LATIF NASSER: Before we start, a quick warning. This episode contains some graphic language, and it may not be suitable for all listeners.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LATIF: I'm Latif Nasser. This is The Other Latif, Episode 4. Afghanistan. When we last left him, Abdul Latif Nasir walked in to get his paycheck from Osama bin Laden's headquarters in Sudan, only to find—nobody.

CATHY SCOTT-CLARK: I would imagine there would just be empty offices, kind of windows flapping open. I mean, nothing there. Everyone's gone. Everyone was cleared out on one day.

LATIF: He didn't even know that Osama and his inner circle had any plans to leave. They just ghosted him. That same spring, I was 10 years old. My family lived in the suburbs of Toronto, and at our local mosque we would watch videos and news reports about Muslims being persecuted around the world. The summer before, Bosnian Serbs had massacred 7,000 Muslims around Srebrenica. Russians were attacking Chechen Muslims. Palestine was constantly in the news, and a few years later it'd be Kosovo. All these stories about all these Muslims being targeted, many being chased out of their homes. The videos I remember seeing most were about Afghanistan, about how the Taliban prevented girls my age from going to school, how they drove moderate Muslims like us into hiding, sometimes even killed them.

LATIF: My dad actually started raising money for organizations to help people who were fleeing the Taliban. One of them was the Aga Khan University Medical College in Pakistan. He raised so much money for them that a few years later they invited him to visit, and he took me along, to Karachi. I was 15. It was my first long-distance flight. And after we got there, after we toured the university, we got on a bus, and they took us to a refugee camp. We met Afghans who had walked for weeks through the Spin Ghar Mountains just to cross the border into Pakistan.

LATIF: At the camp, I don't remember much, but I do remember looking into a tent and seeing a woman sleeping on a rug on the floor, holding the tiniest baby I had ever seen. They told me that she had had the baby just a few days before, in the middle of her death-defying mountain hike. I cried harder than I had ever cried before.

LATIF: Back in Canada, other people in our community literally dropped everything to go help. My friend Samira's parents, Roshan and Rahim Thomas, they were an optometrist and ophthalmologist with a thriving practice and three kids in Vancouver, uprooted their lives to go give eye care to Afghan refugees in Pakistan and start an elementary school in Kabul.

LATIF: Those were things in our family that we were so ...

LATIF: Anyway, all of that is to say that what Shelby says Abdul Latif Nasir did next makes sense to me, that while he was in Sudan ...

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Stories of Muslims being persecuted around the world did have an effect on him.

LATIF: ... he was seeing the same kinds of videos and news reports that I was seeing at my mosque.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: He was looking to learn more about what was happening in Chechnya and what there was to be done about it.

LATIF: And like people I know, he decided to act.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Exactly.

LATIF: In short, she says, he decided to go to one of these war-torn countries to try to help his fellow Muslims. He used what little life savings he had to buy a plane ticket, first to Yemen, and then he hoped to Chechnya, where he could help by, I don't know, I imagine distributing food and medicine and supplies. As for how he wanted to help, I just had trouble imagining it. He was poor, if not broke, didn't know anyone in those places, as far as I can tell, had no medical experience, no war zone experience, no charity experience, was not affiliated with an established aid group. I'd asked Shelby, if he was actually trying to help, how was he trying to help?

LATIF: Like, did he have a sense of, like, "I want to be a missionary," or was there a sense of, like, how he would help other Muslims?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Classified.

LATIF: Okay.

LATIF: Virtually every question I asked about this period in Abdul Latif Nasser's life ...

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Classified. Classified. Classified.

LATIF: ... I got the same reply.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Sorry, I'm just looking to see if there's anything else.

LATIF: No, please.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Yeah.

LATIF: Classified?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Classified.

LATIF: Mm-hmm.

LATIF: She couldn't talk about it, or maybe she just thought it wouldn't help her client if she did. I don't know. So from the time Abdul Latif leaves Sudan all the way up to his capture, I really have one version of events, the US government version. Some of this version is based off of Abdul Latif Nasir's own confessions, information he gave up during interviews or interrogations at Guantanamo Bay. Now you might think confessions are confessions, but the thing to keep in mind is, just like basically every other detainee at Gitmo, Abdul Latif Nasir was tortured.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Stripped naked, chained to the floor. Frozen water dumped on their heads. Loud music. Deprivation of water, clothing, warmth. Heated to the point of danger. Frozen to the point of danger. Being told, "If you admit to this you can go free. If you don't, we will find and rape your mother."

LATIF: And according to many experts, including neuroscientist Shane O'Mara, torture is one of the most unreliable ways to get true information out of a person. So remember that. Let that inform everything you hear in the rest of this episode from here on out.

LATIF: Okay, so I want to tackle three of the most salient accusations the government has made about Abdul Latif Nasir, about things he supposedly did during his time in Afghanistan. We're gonna take them one by one. First ...

MAN: One.

LATIF: Training camps. In an interrogation, Abdul Latif talks about why he left Sudan. He says one day he was in the market in Khartoum and he met a Libyan guy. The guy was 30, about his age. He and this guy get to talking and go back to the Libyan guy's place, where that guy puts on a VHS tape. The video is two hours long, and shows Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya being massacred. The video also—and I'm quoting here, "Focused on the glory of fighting jihad and the reasons why an individual should go to fight for Islam." In the interrogation, Abdul Latif says that when he saw that video, he decided he had to act. According to the government, he became, quote, "convinced" that he wanted to, quote, "conduct extremist operations," and he even chose a nom de guerre, a battle alias, Taha. Which I mean, at first felt kind of like a terrorist origin story B-movie, like he watches a VHS tape, jumps off the couch, and says, "I am Taha!" But then again, this sort of thing does happen. Literally, while I was reporting this, a Canadian Muslim guy five years younger than me from my hometown, pled guilty to leaving Canada to try to fight alongside ISIS in Syria. When they asked him why, he said he saw some videos online.

LATIF: Anyways, according to the government documents, Abdul Latif flies from Sudan to Yemen, where he's supposed to meet a contact that the Libyan guy gave him, who in turn will help him sneak into Chechnya to fight. The contact asks him about his combat experience. Abdul Latif tells him he hasn't got any. The contact tells him to sit tight, "I'll make arrangements." But after seven whole months of waiting, hanging around a mosque, Abdul Latif gets a message. He cannot go to Chechnya. The door is closed. But he discovers another option, somewhere he could go and train to fight whomever and wherever he wanted.

LATIF: And he arrived in the desert city of Jalalabad, Afghanistan in late 1997, 32 years old. According to an interrogation log, he was staying at a guesthouse, kind of like a hostel or a Muslim version of a YMCA. He said he was scared to go outside by himself because he didn't have a beard and he worried that the Taliban would harass him. He waited a week, grew out his beard, and went from guesthouse to guesthouse, until he eventually got the head of one of those guesthouses to introduce him to a commander in charge of a bunch of Al-Qaeda training camps, and that guy assigned him to al Farouq, the largest Al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. This is the camp where Osama bin Laden himself visited and lectured. This is the camp where at least seven of the 9/11 hijackers were trained.

LATIF: Now asking Shelby if any of this is true about Abdul Latif ...

LATIF: Did he live in military training camps in Afghanistan?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Classified.

LATIF: ... she gives me the common refrain.

LATIF: Did he train in military training camps in Afghanistan?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Classified.

LATIF: Did he train others at military training camps in Afghanistan?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Classified.

LATIF: So no clearer on that point. What the government documents don't tell you much—or really anything about—is what al Farouq was actually like, which when you really stare at it, definitely complicates things.

CATHY SCOTT-CLARK: Can you turn the volume up a bit?

LATIF: Again, author and journalist Cathy Scott-Clark.

LATIF: Hey, can you hear me?

CATHY SCOTT-CLARK: Yes. Hello, how are you?

LATIF: Good. Good afternoon for you, I guess. Yeah.

LATIF: Cathy's written extensively about these training camps.

LATIF: Can you kind of like, paint a scene for me a little bit? Like, how—yeah, what were they like?

CATHY SCOTT-CLARK: I mean, a bit grim. A bit limited in their facilities. You'd have a few sort of small huts, a very basic cooking area, target setups made of stone, hopefully a river somewhere nearby so you can wash. I mean, no proper sanitation facilities. Probably a large hill that you'd be made to run up and down 50,000 times a day. A place for young male, mujahideen to go off and deal with their personal desires in an appropriate fashion. That was about it, really.

LATIF: What do you mean by—that's like an outhouse? Yeah, what do you mean by that?

CATHY SCOTT-CLARK: There had to be somewhere where you could go and jerk off.

LATIF: What?

LATIF: Apparently these camps tended to have a dedicated masturbatorium.

CATHY SCOTT-CLARK: Yes.

LATIF: Anyway, al Farouq had about 200 trainees at a time. If you watch the Al-Qaeda training and recruitment videos, the impression you get is that the people at these camps are serious and dangerous and utterly dedicated to killing Americans. Then I came across this book from an Australian guy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Hicks: Good day. I'm David Hicks.]

LATIF: David Hicks, a former Gitmo detainee.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Hicks: I want to thank all GetUp members who helped me get out of the hell that was Guantanamo Bay.]

LATIF: He was actually detainee number two. And he was at that training camp a little while after Abdul Latif. He wrote about his time there, about many of the guys who were training with them.

DAVID HICKS: It was a conglomerate of people from all around the world that went there and received basic military training for people that were interested in helping in, say, Chechnya or Kashmir or some of the other places.

LATIF: This one paragraph he wrote really surprised me. Okay, so I'm quoting the book. "I know it might sound strange to some people, but some of the young men who came from military training thought it would make an interesting holiday during their time off from work or uni. They left the camps without any intention of getting involved in any conflict. They just saw it as a travel experience. Others trained for the personal challenges, such as getting physically fit. Some young men wanted to protect their families. Most of the people I met never seemed to have any intention of joining a military force and engaging in a combat situation."

LATIF: Now you could argue that David Hicks is downplaying the danger of the camp, but if he's even 50 percent right, this is totally different than how I always imagined. A way motlier crew of guys, not just these diehard Al-Qaeda foot soldiers. So if Abdul Latif Nasir did attend one of these camps, how are we supposed to interpret that? If he was there, how serious was he about it? Was he just working out? Was he trying to prepare himself to help Muslims in need, or was his goal to become a serious Al-Qaeda fighter? According to US government documents, Abdul Latif Nasir was training to become the latter, and he was selected to attend higher-level training camps, where he supposedly learned about advanced guerrilla warfare tactics, poisons and explosives. He allegedly received training in hand grenades, rocket-propelled grenades, TNT, mortars, C3, C4, and so on. And apparently, he was so good with explosives, he started teaching it himself. And according to the US government, in March, 2001, Abdul Latif Nasir put those skills to use. And this is big point against Abdul Latif Nasir ...

MAN: Two.

LATIF: ... number two, which is a huge act of terrorism and destruction, but it's not 9/11.

CATHY SCOTT-CLARK: No, he wouldn't have known anything about 9/11.

LATIF: I just need to be super clear here for a second, because going into this reporting journey, that was ...

LATIF: That was actually one of my exact questions I wanted to ask you, I realize, is would he have known about 9/11? But you think he would not have beforehand?

CATHY SCOTT-CLARK: Absolutely no way. I can say that definitively, because 99 percent of people associated with Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan at the time didn't know anything about what was coming.

LATIF: Everyone including, much to my surprise, the US government, is explicit that Abdul Latif Nasir had nothing to do with 9/11. In fact, in a US government document from 2005 you will find the following statement, quote, "Detainee did not agree with the attack on September 11, 2001." He further thought the people killed were innocent, it was against Islamic principles to attack innocent people, and that Osama bin Laden was wrong. Not at all what you'd expect from Al-Qaeda's top explosive expert. Anyway, number two.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Bamyan.]

LATIF: Bamyan.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Two of the world's largest statues of Buddha earned Bamyan the nickname 'Valley of the Gods.']

LATIF: February 2001, the leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, issued a decree ordering the destruction of all non-Muslim statues in Afghanistan, in particular, two sandstone Buddha statues in the town of Bamyan. These statues were hand-carved in the sixth century. They're a UNESCO World Heritage Site, considered one of the cultural wonders of the world. But to Mullah Omar they were pagan idols challenging the oneness of God. These statues survived Genghis Khan and the Mongols in the 1200s, Aurangzeb and the Mughals in the 1600s, the British invading in the 1800s, the Soviet bombs in the 1970s and '80s, but what they didn't survive, according to the US government, was one person—Abdul Latif Nasir. According to the declassified US government documents, quote, "Under orders of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar," Nasir placed mines in the statues and blew them up.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The serene giants that had watched over Bamyan for some 1,500 years fell, blown up by Afghanistan's Taliban government.]

LATIF: I tried for months to get the world expert on the Bamyan Buddha statues on the phone with me. Eventually, his daughter called and told me that he couldn't do the interview because even now, almost 20 years later, it's still just too painful for him to talk about it.

WOMAN: You can come right here and you can sit down. And Latif is actually already on the other side of this microphone.

LATIF: Right after that call, I happened to go hang out with a friend of mine, Omar Mullick, who's a cinematographer and filmmaker. I brought it up as if to say, like, how could someone feel this intensely about a statue? These are objects. But what I didn't realize is that Omar, he felt basically the same way that expert did.

LATIF: Just got under your skin.

OMAR MULLICK: Yes, it did.

LATIF: These weren't just rocks.

OMAR MULLICK: Yeah, it did get to me.

LATIF: He was in Afghanistan back in 2011 working as a war photographer, and one day he went to Bamyan to take pictures of where the statues used to be.

LATIF: How big is it? Is it like a city or is it like a region or is it like a ...

OMAR MULLICK: No. A town. A small town that's a little spread out. Dusty and open. And when the sun goes down, it casts these long shadows. Someone will come by with a mule and cart, and the shadows they will cast will just stretch on right into the horizon. And then as you approach this cavity where the Buddhas were, and that's got deep shadows in it as the light moves around it.

LATIF: What did it feel like seeing that?

OMAR MULLICK: Oof. Latif, I mean ...

LATIF: He said the true meaning of the loss of these statues didn't actually hit him until he walked past them and started moving up into the mountain itself.

OMAR MULLICK: Along the way, in these crevices and little holes, which from the ground you might not immediately recognize were ancient homes built into the wall, and these apple-cheeked children, you know, sort of squinting and giggling from windows, and people inviting you in. And I remember walking into one of these homes, and we sat down. And one of the kids was finishing reading the Quran, and then turned to us to sort of speak and serve us tea and all of that. And I thought, "They're living in the Buddha with this Quran, and no one's batting an eyelid."

LATIF: These Muslim families had been living inside these huge symbols to a different religion for generations.

OMAR MULLICK: And everyone was proud of them. Like, sort of everyone there to a tee would say, "Yeah, that's an amazing thing. We're proud that we love that." It was on the tongue of every person we met there. I was standing in a place where every single thing around me is proof.

LATIF: Physical, tangible proof.

OMAR MULLICK: That a Muslim in this Islamic region had exercised for over a millennia the kind of tolerance and inclusion that allowed the Buddhas to survive until only very recently, and that these people had actually a more inclusive sense of who they were as Afghans in that region than we probably do now as Americans right now, which should be a sobering thought. These Buddhists were proof that we could all get along, and that's what they destroyed.

LATIF: After talking to Omar, I couldn't help but take the destruction of these statues personally. Like, this is a uniquely heinous act against all of us. It's everybody's loss. But the thing is, when I asked Shelby about all of this ...

LATIF: Did he blow up the Bamyan Buddha statues?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Absolutely not.

LATIF: Okay.

LATIF: ... she was uncharacteristically candid and blunt.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: It's offensive to him that someone would do that, and thus it's offensive that he'd be in any way implicated, especially given that he wasn't. Anyway ...

LATIF: After that conversation with Shelby, I started going back through the government documents to try to figure out where exactly this accusation came from. As far as I can tell, Abdul Latif never confessed to blowing them up. Instead, the government's evidence on this point—at least what's declassified—comes from the statements of two different Guantanamo detainees. Two. A Saudi guy and a Yemeni guy. The Saudi guy is named al-Jedani, and he said that he heard that Abu Taha, Nasir's alias, placed the explosives. That's it. That's all it says. Hearsay testimony, and not even implicating Nasir directly, just his alias. So I did a little research on this guy. Turns out at the time the Buddhas were destroyed, this guy wasn't even in Afghanistan. He was in Saudi Arabia. I also found an instance where a district court judge threw out al-Jedani's testimony in a similar case as, quote, "inherently unreliable," and as, quote, "amounting to no more than jailhouse gossip." So that's the Saudi guy who claimed Abdul Latif Nasir blew up the Buddhas.

LATIF: The other guy, a Yemeni, Yasim Muhammed Basardah, told interrogators that he heard from a fellow Yemeni who he met in Kandahar Prison that Nasir helped the Taliban destroy the ancient Bamyan Buddha statues. He said that Nasir placed mines in the statues and blew them up under orders of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. Again, secondhand information, but this time more specific. Basardah's name actually pops up in Abdul Latif's file probably more than anybody else. He describes specific moments where he had direct conversations with Abdul Latif Nasir. This is the same guy who said that Abdul Latif Nasir was one of the most important military advisers to Osama bin Laden. But it's tricky, because this guy Basardah ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Amy Goodman: This star witness, if you will.]

LATIF: ... is kind of famous. The US government's most prolific informant ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Who was captured ...]

LATIF: ... at Guantanamo Bay. Over the course of dozens of interviews, Basardah provided evidence against ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: At least 123 of his co-prisoners.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Amy Goodman: At least 123 other prisoners there.]

LATIF: 123 different detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: That's an extraordinary number.]

LATIF: And I found out through reporting by Del Quentin Wilber and David Lay that in exchange for all of this information, he was being given gifts. While most detainees at Gitmo were forced to live a pretty spartan life, this guy got his own private cell, a CD player, coffee, chewing tobacco, a truck magazine, other items—which may or may not be porn—and my favorite of all, McDonald's apple pies. All of this stuff, and the fact that he ratted on 123 people ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Of course it does raise the question whether he has not been exaggerating.]

LATIF: Fully it becomes apparent to even his interrogators that he's probably not telling the truth. For example, at one point, Basardah names a bunch of guys who were at a training camp with him during a specific time frame, but then a military official finds that not a single guy he named was even in Afghanistan at that time. You can actually see the doubt unfold over time in the documents themselves. These disclaimers start appearing next to his claims in detainee reports. I'm quoting here. "In every interview where Basardah was questioned on detainee, Basardah has changed his story." Or this one. "Research into the other detainees' timelines does not readily support Basardah's information." The most extreme of all, Basardah, quote, "Should not be relied upon. Trusting him strains the imagination." Okay, so oh for two. There is literally no other evidence that the US military has publicly acknowledged to argue that Abdul Latif Nasir was involved in the Bamyan Buddha bombings. That's it.

LATIF: Now I wanted desperately to talk to these two guys, to hear the story from their perspective, but I couldn't get in touch with either of them. So instead, I went back to that DoD document and looked for other names of guys who had said incriminating things about Abdul Latif. None of them could or would talk to me, except for this one guy.

MOHAMEDOU SLAHI: Yeah. My name is Mohamedou Slahi. I am a Mauritanian citizen, 47 years old, electrical engineer, information technology.

LATIF: Mohamedou Slahi was in Guantanamo Bay from 2002 to 2016.

LATIF: Really, I just have one question for you, and it may be a difficult one, which is that in reading Abdul Latif Nasir's DoD detainee assessment file, there was this quote, and I wanted to ask you about it. The quote is, "Detainee," which is Nasir, "admitted he attended the wedding in Kandahar of Osama bin Laden's son, Mohammed bin Laden. Mohamedou Ould Slahi," that's you, "corroborated detainee's participation in the February, 2001 ceremony." Did you say that? What do you make of that?

MOHAMEDOU SLAHI: [laughs] I absolutely have not the slightest idea. And this is possible that I told them that, even though this is the first time I ever heard that he attended this wedding. My understanding is that he was in Afghanistan much, much later than I, and we never crossed paths ever in Afghanistan. I left Afghanistan around March of 1992, and this wedding is February of 2001. How possibly would I know about a wedding that happens in February of 2001 when I was thousand of miles away? It was impossible for me to be there. Absolutely impossible.

LATIF: Why would you have said yes to that, if you did say yes to it?

MOHAMEDOU SLAHI: Because I went through so much pain and suffering, including sleep deprivation, multiple sexual assault, the threat against dear members of my family, including my mother, that I said, "I'm not going to make this anymore." Whatever they want me to say, I would say. For instance, like this wedding, these pictures they showed me a million times, but I kept saying, "I don't know about this event." And then after the torture, I told them, "Oh, of course it happened," and everything they ask me, I say yes. Could you talk to Basardah?

LATIF: Oh, Basardah. Basardah. Oh, I tried, I tried. I really tried. He's in Spain. From what I've heard is that there are so many people who are very angry at him, and potentially even want to kill him, he's sort of deep in hiding.

MOHAMEDOU SLAHI: To be honest to you, I don't think anyone wants to kill him.

LATIF: You think?

MOHAMEDOU SLAHI: Everybody knows that he's very disturbed mentally.

LATIF: Yeah.

MOHAMEDOU SLAHI: He tried to kill himself. You know that.

LATIF: No, I did not know that.

MOHAMEDOU SLAHI: Yeah, he tried to commit suicide.

LATIF: Oh, wow.

MOHAMEDOU SLAHI: Yeah, it was very hard. He was very young. They kept giving him cheeseburger, hamburger, pizza, and he kept just saying random stuff. And they know he was lying. Everybody knows he was lying. Everybody knows 252 was lying, including the interrogators. They laugh about him. They joke about him.

LATIF: Do you sort of—do you blame him, or do you think it's such a ...

MOHAMEDOU SLAHI: I will be very honest with you, Latif. At first I did blame him. You should say there is no loyalty if someone commits crime. But if someone didn't, then you should not lie about people. But then one day I was so angry when they told me that a detainee lied about me. When I was tortured, I did not blame them anymore because I was saying, "Wow. This is one way for Allah to show me that I am a weak person too, you know?"

LATIF: Yeah.

LATIF: Even though they wouldn't talk to me, I went through all the rest of the stories of the guys who gave incriminating information on Abdul Latif Nasir. Now there's a lot of classified evidence that I'm not allowed to see, but as far as I can tell, in all the leaked and declassified evidence about Abdul Latif Nasir, there is not a single named human source who seems reliable, stable and non-coerced. It makes you wonder, like, if this is the standard of evidence, if this is the actual evidence, I'm not nearly convinced he blew up the statues. I'm not convinced of anything.

[LISTENER: Howdy. This is Blake Crozier from Nashville, Tennessee. Radiolab 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.sloan.org.]

LATIF: This is The Other Latif. I'm Latif Nasser.

MAN: Three.

LATIF: The third major accusation that the US government holds against Abdul Latif Nasser is that he was allegedly a top military advisor to Osama bin Laden, and fought on his behalf at the Battle of Tora Bora.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, George W. Bush: Ladies and gentlemen, this is a difficult moment for America.]

LATIF: This is the big battle in Afghanistan that happened right after 9/11.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, George W. Bush: Two airplanes have crashed.]

LATIF: The towers had just fallen, and even the government agency that specialized in gathering intel was out for blood.

GARY BERNTSEN: My order was to kill him and cut his head off.

LATIF: Osama bin Laden's head?

GARY BERNTSEN: Yes. And bring his head back for the president.

LATIF: Whoa! Wow.

GARY BERNTSEN: Of course I wouldn't have cut his head off. We would've just killed him and buried him.

LATIF: Wow.

LATIF: This, by the way, is former senior CIA officer Gary Berntsen.

GARY BERNTSEN: I served in the Directorate of Operations for 24 years. Served in the US military before that.

LATIF: He was leading one of the first American teams in Afghanistan post-9/11.

LATIF: It's funny to me because, like, you're CIA, you're intelligence people.

GARY BERNTSEN: Correct.

LATIF: But the goal here wasn't to capture and to question and stuff. You were like, "We're gonna kill these guys."

GARY BERNTSEN: Yes.

LATIF: Yeah. Yeah. Was that weird? Did that feel like you were like, "Oh, I'm doing somebody else's job here," or how did that feel?

GARY BERNTSEN: No. Look, they had just killed 3,000 people in the United States. It didn't feel weird. It felt like revenge. That's what it felt like.

LATIF: Okay, so less than a month after 9/11, the United States enters Afghanistan, seizes the capital city from the Taliban government.

GARY BERNTSEN: Okay, so Kabul folds. Bin Laden fled the city, and he moved in a very, very large convoy.

LATIF: According to government documents, Abdul Latif Nasir followed close behind him. A day or two later, Berntsen gets a tip.

GARY BERNTSEN: We get a phone call, satellite phone.

LATIF: From a town 60 kilometers east of Kabul.

GARY BERNTSEN: We had one of our sources down there.

LATIF: And his source said, "I've got a visual on bin Laden and his people." They were headed for the mountain range of Spin Ghar, specifically to a cave complex called Tora Bora.

[NEWS CLIP: Tora Bora, high up in the white mountains, close to the border with Pakistan.]

[NEWS CLIP: Al-Qaeda's only remaining stronghold.]

LATIF: Gary was part of a skeleton crew of only eight guys, so to follow them ...

GARY BERNTSEN: All right.

LATIF: ... he needed to assemble a bigger army.

GARY BERNTSEN: I built a force of 2,000 men.

LATIF: That took about two days.

GARY BERNTSEN: Cost me about $4-million.

LATIF: [laughs] Okay.

GARY BERNTSEN: I had a big Rubbermaid trunk of $14 million with me. I made my communications officer sleep on top of it every night.

LATIF: Whoa! Whoa. Whoa. Okay. Wow.

GARY BERNTSEN: And so ...

SUZIE LECHTENBERG: Okay, Latif. Latif, I want to ...

LATIF: Let's keep going.

LATIF: They headed south.

GARY BERNTSEN: We got down to a schoolhouse at the foot of these mountains.

LATIF: It's a huge mountain range, and Berntsen knew that bin Laden was gathering his forces somewhere nearby.

LATIF: Can you describe the mountains a bit for me?

GARY BERNTSEN: They're covered sort of in, like pine trees. They're very sharp. They're steep.

LATIF: To find bin Laden ...

GARY BERNTSEN: We took four of my men.

LATIF: Sent them up into the mountains.

GARY BERNTSEN: With donkeys and 10 Afghan guards.

LATIF: They climbed for hours, heading toward a high point in the mountain range, hoping to be able to look down and get a view of bin Laden's people.

LATIF: And ...

GARY BERNTSEN: And so at that point ...

LATIF: Yeah. How did they even know where to look?

GARY BERNTSEN: Well, we were listening to radio coms.

LATIF: Oh really?

GARY BERNTSEN: Yes. One of our guys was a native Arabic speaker who'd been listening to bin Laden for 10 years, all of his intercepts. We had him moved out there, positioned, and he was with the team ...

LATIF: Wow.

GARY BERNTSEN: ... that was there. He was doing the intercept himself.

LATIF: Wow!

LATIF: Side note: I'd later learn that the Al-Qaeda folks knew the Americans could hear them, and they even warned bin Laden about it. His response, "Let them listen." Quote, "I want them to know where to come." Bin Laden was assuming that the Americans would parachute in, just like the Soviets had back in the '70s, and if he could lure them to Tora Bora, a landscape he knew and they didn't, he'd have the advantage. Well ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Berntsen: We're on top of them.]

GARY BERNTSEN: It worked.

LATIF: Gary's men find what they're looking for.

LATIF: What exactly are they seeing?

GARY BERNTSEN: Down below, there's a valley. And in that valley, there was a single road up into this position. They see bin Laden had set up camp there.

LATIF: Vehicles, tents, weapons.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Berntsen: He's down below us. He's got roughly 800 to 1,000.]

GARY BERNTSEN: I want every one of them extinguished, because I saw every one of them as a potential pilot that could fly a plane into a skyscraper.]

LATIF: According to government documents, Abdul Latif Nasir was one of these men.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Berntsen: We request permission to initiate combat and start calling in airstrikes.]

GARY BERNTSEN: They said, "Of course. Immediately."

LATIF: They radio for the planes.

GARY BERNTSEN: They come in, they circle over, they get lined up.

LATIF: And Gary's men in the mountain break out this glorified laser pointer called a SOFLAM.

GARY BERNTSEN: Unbelievable technology.

LATIF: They turn it on.

GARY BERNTSEN: Paint the targets.

LATIF: Aim this visible beam of infrared light at a very specific point in the camp below them, like the windshield of a truck.

GARY BERNTSEN: Incredible accuracy with these devices.

LATIF: The airplane would come in.

GARY BERNTSEN: Release ordinance. That ordinance would find the light.

LATIF: Lock on to the invisible beam.

GARY BERNTSEN: And then ride the light right into the target. I mean, they could literally fly very, very large bombs right in the window of your house.

[NEWS CLIP: ABC's Dan Harris reports now from the front line.]

[NEWS CLIP: At Tora Bora today, US fighter planes and B-52s dropped their payloads.]

GARY BERNTSEN: It was very, very effective.

[NEWS CLIP: Well over 400 bombs have been dropped in the area on Thursday and Friday alone.]

GARY BERNTSEN: And after 56 hours of this beating, they had their armor and their vehicles and their trucks and their communications destroyed. They then crawled up into the mountains of Tora Bora right behind them.

LATIF: This whole time, Berntsen's men are able to hear Al-Qaeda communicating with each other over the radio.

GARY BERNTSEN: We actually listened to bin Laden apologize to all of his people too, as all this was going on.

LATIF: What'd he say?

GARY BERNTSEN: He told them he was sorry that he had led them into there, that they all needed to fight and sacrifice for the prophet. He prayed with them on the radio.

LATIF: Wow. Wow!

LATIF: At some point things were looking so bad that Osama bin Laden wrote his will. Quote, "Allah bears witness that the love of jihad and death in the cause of Allah has dominated my life, and the verses of the sword permeated every cell in my heart."

GARY BERNTSEN: And then we came and we threw a BLU-82 at them, which was a 16,000 pound device was dropped in there.

LATIF: What is that? What does that mean?

GARY BERNTSEN: It's like the size of a Volkswagen. They used those in Vietnam to make airfields out of the jungle.

LATIF: Eventually, the Americans discovered that this bomb not only collapsed caves all along the mountain, but according to captured Al-Qaeda fighters, it literally vaporized men deep in the caves.

GARY BERNTSEN: We thought we killed him. I'll be honest with you. I thought I had him. I thought he was dead, but he crawled out of there. And so, you know, three or four months later when I'm back in the United States, or five months later, he comes on TV and there's a yellow-colored video that he did where he's announcing that he's alive. You could've knocked me over with a feather at that point. I thought he was done.

LATIF: A few days later, Abdul Latif Nasir was found in a village two days' hike from Tora Bora on the way to the Pakistani border and was turned over to the Northern Alliance. He had on him an AK-47 and $800 US. Of course, I asked Shelby what happened.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Hmm.

LATIF: No surprise ...

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Unfortunately, that's not something I can answer, because it's not unclassified, but the government likes to characterize it as if you were anywhere near Tora Bora, never mind walking in one direction or another, you were definitely in the caves with Osama bin Laden that day, helping him in some capacity. And the truth of the matter is the region of Tora Bora and the escape routes used by civilian women, children, you name it, is an enormous region.

LATIF: Right.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: And is, as far as those in the area were concerned, one of the only ways to survive the bombing campaign.

LATIF: As far as his capture, Shelby pointed to the bounty flyers than then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had talked about at the time.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Donald Rumsfeld: We have large rewards out.]

LATIF: Targeting any bearded or Arab-looking men.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Donald Rumsfeld: We have leaflets that are dropping like snowflakes in December in Chicago.]

LATIF: How much are these bounties?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: It ranges up to $3,000 per person, which of course that was actually a lot of money.

LATIF: Okay, but—okay, so ...

SUZIE: Where was he? Was he, like, in a house?

LATIF: In a car? Yeah. It's like, is there any, like, even ...

SUZIE: And who was the guy that, like, grabbed him?

LATIF: Yeah.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Yeah. Unfortunately, those are the details that we've gone over in classified proceedings and don't have unclassified.

LATIF: Okay, so what we can know was that he was in Tora Bora. So what you're saying is he was in Tora Bora, he was fleeing, and then he was apprehended by somebody and then sold for a bounty to the American government? That's all true?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Exactly. Yeah.

LATIF: And can't get any—There's no more specificity than that, right?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Right.

LATIF: I ran some of those general ideas by Berntsen to see if he thought they were plausible.

GARY BERNTSEN: Let me explain something to you.

LATIF: Okay.

GARY BERNTSEN: Let me explain something to you right now.

LATIF: Sure. Sure.

GARY BERNTSEN: If you were not a jihadist, you wouldn't have gone south.

LATIF: Meaning you wouldn't have gone to Tora Bora at all.

GARY BERNTSEN: You'd have just stayed on the road, Highway 1, for another hour and a half and walked into Pakistan. Okay?

LATIF: Right.

LATIF: Gary says if he was just a normal person trying to escape ...

GARY BERNTSEN: It was easy to take a bloody bus. Okay? He could've got on a bus in Jalalabad. He could've bloody walked. He chose to go south with bin Laden. Why? Because he's a member of Al-Qaeda, and the force is trying to stay together. They're trying to defend themselves and fight together. They have critical mass that way.

LATIF: Okay. All right. Yeah. Well, okay, so if I'm playing devil's advocate, I mean, there are people who run towards battle zones or front lines. who are—I mean, the example in my head is like a medic or someone, like someone who actually thinks they could—if he was an aid worker theoretically, and he was wanting ...

GARY BERNTSEN: Let me explain something.

LATIF: Yeah. Sure.

GARY BERNTSEN: They don't know there's a battle going on. They're running south to stay together. There's no army. They don't see a battle coming. Not until the bombs start dropping.

LATIF: Right.

GARY BERNTSEN: His story falls apart. It's stupid.

LATIF: At this point I felt stuck. Liie, I could see all the sides. I could see Shelby's account, and honestly I wanted to believe that account. Like I said, the desire to help, that made sense to me. I'd felt it. At the same time, as much as I didn't want to admit it, Gary's skepticism also made sense to me. Why was this guy there to begin with, if not to fight? And through it all I just felt haunted by this image, this image of this pinpoint, laser-guided bomb juxtaposed against this just fog bank, this informational haze that is actually justifying that very bombing. Anyways, I was sitting in that haze, not knowing what to think, until ...

LATIF: I'm just kind of champing at the bit to talk to you.

JON LEE ANDERSON: [laughs] Okay. That's fine.

LATIF: ... I met this guy.

JON LEE ANDERSON: My name is Jon Lee Anderson. I'm a reporter with the New Yorker. I covered the war in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11.

LATIF: Jon Lee is one of the few people who knows firsthand what happened to Abdul Latif Nasir next and is allowed to tell me about it.

JON LEE ANDERSON: So this is—so it's December, 2001. I'd been in country since September.

LATIF: He'd been there on the mountainside at Tora Bora, watching the bombs fall.

JON LEE ANDERSON: It was a very strange and surreal scene where you could sort of make people out on the scree and the distant glaciers of the mountains. There were explosions.

LATIF: Wow.

JON LEE ANDERSON: But the journalists were kept back, by and large, from the fighting.

LATIF: And as the war was winding down, Jon Lee found himself at a Northern Alliance prison camp with a rare opportunity to interview two Al-Qaeda prisoners.

JON LEE ANDERSON: Nobody at that moment had, to my knowledge, interviewed someone who said they were from Al-Qaeda.

LATIF: The day he went to visit the prisoners was bright and cold.

JON LEE ANDERSON: We were led into the outer gates of the prison. It was a very old prison, and there was this kind of dusty outer garden. And then there was an intersection with buildings that were in lockdown. Few days, it may have been the day or two before, the news spread of several Al-Qaeda prisoners that were being taken to Pakistan inside a vehicle, and they overpowered their guards, murdered them, and had escaped.

LATIF: Oh wow!

JON LEE ANDERSON: So the atmosphere was quite murderous.

LATIF: Jon, his translator, a few others were brought into the outer courtyard of the prison. They were told the prisoners would be shackled.

JON LEE ANDERSON: And there they were.

LATIF: No restraints. Standing there.

JON LEE ANDERSON: It was these two prisoners.

LATIF: Some of the guards stood up and formed a circle around Jon Lee and the two men.

JON LEE ANDERSON: And, you know, I didn't trust the circumstance. I didn't trust the guards to be fully on their game. And I also had to contend with Jack Idema, the American, the mercenary, because he was with ...

LATIF: Because he was with you.

JON LEE ANDERSON: He was with me. He was very belligerent.

LATIF: As a journalist in Afghanistan, it was necessary to have protection. And Jon Lee Anderson's protection at this time happened to be this infamous American bounty hunter.

[NEWS CLIP: Jack Idema, a self-styled American soldier of fortune in Afghanistan.]

LATIF: This was a guy who was eventually arrested by the Afghan government for running his own prison.

[NEWS CLIP: A private prison in his house where he tortured people.]

LATIF: So Jon Lee would be trying to ask questions to the prisoners.

JON LEE ANDERSON: Meanwhile, I had Jack, who would periodically interrupt me and say bellicose things to them, you know?

LATIF: He'd shout about September 11. Tell them America was coming to get them.

JON LEE ANDERSON: I had to hold him back and tell him to calm down a few times. But in any case the game was on. We just started talking.

LATIF: One of the guys was in his 20s, short, stocky, big black beard. He was from Kuwait.

JON LEE ANDERSON: He was very watchful of me. You know, he had a story about being there to build water—you know, to do charity on behalf of the Muslim people. And I found him quite unsettling, because he kept edging towards me. And by the end of the encounter we'd moved several feet.

LATIF: Huh. That's kind of menacing!

JON LEE ANDERSON: Yeah. The other fellow, darker, thinner. As I recall he had a scraggly beard.

LATIF: He wore a gray pakol porkpie cap, a camouflage jacket, US combat boots.

JON LEE ANDERSON: But where Faiz the Kuwaiti was very vigilant and watchful, he was kind of in his own head. He had just a very neutral, matter of fact, fatalistic, I guess, presence.

LATIF: This guy was from Casablanca, Morocco. His name?

JON LEE ANDERSON: Was Nasir Abdul Latif.

LATIF: Abdul Latif Nasir.

JON LEE ANDERSON: He began by telling me ...

LATIF: Before I tell you what Abdul Latif actually said to Jon Lee Anderson, I gotta preface it by saying how extraordinary this interview is. Jon Lee asks basically every question I would've asked had I been there that day. And he recorded the answers and published them soon after, without ever having to get anything declassified by the US government or spun by a defense attorney. As a journalist interested in this guy's story, it's a pretty remarkable, and I would argue trustworthy snapshot, at a pivotal moment in his story, potentially even a moment before his testimony was tainted by the kind of torture he would later get at Guantanamo.

JON LEE ANDERSON: He did not speak any English. He began by telling me that he was Moroccan, he had been here and there. He'd somehow ended up in Afghanistan because he was attracted by its strict Islamic rule and because there Mawlawi, there were Islamic scholars there, but that he hadn't gone there to fight, but then when the war had come he'd found himself essentially caught up in it.

LATIF: As an aside I should say this is pretty much Shelby's story of what Abdul Latif was doing in Afghanistan, that he was there studying, praying, helping people.

JON LEE ANDERSON: And so I said, "Well, so what were the circumstances when you were caught? By then were you carrying a gun?" And he said, candidly, "Yes, I was." At a certain point, it was as if he had decided to just tell the truth. He just said, you know, "By the time the Americans came, I wanted to fight them, and I was fighting for jihad." And that when the country was attacked he happily and fullheartedly, you know, fought against the foreign invaders. I felt that I was at least talking to someone who had the courage or the courtesy to be honest.

LATIF: Was he saying this kind of stuff proudly?

JON LEE ANDERSON: He was very matter of fact. I remember—I seem to recall him just standing there and being not exactly absent. He had, I don't want to say a kind of faraway look in his eye, but I had the impression I was with a kind of true believer. Latif was a man whose notions of the jihad came from the book. And I didn't feel that he looked at me with hatred. So it was an interesting moment. I felt that he was being honest and therefore I appreciated it.

LATIF: Huh.

LATIF: Jon Lee Anderson wrote about this encounter in his book, The Lion's Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan. I asked him to read parts of that book, and this is how that meeting with Abdul Latif Nasir came to an end.

JON LEE ANDERSON: "I asked if either of them had seen Osama bin Laden. Faiz Mohammed Ahmed said no, but Nasir Abdul Latif said that he had. 'He was in Tora Bora for a long time, and he was receiving a lot of visitors. Osama bin Laden told us, 'Believe in us. Believe in Allah. Believe in me and this jihad. We will win in the end.' Nasir Abdul Latif stared at me directly with his pale brown eyes. 'We did not come here to fight Afghans. We came here to fight Americans, and we will keep fighting until we destroy them totally.'"

LATIF: Fuck!

LATIF: It's pretty bad. Probably the most dependable evidence I've come across, and it's also the most damning evidence I've come across.

LATIF: There is this New Yorker journalist Jon Lee Anderson.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Ah.

LATIF: Do you know what I'm talking about here?

LATIF: When I read Jon Lee's passage to Shelby, "We did not come here to fight Afghans. We came here to fight Americans, and we will keep fighting until we destroy them totally."

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: I read that, yeah. The truth is I've not discussed the existence of the interview or its publication in a book with Abdul Latif, so I suppose I can't comment on that.

LATIF: She said she couldn't comment, of course. but ...

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Well to be honest, I suppose I can tell you what I thought of it when I first read it. It's scary as hell.

LATIF: Yeah, pretty scary.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Yeah, especially the description of his eyes.

LATIF: And she says that is not the guy she knows and has been representing for four years.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Nah. I don't really see that. I don't really see staring at someone like that and saying that in such a menacing manner. Even though I have no reason to doubt the veracity of the accounting of what was said, I do tend to doubt information that was taken in the context of, so for example if Abdul Latif the day prior were beaten by Afghan forces. And to be honest ...

LATIF: She basically said you'd be an idiot to trust anything that anyone said in the context of that prison. Consider his circumstances. He was most likely being tortured by Northern Alliance soldiers who were paid like mercenaries to deliver Al-Qaeda soldiers to Americans, and their basic MO was to pick people up, sometimes at random, and torture them until they admitted to be aligned with Osama bin Laden. The only way to stop the torture? Admit guilt. The soldiers were standing right there. If he didn't say what he said, what do you think would've happened? That made sense to me, until I thought about that other guy right next to him who said he was doing charity work. Why didn't that guy feel the same pressure? But then I heard another angle on this from the journalist Cathy Scott-Clark. She said, "Let's just take him at his word. Presume he meant everything that he said. Put yourself in his combat boots and imagine why he might've felt that way."

CATHY SCOTT-CLARK: I mean, he has seen many days of pounding with JDAMs and huge aerial bombardment on that mountain, which decimated the troops fighting up there. I mean, I've interviewed people who have been released from Guantanamo, including a doctor, and he was forced to do amputations and all sorts of horrible operations without any anesthetic, just using a knife. So obviously if Nasir was there and witnessed all of that, and also what you have to realize by that stage is that there have been some pretty horrific massacres of innocent wives and children of Al-Qaeda operatives. A group of women and children from Al-Qaeda families were fleeing from Kandahar to a place called Panjwai, which is southwest of Kandahar. They were in a kind of convoy of vehicles, and two American helicopters followed them and all these women and children got blown to bits.

LATIF: Whoa.

LATIF: As for Abdul Latif himself, according to government documents, he flees the fighting. And as he does, this is actually from the US government account, US helicopters come and shoot 35 of the guys he's running away with as they're running away—including one of his close friends. That was about a week before this interview. So if that's all true, makes total sense he would hate America, and say so. But here's the thing that Americans should be able to get behind more than anyone from any other country. You're allowed to say you hate America. It's not a crime to say things. It's a crime to do things. In the interview with Jon Lee Anderson, he didn't say that he did anything specific or criminal. The US combat boots he was wearing, no Americans died at Tora Bora. Supposedly you can pick those up at any market. Soon after this jailhouse interview, Abdul Latif Nasir would be transferred to American custody, and that precise moment is when his story becomes our story.

LATIF: Independent of what you think he did or didn't do, he got sent to a place where he got treated as if he did it all. So we have to ask, as Americans, does what he did to us, whatever that is, justify what we ended up doing to him? That's where we're headed next. Guantanamo Bay.

LATIF: This episode was produced by Annie McEwen with Sarah Qari, Suzie Lechtenberg and me, Latif Nasser. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly and Margot Williams. Editing by Jad Abumrad and Soren Wheeler. We had help from Neel Dinesha, Audrey Quinn and Kelly Prime. Original music by Jad Abumrad, Alex Overington, Annie McEwen and Amino Belyamani. Tune in next week when we go to the upside down.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Joanna, and I'm calling from the beautiful Lubeck in Germany. Radiolab is created by Jad Abumrad and with Robert Krulwich and produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Suzie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel Habte, Tracie Hunte, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Sarah Qari, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Shima Oliaee, W. Harry Fortuna, Sarah Sandbach, Malissa O'Donnell, Tad Davis, and Russell Gragg. Our fact-checker is Michelle Harris.]

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