybody's in good shape. Everybody's looking good. Everyone's tan and hot. Everyone's drinking and young. Massive amount of drinking. Massive amount of partying. I mean, just everyone was getting drunk and getting laid. And then the Puerto Rican National Guard. Oh my gosh, they had the best beach parties. Thousands of young, fit soldiers and sailors. For some of them, it's their first time away from home. Guantanamo is where they've landed to come

of age. I talked to one guy, Patrick, who was on the prison's quick reaction force. It's kind of like a SWAT team. He turned 21 at Guantanamo. He started his deployment trying to hit on women in bars, but ended up falling in love with another man, a sailor. They had to sneak around. What would you do together? What types of activities would you do? Like, where would you go to just be alone? Lots of sex. Okay.

I just, you asked, and I felt the need to ask in that way. I'll just be explicit. I asked the question, and I heard myself asking. Sexual activities. Activities of a sexual nature. Sexual activities. Okay. Where? Never mind. So it felt very college-like without it being, obviously, the next day wasn't classes. It was Gitmo.

Remember, the original purpose of Guantanamo was to get fighters off the battlefield, out of the way, to a place where we could question them. Guantanamo was a hastily built intel factory. Chaos. Simply put, it was chaotic. Well-meaning chaos, but chaos nonetheless. That's Paul Rester. He oversaw the military's intel shop at Guantanamo in the early days. When he first got there, Guantanamo was already crawling with people from three- and four-letter agencies. CIA, FBI, DIA, NCIS.

Some were seasoned al-Qaeda investigators. Others were fresh out of Army Intel School. All were competing for access to the detainees. To streamline the scheduling, they teamed up. Three interrogators plus an interpreter. So that's four people trying to interrogate a single detainee. At the same time. They're all sitting in a room together. At the same time. And oh, by the way, the only person in the room that's got any area studies knowledge of what they're talking about is the detainee. I tried to explain everything I can.

Omar Degais, a former detainee, was picked up in Pakistan. And I tried to persuade them that we're not the people they're looking for. For him, and for a lot of other detainees, who didn't know much or anything at all about al-Qaeda, the interrogations were maddening. The same questions over and over again for months, sometimes years. They'd say, I've already answered that. Go back to the file.

Or they'd stop speaking at all. The American strategy could be mystifying. Another guy, Murat Karnas, he was 19 when he was taken to Guantanamo. He said he had this one interrogator who kept talking about the time he spent in Germany, where Murat's from. He told me a lot of stories about his life, and it was really boring, but he told me lots of stuff from his hashish, using hashish and stuff like that with young German parties, and a lot of crazy stuff. Did you say anything? Did you just sit there and listen to it?

Yeah. I couldn't go away. I had shackles on the ground. I was locked to the ground. I couldn't stand up. In the beginning, the detainees didn't have a choice about the interrogations. They were forced to go. That's what made Guantanamo Guantanamo. To do what we wanted to do there, we ended up breaking international law, sidestepping the Geneva Conventions, which give certain protections to prisoners of war. Instead, the government argued that the men we'd captured weren't prisoners of war.

They were something else. They called them unlawful enemy combatants. And according to this line of thinking, unlawful enemy combatants were not protected by the Geneva Conventions. Which meant we could play by a different set of rules. We could scream at them for hours, leave them shackled to the floor. We could scream at them for hours, leave them shackled to the floor. One time they told me my family, my mother and father, they died in a car accident. They told me a lot of things.

That's awful. They told me all my family, my brothers and mother and father sit in the car and they had the accident. But he told me he can't tell me any details, and he's not allowed to talk with me about it. So he just told me that very short and said, I can't tell you this. Was this an interrogator who said this? It was an interrogator, yeah. I didn't know if I should believe him or not.

I didn't know. Murat didn't learn his family was alive until years later, when his lawyer gave him a letter in his mother's handwriting. Unlike normal American prisons, there weren't huge divisions among the inmates. They were from all over the world, Afghanistan, but also Arabs from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Libya and Morocco, Kuwait, Tunisia, Sudan. There were a few Europeans, two Australians. Those guys tended to be released first. They spoke different languages, which was a barrier in the beginning, but then they started learning each other's languages, including English. They were Muslims. They'd all been grabbed in the same conflict.

Omar Degayis said they knew who was who, who was al-Qaeda. Of course we knew who was al-Qaeda. They were obvious because they spoke the way they spoke, how they communicated. Even inside, they had a different system. By and large, everyone got along. The abiding antagonism of the cell blocks was between the prisoners and the guards. Often the guards would come in hot, hostile, or scared. They'd been told, like the rest of us back home, that these were the guys. These are the men who attacked us on 9-11.

But after a while, some of them would start to doubt. A former guard who worked in the blocks in the early years, he said by the end of his tour, he could differentiate among the detainees. He was like, wait a minute. This guy right here, yeah, he's probably, you know, probably legit a horrible person that has either killed or caused people to be killed. This guy over here doesn't know shit. He just sits in his cell and cries and wants to go home. After nine months or a year, the guard unit would rotate out and the cycle would start over.

The prisoners had different strategies for getting through. A former detainee from Yemen who goes by Danny, he spent 14 years at Guantanamo. I'm very optimistic there. I was like, I always like looking at the sunlight

and bright side and try to make from lemon juice and everything. But it was so hard, so harsh, so mean. If you protested or provoked, you risked all manner of physical abuse, including being trampled by a team of guards in riot gear. Some detainees, Omar for instance, fought back. Omar figured, I'm going to get my ass kicked regardless, so I might as well make their lives harder. He remembered after one particularly brutal confrontation, Omar had a bad eye and he said a guard had gouged it.

And afterwards, they put him in a new cell where he could see his reflection. Omar said he hadn't seen himself in a long, long time. They had, like, an iron mirror. It wasn't a mirror. It was, like, a round thing on the wall. And it was the first time I saw my face and I saw how my hair went, like, completely white. My chest was white.

My eye was, like, I was shocked to see my eye. I saw how my hair went like completely white, my chest was white. My eye was like a shock to see my eye was completely white. It's like shocking. What were you most scared of in Guantanamo when you were there? Most scared of? I don't know, maybe the... We don't know what's going to happen. It's like you've been there for years. And there's no...

No... No... No foreseeable outcome. You don't... There's no... Like, how long am I going to stay in this prison? I don't know. It's crazy. There wasn't, there wasn't a logical system how people are released and why and what.

And it's mostly nothing to do with the law, nothing to do with what went on in interrogation. It's more to do with other politics outside the prison. Guantanamo, the prison prison wasn't built to last, and nobody wanted it to last. But nobody could manage to shut it down. Even President Bush, whose administration started Guantanamo, he talked about closing it

less than five years after it opened. Didn't happen. Next came President Obama in 2009. He was going to close Guantanamo within a year. Congress blocked that plan. Guantanamo within a year. Congress blocked that plan. Guantanamo was a beast no politician wanted to touch. And the military couldn't empty it out either. We'd hoped to put a bunch of people on trial for war crimes,

but most of them we couldn't even charge, much less convict. The evidence we had was too problematic, or we'd abused them too badly, or they were too small fry, not worth the effort. We tried other ways to sort them, to determine which detainees posed a threat and which ones didn't. But the people who did get cleared for release or transfer, a bunch of them, they still couldn't leave. We had nowhere to send them.

Couldn't send them home. We considered their governments too unstable. Couldn't find another country to take them. Refused to take them in ourselves. A decade in, and we were all stuck. And so began the languishing of Guantanamo. Jake Meyer, the intel analyst, he first got to Guantanamo in 2005. The op tempo was high. Everything was moving. Like, you were a part of something big. So you're caught up in the momentum. You're caught up Like, you were a part of something big. So you're caught up in the momentum. You're caught up in, you know, this constant intel collection.

You know, as fast as you could get it. Six years later, he came back. Totally different story. By then, 2012, the intel mission, Guantanamo's primary mission, was pretty much done. There were about 170 prisoners left. We'd gotten whatever we could from them. The beehive energy of the place had dissipated. You know, and there's a lot less people there.

It's like a ghost town. So, you know, the party moved on, I guess. And, like, everybody was kind of just, like, what is going on now? There's just this feeling of everybody's just like, why are we still here? The majority of prisoners were living communally in a new, modern prison by this point. They had access to movies, books, CD players.

They did art projects, made fantastical things out of cardboard. They could finagle special items from The Next, the big store on the base. Interrogations were optional, and one former detainee told me, kind of cardboard. They could finagle special items from the next, the big store on the base. Interrogations were optional, and one former detainee told me, kind of pleasant. But the perks didn't obliterate the facts. President Obama's second term had begun, and Guantanamo stunk of permanence. In early 2013, the detainees began a hunger strike, which grew and grew, attracting attention all over the world.

The hunger striker's message was the same as ever. Either charge me with a crime or let me go. And that's pretty much how things were when Sarah and I got to Guantanamo in 2015 and met Raul. The prison was maybe closing, maybe not closing. And there were 122 men still there, with no idea of when, or if, they would ever leave. So when I called Raul years later, what I wanted to know was, what did people like him, whose job it was to tell the official story of Guantanamo, what did they really think about working there? What was the unofficial story? Of course, Raul can't speak for the thousands of people who

have worked there over the last 22 years, but he did have a story to tell me about why he was so desperate to leave Guantanamo and what happened to him after. By the time Sarah and I met him, Raul had been in the army for eight years already. Before Guantanamo Bay, the military was my entire world. I was talking about it every single day. Every day. I loved it. I took advantage of the military. The military did not take advantage of me. Raul told me when he was graduating from high school, he needed some direction. The military gave him that, and he got to do incredible things. They sent him to Hawaii, paid for him to go to culinary school. He got a $20,000 bonus when he enlisted in 2007. Before Guantanamo, he deployed to Kosovo and to Afghanistan, which surprisingly, he loved Afghanistan, lost his virginity at Bagram. super gay there. Like I would get my hair dyed black. I would get my eyebrows waxed because on the German side, they had a Russian ran barber salon. And so we would go in there and get facials and it was crazy. After Afghanistan, Raul's next appointment was to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,

the Pearl of the Antilles, which it says on the signs at Guantanamo. The Pearl of the Antilles. Raul had never been to the Caribbean before. Raul's job was to escort reporters like Sarah and me around the base and into the prison. Like most of the public affairs staff, and most of the staff at Guantanamo actually, Raul didn't know much about the detainees. But he was excited to tell reporters about all the good the military was doing for the prisoners. I was so excited for you to come out there, for Fox News, for BBC, for Al Jazeera News to come, so I can share the message of what we had to do as a military,

and that we were going over and above as if we were some, you know, Salvation Army, and that we are there to keep them safe and to send them back to be with their family. And that's what we're doing. We're humanitarians here. That was my belief. That is what we were fed to be told. That is how we talked about it. That is what we believed. But the job was really stressful. and not just for the public affairs staff. A lot of people told us this. The flip side of the drinking culture was an intense anxiety, a fear of getting in trouble.

It was like they were under the world's microscope. Sometimes the detainees would tattle on the guards. Sometimes their own leadership would go after them. Slip-ups, mistakes, and boneheaded decisions that would normally be handled with a slap on the wrist could wind up in Article 15 proceedings at Gitmo. Raul told me he preferred the fear and anxiety of Afghanistan. At least it was fleeting. At Guantanamo, you're like on edge the entire day. You can't really think. You can't be productive. And that's what was happening there. The public affairs staff especially were in a tricky position, caught between reporters who were notoriously impatient with government public affairs types and their own commanding officers who were watching their every move to make sure they didn't say too much or the wrong thing.

So they kept to the safe harbors of their talking points. Present-day Raul demonstrated for me. For instance, if a reporter had asked, what percentage of prisoners are hunger striking right now? A question Sarah did ask. Raul might have said, thank you so much for that question. Our enteral feedings are overseen by our nursing staff. And making sure that they're really staying safe, you know, because our biggest takeaway and our biggest mission here at Guantanamo Bay is making sure of the safe and humane, legal, transparent care and custody of our detainees.

And so, you know, this fully falls into that humane part. We want to make sure that we're caring. Oh, yeah. The safe, legal, humane thing. Raul said part of its power was in just how long it was. It didn't roll off the tongue, but what it did do was it was just long enough to make you roll your eyes or not ask those questions or be inconvenienced. You know, it was just long enough. You're so right.

We were like so like we were so bored by the time you got to the end of that line that we just. Yeah. Like you're not going to get anything from us and we're going to just tire you down. Yeah. What was the worst question a reporter could ask you? Camp 7. Camp 7. For nearly 15 years, Camp 7 was the super secret compound where the government held its most important prisoners.

These were the people accused of plotting 9-11, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and other supposedly high-ranking members of al-Qaeda, prisoners who had been held and tortured in secret CIA prisons overseas. For a long time, everything about Camp 7 was classified. Who was there, what went on there, and certainly its location at Guantanamo, down an unmarked dusty road tucked away in the scrubby hills. So if a reporter asked a question about Camp 7, like, if we have extra time, can we look for Camp 7? Which Sarah did ask.

If we have extra time, can we look for Camp 7? Raul and the other public affairs people would deflect. I've never had anything said to me about Camp 7. I know nothing about it. I mean, you hear rumors, but as far as what they tell, I don't know anything about it. What are the rumors? That there's a Camp 7, a secret Camp 7, yeah. Raul got the impression they were supposed to act as if it wasn't worth thinking about. Like it might not even be real.

Doesn't exist. Don't even ask about it. It's a media thing. Like a media myth? Yep. And it was violently made sure that we didn't know anything. It was like, you don't know anything. Don't say you know anything. Colonel Heath is the only one who could talk about it. You know nothing. But he said they did know about Camp 7. The existence of Camp 7 had been reported nearly eight years before. A simple Google search

would surface a rash of information about Camp 7. The stuff Rowell had learned in his public affairs training about transparency and truth in journalism, he took it seriously. But now he was starting to feel uncomfortable. We didn't have this experience of being shady. We didn't have this experience of, you know, telling lies. There was a point where we all were so drained that that's when a lot of us signed up to do that secret mission that I told you about. The secret mission? after the break. Raul's secret mission came a few months into his deployment.

He didn't really know what he was signing up for. He just knew it was a chance to get away from the tours and the reporters and work inside the prison. The mission was combat camera. It's not specific to Guantanamo. It's a regular military job. Instead of carrying a weapon during an operation, you carry a camera to document it for the commanders and for posterity, I suppose. Although the DOD has never released combat camera recordings from the prison. Raul's job on combat camera was to film the detainees who were on hunger strike as they were forced from their cells and then force fed.

He didn't really have a problem with the idea of force-feeding the hunger strikers. It was an act of protest, and so the military had to keep them alive. I mean, what are they going to do? Could you imagine the story that gets out if a detainee died on our watch because they starved to death? During his shifts, Raul would sit in the combat camera office until a call came in. He'd make his way to the cell block in a golf cart.

And then, wearing a face shield for protection, he would film the guards as they burst into a prisoner's cell, strap the prisoner to a board, and carried him out. Next, the guards would put the prisoner in a feeding chair, his arms, legs, and head all fastened to the chair with straps. Once the prisoner was secured and couldn't move, the medic snaked a feeding tube up his nose and down his throat into his stomach and pumped the Ensure, or whatever nutrition drink they were using at the time, into his body. Raul filmed the whole procedure. Sometimes, as the prisoners were being force-fed,

they would speak directly into his camera. They would talk. They would be like, you know, why am I still here? Can you send me home? You know, I don't want to be here anymore. You know, I'm just like you. I have a son who's your age. There was a certain one that would always talk to me and talk at me because he was used to combat camera. So he would talk at me and tell me to save him and to show those videos to the public. And yeah. I think in the moment I was just very numb to it. Huh. At that time, I was just numb to it.

But he says he kind of had to force himself to be numb. A vague unease was floating around in his psyche. It was easier to ignore it. And that worked okay until one day, his perspective on the military and on Guantanamo shifted. What happened was, he got in trouble for something that had nothing to do with combat camera. Raul's roommate told his commanding officer he thought Raul was having an affair with one of Raul's friends.

Raul was married, and adultery is a big no-no in the military. An investigation was launched. Raul was put on probation for 60 days and was passed over for promotion. Then, months later, Raul got in trouble again for failing a breathalyzer test. All of this was a shock. He says he wasn't having an affair, his roommate was just homophobic. And he says he'd only had one glass of wine, that they gave him a second breathalyzer and he passed. But his commanding officer punished him anyway. He had devoted years of his life to the military.

He believed in the military, lived by its definitions of good and bad. Now, suddenly, he was on the outside of the good guys club. And being on the outside, he started looking at things on the inside differently. So when Sarah asked Raul that question you heard earlier about whether he ever struggled over the imprisonment of the detainees, and he gave her that pained answer,

he says what was actually going on was he was starting to glitch. To ask himself those same questions Sarah was asking everyone. He was starting to feel complicit in what he called stealing people's lives. Soon after we met him, Raul and his unit returned to Arizona. When they had first deployed to Guantanamo, Raul was a cheerful, confident guy, a model soldier. By the time he left, I came away thinking that I was a piece of shit. A few months after he got home, Raul says he had a panic attack and eventually got a

diagnosis of PTSD from Afghanistan and Guantanamo. Which is striking considering in 2011 and 2012, when Raul was in Afghanistan, we were actively fighting a war there. Hundreds of Americans were killed in Afghanistan during those two years. And then here he was at Caribbean Guantanamo Bay, where he could sip pina coladas in the sunshine and go to the beach if he wanted. And he comes home and falls apart. I think it's weird that I don't have any negative ties to what happened in Afghanistan and what happened in Kosovo. And I assume because I trained for those possibilities. because I trained for those possibilities. We go through, we have a simulation of what it's like to be flipped over in a truck sideways and upside down, and you have to navigate yourself and

unbuckle yourself inside of a Humvee. Those are the trainings we do. So I was trained for Afghanistan. I was trained for Kosovo. You cannot train for Guantanamo Bay. You cannot train for Guantanamo Bay. was that to satisfy our terrified post-9-11 needs, we had to shove aside the old time-tested rules about how to treat war prisoners. And for the ordinary people who had to operate inside the new rules, there was a gap between what they were being told and what they were seeing for themselves. Thousands upon thousands of military personnel, hundreds of prisoners,

everybody trying to bridge that gap. Everybody scrambling through the same experiment. This season of Serial, a history of Guantanamo told by people who know things the rest of us don't about the consequences of an improvised justice system. It's going to be six stories, starting with a guy who acted out the stuff of nightmares, which at the time, all part of his job.

That's next time. Thank you. Thank you.