[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, it's Jad. Today we're gonna kick off something really special: a Radiolab series that has been years in the making. We have spent the last three years pouring over leaked government documents, traveling around the world, conducting over 60 interviews, piecing together the story of one man's life. His story and the series is gonna unfold over six episodes. You'll have to listen in order to really follow along. I think it's gonna keep you on the edge of your seat. We're really excited about this. So without further ado, here's producer, Latif Nasser with a series he's calling "The Other Latif."

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LATIF NASSER: There's a website called HowManyOfMe.com. At the top of the page it says, "There are 329,470,115 people in the United States. How many have your name?" It's a pretty simple website. It uses census data to see how common your name is. You should do it. It's fun. When I type in my name, first name, Latif, L-A-T-I-F, last name Nasser, N-A-S-S-E-R, what it says is there are one or fewer people in the United States named Latif Nasser. One or fewer. I'm the one. How could there be fewer? Anyway, being the only Latif Nasser in the United States, that's not a surprise to me. I've never met anyone with my name before. Not in high school, college, grad school, not as a journalist where I meet new people almost every day. Not even in my trips abroad to Muslim countries, where you'd think it would be a more common name. And to be totally honest, I kind of liked it that way. I was special. I was one of a kind. Until I wasn't.

LATIF: I found another one. And this is the story about that guy, the other Latif Nasir. The one that the census does not count. The one that if you write him a letter—and I have many times—it'll just come right back 'Return to Sender.' The one that doesn't have a passport, a driver's license, a social security number, or a phone number for that matter. I've come to think of him as a black hole in a black hole. And that's because the other Latif Nasir is detainee 244 at Guantanamo Bay.

LATIF: I'm Latif Nasser.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: He would've killed me.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: You have to take everything the CIA says with a pinch of salt.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: People who've committed crimes tend to lie about it.]

LATIF: And this ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: That's why he's still at Gitmo.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Opened up a Pandora's box of horrific things about American justice.]

LATIF: ... is "The Other Latif."

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Would he have cut your head off on a video if he'd have been instructed?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Oh gosh.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Should've been home a long time ago.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: He's innocent!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: That might be the stupidest thing I've ever heard someone say.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I like my brother. You are my brother.]

LATIF: Episode one, "My Namesake."

LATIF: The whole thing started three years ago. I was at work doing what I do best—procrastinating. I was scrolling through Twitter when I saw something in my feed from a not-for-profit law firm. It said, "Read our urgent letter to @POTUS seeking intervention for Abdul Latif Nasir." At first I thought this sounds crazy. I thought they were talking about me. My name is Latif Nasser not Abdul Latif Nasir, but Abdul is one of my middle names. And for a while when I was in college, for reasons I'll explain later, I went by that exact name, Abdul Latif Nasser. But anyway, the tweet. It wasn't about me, it was about another guy, and someone was apparently appealing on his behalf to the President of the United States, at the time Barack Obama.

LATIF: The tweet only had three retweets and one like. I clicked on the link and read the letter. This other Latif Nasir was an inmate at the most notorious prison in the world. I don't think I even knew for sure that Guantanamo was still open, or at least I hadn't thought about it in years, but all of a sudden there was a guy there with my name. I typed his name into Google to see what would come up. It wasn't very much. I learned that he was from Morocco, which struck me because I had done an exchange term there in university. But then most important of all, I found something on the New York Times website called The Guantanamo Docket. It has profiles of every single guy at Guantanamo.

LATIF: I pulled up his, and it had a mugshot photo of a guy wearing a khaki prison jumpsuit, bald, furrowed brow, big unkempt beard. At the top it said he was 51 years old, but that he'd already been at Guantanamo for 15 of those years—almost a third of his life. Then I found a Department of Defense report called a detainee assessment from 2008. It's 15 pages, and it's got the word 'SECRET' in all caps typed at the top and bottom of every page. It was WikiLeaked out. It basically has a list of all the horrible things the US government thinks this guy did.

LATIF: According to the government, he was a top explosives expert for Al-Qaeda. He helped blow up the famous Bamiyan Buddha statues.

[NEWS CLIP: Two-thousand-year-old stone Buddhas carved into cliffs, cultural wonders of the world.]

LATIF: He was directly associated with Osama bin Laden before and after 9/11. "One of the most important military advisers to Osama bin Laden." He allegedly commanded troops against US and coalition forces on the front lines of the battle of Tora Bora.

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

LATIF: If you remember, that's the battle where Osama bin Laden got away. This guy, the other Latif, was supposedly caught trying to escape to Pakistan, surrounded by other Al-Qaeda fighters and holding an AK-47. Now at Gitmo, things don't get any better. According to this document, he's had 56 reports of disciplinary infractions. He was "noncompliant and hostile to the guard force and staff," and it says if he got out, he would pose a—all caps, "HIGH RISK TO THE US, ITS INTERESTS AND ITS ALLIES."

LATIF: When I read all this, I thought, "Oh my God, this guy's a monster!" I needed to know more, so I put in a call to the DOD, but they wouldn't talk about him. Then I put in a call to his lawyer, didn't get a response. And because there was literally nothing else about this guy online, I figured that was the end of it, but then the lawyer called me back.

LATIF: Okay, now talk.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Okay. Can you hear me?

LATIF: Oh man, fine—this is great. I feel like we—yeah.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Hang on one sec.

LATIF: And my producer Suzie Lechtenberg set us up in the studio.

SUZIE LECHTENBERG: Shelby's having a hard time hearing you.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Sorry.

LATIF: Oh, okay.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Sorry.

LATIF: La la la la la la la la. Any better? La la la la la la la.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Oh, that's fine. Good.

LATIF: Better, better, better, better, better, better, better. Better.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: That is better.

LATIF: Is this better?

LATIF: She'd actually just been chatting with Abdul Latif himself that morning.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: I was like, "Dude, I gotta get off the phone. I'm going to this interview about you."

LATIF: From her apartment in Queens.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Yeah. I told him that you pronounce your names slightly differently, that I was going to butcher it.

LATIF: Anyway. Her name ...

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: My name is Shelby Sullivan-Bennis.

LATIF: ... is Shelby.

LATIF: Okay. Can you first just tell me what is his name?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Abdul Latif Nasir.

LATIF: When you first got an email from me, did you notice the names were the same, or did it take you a while to notice that?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: I did notice. In fact, that it first occurred to me that you are a relative, which is really the only reason I answered.

LATIF: Oh, wow! Oh, of course.

LATIF: She's in her early 30s, from Rhode Island.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Middle class white.

LATIF: She never really planned to be a Gitmo lawyer.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: I think actually on some elementary school yearbook, I had written 'dancer.'

LATIF: But she wanted to help people, which is what led her to study law. And it was in her third year apprenticing at a law clinic that luck intervened. She was sitting around a table with all the other law students ...

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: We kind of went around the table and pulled numbers out of a hat, and I wound up with Guantanamo. I was like, "What?"

LATIF: Not really what she was expecting.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: I think I was a little confused.

LATIF: But the more she learned about Guantanamo Bay and the people still held there, the more she felt like this is what she should be doing.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: They were the people that others were less willing to defend. It was harder to get behind them and that made me want to do so.

LATIF: How many clients do you have there?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: I have seven.

LATIF: Oh wow! Well, so back to the other Latif, back to our guy. Like, when did you first hear about him, hear his name for the first time?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Hmm. The first time I heard the name Abdul Latif Nasir was 2016.

LATIF: Shelby was 29 years old, working at the law firm Reprieve. When one day she received a letter.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: A handwritten communication from Abdul Latif.

LATIF: What was his handwriting like?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: It was good. It was better than mine.

LATIF: He had gotten her name from one of the other detainees, and send her the first letter he had sent to a lawyer in almost a decade. It was in English, which he'd taught himself while he was there, and it was a plea for help. After being at Guantanamo for 14 years, 14 years without a trial, he was now up for his first sort of Gitmo parole hearing. He needed a lawyer and fast, because this hearing ...

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Is less than two months away.

LATIF: And, like, were you getting requests like this all the time, or was this a very rare or unusual thing?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Today the answer would be that I get them all the time, then that was my first.

LATIF: Hmm. So what happened from there? Like, what did you have to do or ...

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: I learned the bare details of his case.

LATIF: you know, blowing up Buddha statues, key Osama adviser, Tora Bora.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: And then I went to go meet him.

LATIF: To get to Gitmo, first ...

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Take a regular flight to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

LATIF: Then a second flight.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: An airline that has a contract with the government.

LATIF: Down to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Plane lands. Everyone's in military garb, and they all have guns. You get on a bus, hop on a ferry.

LATIF: Take the ferry to the other side of the bay.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Disembark and look around for your minder—essentially your military babysitter. They need to bring you into the detention camp.

LATIF: Get you a proper badge. Go through all your stuff.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: All of your client notes.

LATIF: Your pens one by one.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Make sure that the paper you're bringing in has no staples in it, which means it has to be detached from your notebook.

LATIF: Finally, they take you to a meeting room.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: They have them essentially in—it's kind of like an array of cement huts, none of which have windows.

LATIF: One of the few things Shelby had heard about this guy was that years ago he had preferred not to be represented by a female lawyer.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: So ...

LATIF: She finds herself thinking ...

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: I hope he knows I'm a woman. [laughs]

LATIF: Inside the hut ...

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: It's essentially a cement room. It's got the bed. It has the very basic framing of a toilet. Plastic table with metal legs.

LATIF: On one side of the table there's a chair for her.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: And on the other side is seated a man in a white prayer cap, a baggy white shirt, a relatively short gray beard, close shaven head, grayish-brown eyes. I saw a healthy looking older gentleman with one ankle cuff chained to the floor. And he stood up and extended his hand and held mine and said, "Thank you, Shelby, for coming." I think he didn't expect me to show up.

LATIF: Was there any, like, small talk? Or what—was it like, "We got two months, we gotta get down to business. Like, here we go?"

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: The latter.

LATIF: What she soon learned, she told me, was that document I read was totally false.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: He did not take up arms against the Northern Alliance. Definitely does not have extremist sentiment. He didn't support what happened on 9/11.

LATIF: He was not a member of Al-Qaeda.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Did not have a relationship with Osama bin Laden.

LATIF: He did not blow up those statues.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Was not on the front lines at Tora Bora.

LATIF: The reason he went to Afghanistan was to help his fellow Muslims.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: And he found himself under fire along, with a slew of children and families seeking shelter from the bombings.

LATIF: He got caught by Afghan forces, and Shelby believes sold to the Americans for a bounty. So according to Shelby, Abdul Latif is an innocent man.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Detained without charge or trial for the last 15 years.

LATIF: Actually now it's been 18 years.

LATIF: Was Abdul Latif Nasir ever tortured?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Absolutely.

LATIF: Hearing Shelby say all of this was disorienting. I remembered all those high-profile news stories of guys locked away in Guantanamo who are probably innocent.

[NEWS CLIP: Detained at Guantanamo for two years without charges.]

LATIF: Like those young British guys, the Tipton Three.

[NEWS CLIP: The Tipton Three, reportedly detained on their way to a wedding in Pakistan.]

LATIF: All of this felt weirdly plausible. But then I'm like, of course he and his defense attorney say he's innocent. What else are they gonna say? The fact that I shared this guy's name and religious background made it even more confusing. As a Muslim to see an innocent Muslim man profiled, held, tortured in this way makes me outraged, but I'm just as outraged at the zealots who belong to groups like Al-Qaeda, who often target moderate Muslims in the name of our shared faith. So anyhow, I just felt like I couldn't put myself down in one spot. You have these two totally contradictory stories of this guy with my name. One was the blackest black, the other was the whitest white, no hint of gray in between. There was no trial, no easy way of investigating the evidence on either side. I can't talk to him directly because no journalist has ever interviewed a current Gitmo detainee. So it was like he was trapped in a box, both innocent and guilty at the same time. But this hearing could change all of that.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barack Obama: Good morning everybody.]

LATIF: It's called the Periodic Review Board hearing or PRB.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barack Obama: Today the department is submitting to Congress our plan for finally closing the facility at Guantanamo once and for all.]

LATIF: These hearings were part of Obama's original plan to close Gitmo back in 2011.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barack Obama: We'll accelerate the periodic reviews of remaining detainees to determine whether their continued detention is necessary.]

LATIF: The whole point of these things is trying to answer one question, which is: are you a threat ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barack Obama: A continuing a significant threat.]

LATIF: ... from now on? So this is very future focused.

LATIF: Much less like a trial and much more like a parole hearing.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Absolutely.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barack Obama: Let's go ahead and get this thing done. Thanks very much everyone.]

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: But ...

LATIF: There's a catch, because Shelby says PRB hearings are like these maddening paradoxical puzzles. These boards want to hear that you're no longer a threat. Part of that is that they want to hear that you're sorry, and they want to hear exactly what you're sorry for.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: And not only were you expected to admit and repent, but do so with specificity.

LATIF: For example, if they think you were a member of Al-Qaeda, they want to hear you regret and apologize for being a member of Al-Qaeda. That's the only way you're gonna get out.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: It's plead guilty to this crime or stay in jail forever. I have had clients ask me if they should admit to doing something that they didn't do, and of course I can't counsel you to lie. But I'm not going to lie to you and say that if you deny three of these three paragraphs that you have any shot at winning because you don't.

LATIF: Which makes you think, okay, easy, right? Just apologize without meaning it. He can get out. Here's the catch with that. Imagine the other Latif is innocent, but he does that. He confesses and says, "Yes, I was Osama bin Laden's top military advisor," and somebody writes that down. If he fake apologizes and doesn't get out, that fake apology actually counts as a confession, a non-torture confession, which then if he ever does get a fair trial, could count as evidence against him.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: So many statements you make, they're gravely dangerous.

LATIF: Had you been to PRBs before, or was this your first PRB?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: It was my first PRB.

LATIF: Oh wow.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Yeah. And I must have called a dozen mentors, former professors, people I had never met before but had come on good recommendation as to what they thought. But there was controversy at the time and disagreement as to what to do.

LATIF: So Shelby laid out the situation for Abdul Latif. There are risks to lying and there are risks to telling the truth.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: I told him that this was a dangerous hearing, and it is your decision entirely.

LATIF: On June 7, 2016 at 09:06 hours, she and Abdul Latif Nasir sit at a table in a small overly air conditioned conference-type room in Guantanamo Bay.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: He's at the head of the table so to say, in kind of like a plush chair.

LATIF: On the wall ...

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: There's one-way glass.

LATIF: And next to it was a video teleconference screen.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: VTC. And you see that word kind of like pop up as though you're about to watch a show, or have some sort of like CEO convo.

LATIF: This VTC connects them through over 800 miles of ...

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Undersea cables.

LATIF: ... to another air conditioned conference-type room in an undisclosed location in the Washington, DC, area.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Good morning. This board is convened to determine whether to continue ...]

LATIF: This room also has a table.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: A very similar looking table, but maybe more mahogany.

LATIF: And around it sits six people.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: The six members of the Periodic Review Board.

LATIF: And even though Shelby can see them—their eyes, their hair, their glasses ...

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: They're all—I mean, I would say anywhere between 35 and 50.

LATIF: ... she's not allowed to know their identities.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: No, no.

LATIF: They represent six of the most powerful agencies of the American government.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: You've got DOS, DOD, Joint Chiefs of Staff.

LATIF: Department of Justice.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Homeland Security.

LATIF: And National Intelligence. These are career civil servants, insulated from politics, theoretically nonpartisan. Also importantly, these folks have the highest security clearances. And in front of each of them is a folder with a summary of all of the classified information about Abdul Latif Nasir that the American government has. Without a doubt, more information about him than I've dug up in three years of reporting. Now because I can't access most of his PRB record, I don't know the full deets of what happened. But here's what I do know. I know that five minutes in at 09:11 hours there were technical difficulties to the video teleconference. 09:14 hours, the video teleconference is reconnected. I know that Abdul Latif Nasir's alleged crimes were read out, so Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Tora Bora and so on. Then Shelby's opening statement in which she says that Abdul Latif Nasir has a supportive family back in Morocco who's ready to receive him. He has a home and a job waiting for him. Eventually, it's his turn to speak.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: He was encouraged to kind of articulate like a hello, welcome message.

LATIF: Was he nervous? Did he look nervous?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Yeah.

LATIF: He sits quietly, his hands folded in his lap. He's wearing a loose white t-shirt, one that another detainee had loaned to him for this hearing, and a white prayer cap. He's very still. He leans toward the mic and says a simple statement.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Something along the lines of, "I appreciate the opportunity to be heard here today and I would like to answer any questions that you have." Or something like that. And he spoke really confidently.

LATIF: But the board looked confused.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: There was like a scramble and like a, "Huh?" And someone on the other side grabbed their mic and was like, "Could he say it again? We can't hear him."

LATIF: Shelby pushes the microphone closer to Abdul Latif's mouth. He tries again. "I appreciate the opportunity to be heard."

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: "Nope, still can't hear him."

LATIF: At this point, both he and Shelby are getting a little anxious.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: I basically told him to, like. shout.

LATIF: "I appreciate the opportunity to be heard today!" And then ironically ...

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Because of his volume, they had questions about his demeanor.

LATIF: Oh, my God.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: And I'm ready to shoot myself in the head. My guy's too quiet, and then I tell him to be louder. And then it seems that maybe he was too loud. And I'm not quite sure who it came from, but I was asked whether he was upset on some level.

LATIF: And Shelby's like, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no."

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: We asked him to raise his voice because you guys couldn't hear. Remember that? Like ...

LATIF: There's a whole conversation about it, and Shelby's responding calmly, but in her head she's like ...

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Oh my God! Like. horrifying.

LATIF: And then the Q&A, the part where the panel basically grills Abdul Latif Nasir. Asked him a million questions to see whether he's still a threat.

LATIF: Yeah, so what do you guys decide that he's gonna say?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: We go through an honest history, and explain different decisions made over the course of his life. And I have ...

LATIF: Of his true story.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Yeah. Yeah.

LATIF: Hmm. Did he, like, admit to anything? Did he, like, say that he regretted anything?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: So I can't say what he said.

LATIF: Right.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Yeah.

LATIF: Did he apologize for anything? Can you say that?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: I can't.

LATIF: The whole hearing takes a couple of hours. After they cut the video teleconference line, the panel in DC has its own meeting to discuss Abdul Latif Nasir's case. On the one hand, they know that keeping him in prison is a burden on the United States—financially, legally, in terms of our international reputation. But on the other hand, they know that letting him go means that if he ever commits a crime, ever threatens or harms an American anywhere in the world, it'll be on them. The decision to release a guy from Guantanamo has to be unanimous. All six members of the board have to agree. After the hearing ends, they tell Shelby you'll hear back from us in a month. The result after the break.

[LISTENER: Hello, this is Erin Scornya, currently located in Arlington, Texas. 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 Radiolab's "The Other Latif." I'm Latif Nasser. A little more than a month after Abdul Latif's PRB hearing ...

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: I was in London.

LATIF: ... Shelby was at a work retreat at this fancy donated office space.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: In this gorgeous building. I swear it had a fountain in the middle. It was all very impressive.

LATIF: She and her coworkers were in a conference room, sitting in a circle of chairs.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Talking about different issues. Someone at the front with a projector.

LATIF: And she was trying to focus.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: But yeah, every now and then ...

LATIF: She'd take out her phone, check her email.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: And I wasn't sure they would come through, because they're always wishy washy on timing.

LATIF: She knew that technically any day now she would hear the results of Abdul Latif Nasir's PRB hearing.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: I'm just sort of sitting there refreshing. Refreshing. Refreshing. Refreshing.

LATIF: And then it came. Soon after, Shelby still at the retreat, found a quiet room.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Sat down in a chair and ...

LATIF: Calls in to the official hearing with Abdul Latif where they tell him the results.

LATIF: Did he know nothing? Like, did he have a sense, or was he, like, coming in as totally cold?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Totally cold.

LATIF: Wow!

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: I know, the suspense. It was actually—it began kind of coldly. There are all these kind of like deep male voices, like, asserting things that sound kind of like rules.

LATIF: Things like ...

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: No classified information shall be discussed, and no mention of other detainees.

LATIF: Et cetera, cetera.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: So it was kind of like, okay, let's get to the—you know?

LATIF: Finally, someone started to read.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: This very formalized final determination letter. It began something like, "Abdul Latif Nasir, I'm here today to inform you that the Periodic Review Board ..."

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... the periodic review board by consensus determined the continued lawful for detention of the detainee is no longer necessary to protect against the continued security of United States.]

LATIF: He's free. He's free to go.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: [gasps] Yes! And then I start squawking in because Abdul Latif's not said anything yet. And I'm like, "Did you hear that? Did you understand what that was?" And he said, "Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you." He just kept saying thank you, kind of like an excited, like, he's not even done with the 'you' before he starts the next 'thank.' Like, "Thank you. Thank you. Thank you." And I kind of wanted to, like, interrupt him, and at some point I did. I was like, "Abdul, I want to hear what you think."

LATIF: And what did he say?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: "I'm so happy. So, so happy. I have no words." I wrote down actually a bit of the transcript. It occurred to me halfway through the excitement to take a transcript. And he says, "I want you to give my wishes and thanks to everyone. I'm thankful for what they've done for me. You should thank yourself first." This sounds self-aggrandizing now that I'm reading it out loud.

LATIF: [laughs] No keep reading. Keep reading.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: "I'm so excited to see my family for the first time. I can't—I can't tell you. I can see my brother's face now. You will have to come to Morocco like I told you, and have your honeymoon in Casablanca. Tell your boyfriend that this is what he must do. Thank you for all your hard work." And then the final line is, "My lawyers were the light in these dark times."

LATIF: And how did that feel?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Like the greatest success of my life at that point. [laughs]

LATIF: So with Shelby's help, the panel cleared him unanimously. All six of them together decided that he no longer posed a serious enough threat to keep him at Guantanamo. It was the closest thing he ever had to a trial and he won.

LATIF: And then what happened after that?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Well, honestly, there wasn't much that we were supposed to do after that.

LATIF: Basically, it was just a matter of paperwork. The State Department here in the US had to make arrangements with the receiving country's government, in this case, Morocco. They had to ensure that Morocco was willing to receive him, and that once he got there, Morocco could properly monitor him and help him reintegrate into society. Pretty straight forward. In contrast to many other transfers that happened around that time, the receiving country, Morocco, was a super stable country, a US ally, and one that had received over a dozen other Guantanamo guys before. It was a cakewalk.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Yup.

LATIF: You were just expecting, like, any day now, like, what? Any day now I'm gonna hear what from who?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Any day now I expected to read an article that told me that my client had left on a plane.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hillary Clinton: I am tired of Donald Trump insulting Americans!]

LATIF: It's summer, 2016.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Donald Trump: You will be so proud of this country very, very soon. Thank you all.]

LATIF: While Shelby's waiting for that article, pretty much everyone else in the country is focused on the upcoming election.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Donald Trump: USA. USA.]

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: I want to say it was probably August, September.

LATIF: Shelby found out from the State Department, FYI, Morocco has not yet returned the paperwork.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: They still hadn't heard back.

LATIF: And so after that, every few days ...

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: I was being kind of that pesky attorney.

LATIF: ... Shelby would call them up.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Just check in and see.

LATIF: How's it all going?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Have you heard from the Moroccans?

LATIF: They'd always give her some excuse like...

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Because of A or B or C.

LATIF: Because it was Eid, or because Moroccan elections were happening.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: They were just taking so long. Ha, such a Moroccan thing!

LATIF: Then they would assure her, it's fine.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Don't worry.

LATIF: It's gonna be fine.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: You know, this'll definitely all happen. It'll all go through. Fast forward to October, even in through November, we were nervous.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Donald Trump: Gitmo, right? Guantanamo Bay.]

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: And of course, by then we knew who had won the election.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Donald Trump: Which by the way, which by the way, we are keeping open. Which we are keeping open. And we're gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me.]

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: I mean, we had heard his rhetoric on the campaign trail, and we'd heard a hundred other statements. It never actually occurred to me that someone could mess this up.

LATIF: Basically, as best as I could figure out, for some reason, that email, that diplomatic exchange gets stuck in a Moroccan civil servant's inbox, and that person just doesn't respond. And by the time that person does respond saying, "Okay, send him over," the bureaucratic window had closed. Obama was about to leave office, so no more Gitmo transfers. Done. Even though he had been cleared to go by the American government and to come home by the Moroccan one, it was just too late. But Shelby would not give up. She's on her phone constantly.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Call every single human being who I know who works for the State and Defense Departments.

LATIF: Talk to anyone who will listen.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Try to climb a ladder, any ladder. I don't care if it's the correct one.

LATIF: But ...

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: It was the holidays.

LATIF: People were not picking up their phones.

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: I was able to reach a few people in government.

LATIF: She told them, "I need to talk to someone about my client. There's been a paperwork mixed up. Does anyone know what's going on?"

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Give me anything. It was Christmas Eve. Embarrassingly, I was at an Applebee's in Rhode Island? [laughs]

LATIF: On Christmas Eve?

SHELBY SULLIVAN-BENNIS: Yeah. Yeah. I was meeting up with a bunch of old friends. And everyone had just sat down and placed drink and, like, appetizer orders. And I get this phone call from my co-council Tom Durkin, and I instantly walked outside without a coat. It was freezing. So I'm standing outside the Applebee's, and Tom basically says the notice didn't go in and he's not going home. And I just sunk to the ground. Merry Christmas.

LATIF: They filed a last-minute emergency motion, but that got struck down. And then in a last minute Hail Mary move, Shelby wrote an open letter to President Obama and tweeted about it. The full tweet actually read, "Read our urgent letter to @POTUS seeking intervention for Abdul Latif Nasir, cleared yet stranded at Guantanamo Bay." That was the tweet I saw. The day I saw it was January 19, 2017, the last day of the Obama administration. Nothing happened with the letter. As far as Shelby knows, President Obama didn't ever get it. A day later, President Trump got sworn into office. He had recently tweeted that "There should be no further releases from Gitmo. These are extremely dangerous people and should not be allowed back onto the battlefield."

LATIF: So that's where we are. Terrible accusations by the US government, a lawyer who claims virtually none of it is true. A PRB hearing that claims he's no longer a threat to the US. A president who staunchly disagrees. And finally a man caught in the middle of it all, largely forgotten.

LATIF: I heard this story three years ago, right after it happened, and as I've thought about it every day and night since, it hasn't gotten any less irrational. Very high level representatives of virtually the entire US government came together and decided this guy should go home, but because of some slow paperwork that some random government flunky somewhere filed late, he just got stuck there. It just seemed unfair.

LATIF: At the same time, I found myself fixated on that hearing. Why did all these bureaucrats decide to let him go after so long? Was it because of something he said at that hearing? The more I thought about what I heard from Shelby, the more I got tangled up in the logic of it. Shelby said that Abdul Latif was innocent, and that he told the truth to the panel. But she also said that if a detainee went in front of the panel and said he was innocent, he wouldn't get cleared. Yet he got cleared. Something didn't add up.

LATIF: I requested the transcript of the hearing from the Pentagon, but they said I couldn't have the vast majority of it, which I expected. But here's what I didn't expect. It wasn't because it was classified. It was because Abdul Latif and Shelby specifically requested it not be made public. Huh. Weird! And then, looking over the tiny portion of it that I was allowed to see, I saw a statement from an anonymous military officer assigned to be Abdul Latif's personal representative—basically like a military public defender. It's a single page, and it reads like a high school teacher's letter of recommendation. "He's shy but speaks good English, excelled at his computer class," that sort of thing. But there's one line in there that caught me.

LATIF: "Nasir deeply regrets his actions of the past." That's it. Nothing about what those actions were, when they were, why he regrets them. Just Nasir deeply regrets his actions of the past. Huh. So he had regrets. But if he was innocent and telling the truth, what did he have to regret? Unless he was actually guilty and telling the truth, or he was actually innocent but lying to the panel, and now Shelby was lying about his lying. Ar maybe he was guilty and telling a lie.

LATIF: The logic here just broke my brain, and the fact that the US government and Shelby were so tight lipped made it all the more frustrating. Like, both sides disagreed about everything except the fact that nobody else should know the details.

LATIF: Now coincidentally, as I've been working on this story, I've been in the final stages of becoming a US citizen.

LATIF: Okay, here I am. I just got through security. I'm in the basement of this giant marble building.

LATIF: And at one point I was sitting in a nondescript government lobby cramming before my civics test about, among other things, the rule of law. And I wasn't actually allowed to have my phone on, but of course I did, and it just kept dinging with push alerts about exactly the kinds of news reports you'd expect, about secret drone strikes and migrants detained at the border. These stories feel very much outside the law, where the government has said either nothing or basically just trust us.

LATIF: My mind came back to this story. How did this happen here, in the land of life, liberty and due process? And how is it still happening in our names and with our tax dollars? According to the New York Times, a single Guantanamo detainee costs $13 million per year. So sitting there in that lobby, I told myself yeah, I have to do this story. I just have to. This has become the most personal and most difficult story I've ever reported. I felt way out of my depth so many times over the last three years, being ushered through the bowels of the Pentagon, being surveilled and chased by unmarked cars in foreign countries, having late night WhatsApp convos with alleged terrorists. But here we go: five more episodes in five countries covering five pivotal moments in this guy's life, to try to understand how he got to where he is and how we got to where we are.

LATIF: This episode of "The Other Latif" was produced by Annie McEwen, Sarah Qari, Suzie Lechtenberg and me, Latif Nasser. Fact checking by Diane Kelly and Margot Williams. Editing by Jad Abumrad and Soren Wheeler. Original music by Jad Abumrad, Alex Overington, Annie McEwen, and Amino Belyamani. Episode two next week.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Deborah from San Francisco, California. Radiolab is created by Jad Abumrad 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. And I'd really like to add, I will miss you, Robert.]

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