331: Habeas Schmabeas (2007)

Ira Glass

So, here's how a lawyer meets with his client when his client is a prisoner at Guantanamo. There's a little hut with a metal table.

Ira Glass

Joe Margulies of the University of Chicago represents a few detainees at Guantanamo, and he says that to understand that thing about the natural light, you have to understand that the detention facilities at Guantanamo were designed to be the perfect interrogation chambers. And so anything the prisoner wants, including sunlight, he's only going to get with the permission of his interrogators as a reward for cooperating. And anything can be used that way.

Ira Glass

If prisoners feel despair, they'll cooperate, they'll talk. They'll tell us all the dangerous things they know. That's the idea. Let's make them feel hopeless.

Ever since President Bush announced the global war on terror, we've been told this is a different kind of war with different rules. The battlefield isn't a jungle in Asia or a beach in France, it's everywhere. Soldiers aren't guys in uniform, they could be anybody. And prisoners of war are different too. So dangerous, we're told, that we keep them in an offshore facility and as close to total secrecy as possible. To interrogate whenever we want, however long we want, using methods we have never approved for other wars.

And one thing that's just weird about Guantanamo is that in all of these years that it's been going, why haven't we seen more of these guys on radio and TV? Roughly 400 of them have been released. About a year ago on our radio show we were talking about this and we realized that none of us had ever read or heard any interview with any of them. And so we decided that we were going to try to get some of these guys onto the air. And the show that we put together and put on the air a year ago with those interviews just won a big award, the Peabody Award. And so because of that, we bring you that show again today. Updated here and there where the facts have changed a little bit.

And so today you're going to hear from two of these Guantanamo detainees who have been released. And I believe you're going to be very surprised at what they're like. We're also going to try to explain, once and for all, what all of these kind of technical sounding things about hearings and raids and new rules of war that we all hear in the news from time to time, what it all adds up to. It's This American Life from Chicago Public Radio, distributed by Public Radio International, I'm Ira Glass.

Ira Glass

Our guide for all of this is Jack Hitt. Here he is.

Jack Hitt

As best as they can tell, Badr Zaman Badr and his brother were imprisoned in Guantanamo for three years for telling a joke. Actually, for telling two jokes. They ran a satire magazine in Pakistan that poked fun at corrupt clerics, sort of the Pashto edition of The Onion.

The first joke that got them into trouble was when they published a poem about a politician called, "I am Glad to be a Leader." Here's Badr.

Jack Hitt

So the guy with the big stomach called about Badr and his brother. He threatened them. And as best as they can tell, told authorities that they were linked to al-Qaeda, which landed them in Guantanamo, and which leads us to the second joke.

This one was in an issue of Badr's magazine that came out in the '90s, after our government set a $5 million reward for Osama bin Laden. Badr's magazine issued its own bounty for the capture of an American leader.

Jack Hitt

So after hearing the punchline explained a 150 times, we finally get the joke, and sent Badr and his brother home. It had been three years since the Pakistani army surrounded their house in Peshawar, came into their living room, which is lined with wall to wall bookcases and arrested them. That's Badr's version of why we jailed him. Here's President Bush's.

Jack Hitt

The administration has never wavered on this point. Here's Dick Cheney on Guantanamo.

Jack Hitt

We're told over and over that these prisoners are so terrible that we need an offshore facility away from US law to hold them. But then there's Badr. And every day, more stories like his are coming out. And they raise the question, is Guantanamo a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of mistakes?

In a new study from Seton Hall's law school, researcher simply went to the trouble of reading the 517 Guantanamo case files released by the Pentagon. Here's what they found.

Only 5% of our detainees in Guantanamo were scooped up by American troops on the battlefield, or anywhere else. 5%. The rest, we never saw them fighting.

And here's something else. Only 8% of the detainees in Guantanamo are classified by the Pentagon as al-Qaeda fighters. In fact, Michael Dunleavy, head of interrogations at Guantanamo, complained in 2002 that he was receiving too many quote, "Mickey Mouse prisoners."

In 2004, the New York Times did a huge investigation, interviewing dozens of high-level military intelligence and law enforcement officials in the US, Europe, and the Middle East. There was a surprising consensus. That out of nearly 600 men at Guantanamo, the number who could give us useful information about al-Qaeda, was quote, "only a relative handful." Some put the number at about a dozen, others more than two dozen.

The Seton Hall study might help explain that. It revealed that 86% of the detainees were handed over to us by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance. And some were handed over to us by a new method. Here's Badr.

Jack Hitt

The problem was, we were offering bounties. You know, $5,000 or $10,000. Al-Qaeda brought more than Taliban did and, so OK, fine, here's your money. Take them to Gitmo. That's where Admiral John Hutson, the Navy's top lawyer. He was the judge advocate general until 2000. He says, essentially, we bought Badr and a whole lot of other prisoners.

Jack Hitt

When the Pentagon started offering these rewards, large fees for top leaders, like Bin laden, and smaller payouts for lower level terrorists and Taliban, it seemed like a good idea. They didn't think it would lead to innocent people being turned in. Here's defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2001, just two months after September 11.

Jack Hitt

We all know this is a new war with new rules, but what were the old rules? Well, one had to do with POWs. The military has always known that all kinds of prisoners get picked up in the fog of war, so it was important to get those numbers down to just the real POWs since troops on the move didn't want to be burdened with looking after lots and lots of captives. This problem had been more or less solved by the old Geneva Conventions, which required a quote, "competent tribunal." It sounds crazy, a kind of impromptu court hearing, right after a battle. But that is exactly what used to happen. And typically, some 75% to 90% of the people scooped up would be sent home.

In the Gulf War of 1991, we captured 982 people, released 750 of them right away, and the remainder were POWs. Like in the old war movies, they give name, rank, and serial number, and they got certain things. Everything from a pledge that they wouldn't be tortured, to a promise that they would be released once the war ended, and even the right to send letters home. Here's rear admiral Hutson, the navy's top lawyer.

Jack Hitt

This is a new kind of war after all, and the administration made the argument that the Geneva Conventions apply only when you're fighting another country, a country with a uniformed army, not when you're fighting terrorists.

Jack Hitt

That's Brian Boyle. He was associate attorney general for President Bush when these decisions were made.

Jack Hitt

Here's rear admiral Hutson.

Jack Hitt

This quarrel about the Geneva Conventions continued for three years and eventually, got down to one, very practical question. If you're a prisoner and you're not protected by the Geneva Conventions, and you might be held indefinitely, could you at least make an appeal in a US court? Here's attorney general Alberto Gonzales.

Jack Hitt

And he's absolutely right, about the Germans. Except the Germans were covered by the Geneva Conventions.

Finally, in 2004, the United States Supreme Court stepped in. It said, if prisoners aren't going to be covered by the Geneva Conventions, that's fine. But they couldn't be permitted to fall into a legal black hole, not protected by any law at all. They had to be given some way to challenge their detainment. It's one of the oldest rights in Western civilization, known as habeas corpus.

Habeas corpus, it's a phrase we all know, but let's be honest, can't ever really remember what it means. It's not a trial or anything like one. It's more, well, primal. It's a hearing that commands the executive-- in this case, the president-- to explain why he has jailed somebody. The idea dates back to 1215 England when the nobles forced King John to sign the Magna Carta and agree to the great writ, later known as habeas corpus.

In Latin, it means, "show me the body." In other words, a neutral judge got to see the prisoner in person to check if he'd been tortured, and then the judge had the power to require the king to explain, why is this guy jailed? All the executive had to do was answer with a convincing story, and then the guy went back to the dungeon. It's a right so elemental that it's in Article 1 of the United States Constitution. It's one of the reasons we fought the Revolutionary War.

And after the Supreme Court granted the detainees access to the courts, right away President Bush started talking like a habeas loving King John.

Jack Hitt

The administration quickly put together a kind of hearing based in part on the old Geneva Conventions hearing they'd abandoned. They called this hearing, a combatant status review tribunal, or in the elegant shorthand of the Pentagon, a CSRT.

These new hearings have one oddity to them. The tribunal assumes all the evidence against the detainee is correct. If the detainee wants to prove them wrong, it will be difficult because he's not allowed to see the evidence. It's classified. As a result, these hearings makes strange reading. In many of them, there comes a moment in the dialogue like this one between detainee Abdulmalik and the judging panel. Malik--

Regarding the charge that I worked at various guest houses and offices, what was the work?

JUDGE: I cannot answer that. This is the first time we've seen the evidence. I know nothing more than what is written here.

MALIK: Same with me. I don't know anything about this. Regarding the charge that I was frequently seen at Osama bin Laden's side, who saw me?

JUDGE: I don't know.

MALIK: If it says was frequently seen, you have to prove that.

The Supreme Court had said that the detainees didn't deserve a full criminal trial, of course. Only the basics of a fair hearing, which came down to three things. A lawyer, an impartial judge, and the chance to see the evidence against them. In practice though, they get none of these.

Jack Hitt

And as for confronting the evidence, consider the case of Azmy's client, Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen raised in Germany. The Pentagon accidentally declassified the file with all of the secret evidence against him. And here's what's in it: nothing.

Jack Hitt

But here's the thing, at the hearing, nobody talks about any of that. His personal representative doesn't bring it up. The tribunal doesn't consider it and Kurnaz, himself, doesn't even know about it. He's declared an enemy combatant and sent back to his cell.

But wait, there's more. The reason they give for holding him, a friend of his named [? Selcuk Bilgin ?] blew himself up as a suicide bomber in Turkey in 2003. That's two years after Kurnaz got picked up.

Jack Hitt

You heard that right. Kurnaz was held in Guantanamo because two years after he got picked up, some guy he knows became a suicide bomber. Except that he didn't become a suicide bomber and is currently living in Germany.

Jack Hitt

Then there's a bunch of Chinese Muslims who we accidentally picked up during our sweep in Afghanistan. They're an ethnic minority known as the Uyghurs, and they've been battling the communist Chinese since World War II. Conservatives love the Uyghurs, which is why they've been passionately defended by the National Review and the Weekly Standard.

After a corporate lawyer named Sabin Willett heard about them, he volunteered to represent a Uyghur named Adel Abdul Hakim and some others, and he flew to Guantanamo to meet them.

Jack Hitt

When I interviewed Willett, back when this story was first broadcast a year ago, the government said they'd release Adel and the other Uyghurs if only it could find another country to send them to. At the time, there seemed like an obvious solution. Adel could go 90 miles north to Miami, where there's an entire city of anti-communists. Or, he could be sent to one of the largest Uyghur ex-pat communities, Washington DC. So why didn't that happen? Here's Willett.

Jack Hitt

If Willett's right, this gets to the heart of habeas. The whole point is that the king shouldn't have the right to just detain somebody because it'd be an embarrassment to have the guy free. The Pentagon has an acronym for people like the Uyghurs, it's pronounced [? "en leck." ?] It means, no longer enemy combatant. But as Willett notes, it should be never was enemy combatant.

Since I first talked to Willett for our original broadcast, the White House finally found a refugee center in Albania where they sent 5 of the 23 Uyghurs, including Adel. The others are still in Guantanamo and are classified as enemy combatants.

The problem with creating an offshore legal limbo, where there's no habeas proceeding to separate the al-Qaeda fighter from the comedy writer, comes during interrogation. If we've labeled them as terrorists, then that's how they get treated. Josh Colangelo-Bryan is a lawyer at Dorsey & Whitney in New York who volunteered at Guantanamo. He represents Juma al-Dossary.

For a while, the government thought al-Dossary was a recruiter in America for al-Qaeda. Possibly involved in the case known as the Lackawanna Seven. But this is never brought up at his CSRT hearing. Instead, the government simply states that he's al-Qaeda. And as proof, lists the various places he's been. Afghanistan, Bosnia, Azerbaijan, the Pakistan border. Supposedly he was fighting in some of those places, but the government provides no evidence of that. They don't quote witnesses. Nobody is on record saying he's al-Qaeda. Here's Colangelo-Bryan.

Jack Hitt

We tried out many of our new interrogation techniques on Juma al-Dossary. Colangelo-Bryan met with him many times and cataloged what was done with him.

Al-Dossary said that Americans forced him to the ground and urinated on him. We put out our cigarettes on him. We shocked him with an electric device. We spat on him. We poured a hot cup of tea on his head. We told him that quote, "we brought you here to kill you." We beat him until he vomited blood. We threatened to have him raped. We dressed him in shorts and left him in a frigid, air conditioned room. We abandoned him in another room with no water. We invited him to drink from his toilet bowl, which he did. We wrapped him in an Israeli flag. We told him that we would hold him forever, and we told him that we would send him to Egypt to be tortured.

On a different day, we chained him to the floor and cut off his clothes while a female MP entered the room. We dripped what we said was menstrual blood on his body. When he spat at us, we smeared this blood on his face. We kissed the cross around our neck and said, "this is a gift from Christ for you Muslims." We videotaped the entire episode.

There's no way to confirm that all this happened to al-Dossary. But other prisoners, and officials at Guantanamo have described variations of every technique on the list, including the menstrual blood, the Israeli flag, the references to Christianity, the beatings, the sexual humiliation.

Al-Dossary's interrogated still, about once a month. During one visit last winter he asked Colangelo-Bryan, what can I do to keep myself from going crazy? A few months later, during a meeting, al-Dossary asked to go to the bathroom. Colangelo-Bryan and the MP stepped outside the hut and waited. After five minutes, colangelo-Bryan got concerned. He cracked the door open.

Jack Hitt

It wasn't Al-Dossay's first suicide attempt.

About three weeks later I was back in Guantanamo, Juma said to me that he didn't want to kill himself without an outside witness. His fear was that if he died and only the military knew, nobody would have known what happened.

Of course, as we are often told, this war is different. Who wants to be the one that lets somebody go, who then turns out to be the next 9/11 hijacker. So for the military, there's also this other new thing, a terrifying calculation that there can be no margin of error. Joe Margulies of the University of Chicago represents a few detainees, and has been trying to make sense of what's happened at Guantanamo.

Jack Hitt

In this new war, the plan was to build a prison so bleak that the detainees would give up hope and talk. The military was given a mission and they did a good job. But many prisoners are now moving into year five. If they're al-Qaeda, detainment is perfectly justified. No one argues that. But think about what these incarcerations are for men wrongfully and indefinitely detained. It's like being buried alive in a coffin. Nobody knows how many of the prisoners are, in fact, the worst of the worst, and how many are innocent. But we have a way to find out, it's called habeas corpus.

Ira Glass

Jack Hitt. Coming up, the most popular poem among prisoners at Guantanamo. Or if not the most popular, at least it's very, very popular we're told. That is in a minute. From Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Our program today, "Habeas Schmabeas," stories from Guantanamo. We're rebroadcasting a show that we first broadcast one year ago.

So where do things stand now? Well, in the Fall of 2006, this past Fall, the president signed a law with solid bipartisan majorities that officially denies habeas rights to Guantanamo prisoners. At this point, the CSRT is still the closest thing the detainees have to a habeas hearing, and the CSRT rules have not changed. Prisoners don't get to see the evidence that's used against them. And evidence obtained through torture can be used. All of this is on appeal and will probably end up in the Supreme Court.

This actually brings us to act two of our show. Act two, "September 11, 1660."

Habeas rights were originally created in England, and in one of the Supreme Court cases on this issue, 175 members of the British parliament filed a, "friend of the court" brief, an amicus brief. The first time in Supreme Court history that this has happened. And they argued first of all, that British citizens being held at Guantanamo deserved better than what they were getting in terms of these rights. And they also said, essentially, are you guys nuts? This is from their brief.

"The exercise of executive power without possibility of judicial review jeopardizes the keystone of our existence as nations. Namely, the rule of law."

It also pointed out the history of habeas. How after World War II Winston Churchill wanted to suspend habeas rights for Nazi leaders and just shoot them. And it was the United States which argued for habeas and for trials, which led to the Nuremberg Trials. They also finally pointed out how badly it had gone the last time that they, in England, tried to suspend habeas like this.

"In the 1600s, they write, during the British Civil War, the British created their own version of Guantanamo Bay and dispatched undesirable prisoners to garrisons off the mainland, beyond the reach of habeas corpus relief."

The guy who did that was named Lord Clarendon. And in England, one of our regular contributors, Jon Ronson, decided to look into it.

Jon Ronson

So it turns out that the last person to come up with this exact same way to sidestep habeas corpus is a lord I have never heard of, a not household name lord called Clarendon. Who was he?

I went to a professional, Tony McDonnell, who said he'd take me to Clarendon's grave in Westminster Abbey.

Jon Ronson

I noticed we just passed Charles Darwin's grave.

Jon Ronson

You said you were once showing an American party around and somebody spat it, spat at Charles Darwin's grave.

Jon Ronson

And we just passed the spot where Elton John sang "Candle in the Wind" at Princess diana's funeral.

Jon Ronson

You have to be famous or a great loyalist, or at least someone who worked here, like an organist to be buried here. Tony is a historian and a blue badge guide, an official Westminster tour guide. He took me down corridors and through chambers until we came to a flagstone on the floor, Lord Clarendon's grave. He's in [? vaulted ?] company. Henry the V is buried just to his left, and Elizabeth the I lies a couple of yards in front of him. Tony explains who Lord Clarendon was.

Jon Ronson

So Clarendon had this job. He was the king's advisor in the middle of a civil war, in which the king was killed.

There were two sides. You've got the monarchists and then you've got the puritans who murdered the king because they saw the kingdom as debauched and decadent. Now I know you Americans see puritans as kindly settlers constantly sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner. We see them as bastards. They were religious fundamentalists. In other words, they were--

Jon Ronson

So this was a bustle of civilization. It was a bustle of religious ideology.

Jon Ronson

So as puritans, were they seen to be kind of crazy, religious fundamentalists, these people?

Jon Ronson

The Restoration. This is when the whole sending people away to offshore islands with dubious sovereignty business took place. It was the period after the war. The puritans had been defeated, a king, Charles the II was restored to power, along with his main advisor, Lord Clarendon.

Consider what it was like for Clarendon and the monarchists. They'd been in exile for years. Many of their friends and supporters had been locked up or killed. The puritans had been vicious. They had killed the king. And many of the men who'd done it, were still at large, plotting out there. It was a 9/11 style trauma and Clarendon behaved in a traumatized way.

Jon Ronson

Well, these people had done the most unimaginably horrific acts. They killed the king.

Jon Ronson

The exact location of Lord Clarendon's Guantanamo is lost to history. It was probably in Jersey or Guernsey, which today are rather nice seaside tax havens for the rich. But suspending habeas corpus didn't work out well for Lord Clarendon. He was impeached.

At his impeachment trial, he was accused of sending people away to, quote, "remote islands, garrisons, and other places, thereby to prevent them from the benefit of the law, and to produce precedence for the imprisoning of any other of his majesty's subjects in like manner." And remember, democracy as we know it is still centuries away. Innocent until proven guilty, one man one vote, only the most extreme radicals held these views. These were dark times. There were heads on spikes all over London. And still, the people were shocked by Clarendon's disregard for habeas corpus.

Jon Ronson

The one outcome of all of this was the habeas corpus act of 1679, which specifically forbade what Clarendon had done and made it illegal to send a prison quote, "into Scotland, Ireland, Jersey, Guernsey, Tangier, or into parts, garrisons, islands, or places beyond the seas, which are, or at any time hereafter, shall be within or without the dominions of his majesty." And forbade at his remains for 330 years. In England, anyway.

Ira Glass

Jon Ronson. He does documentaries for the BBS and is the author of the book, Them.

Ira Glass

Act Three, we interrogate the detainees. Yes, the US military had their chance with them. In this act, Jack Hitt talks to two former detainees from Guantanamo. One of these guys you've heard a little bit from earlier in our show, Badr Zaman Badr, the guy who ran the satirical magazine named Pashto with his brother in Pakistan.

The other guy was 19 when he was picked up, Abdullah Al Noaimi, a kid from a well to do family in Bahrain. Here's Jack.

Jack Hitt

Abdullah wound up in American custody the way a lot of the men at Guantanamo did, he was a foreigner in Pakistan and we were offering bounties for guys like that. Remember Murat Kurnaz, the guy whose friend was supposedly a suicide bomber and Juma's al-Dossary? Same thing happened to them.

In Abdullah's case, he was first taken to Kandahar, to a makeshift prison the US set up at an air base with about 20 men to a tent.

Jack Hitt

Badr, the satirist, was taken to that same air base at Kandahar.

Jack Hitt

In the camps, Badr got separated from his brother, the poet. So he devised a way to find him. The detainees didn't have toilets, instead they got a bucket, which got filled up with what Badr modestly calls "dirt."

Every day, some detainee get chosen to empty the buckets. Badr volunteered.

Jack Hitt

The sanitary conditions were just as bad, if not worse, for Abdullah. The tent he shared with other detainees was open on all sides and located at the end of the military airstrip. Every takeoff and landing meant a tornado of dirt-- the literal kind-- blasted through.

In the first few days, he heard the other prisoners in the tent talking about their interrogations.

Jack Hitt

This is not how he thought things would go with the Americans. In fact, back when he was being held on a Pakistan jail, when he found out that Americans would be taking them, he was relieved. He told the other prisoners it was good news. He knew America, he knew how the people were.

Jack Hitt

So how did he know so much about American supermarkets? Well, in 1994, he came to America for the World Cup finals. In fact, Abdullah's been here a lot. He's been downhill skiing in the Midwest. He attended Old Dominion University in Virginia for a while, and has taken other trips too.

Jack Hitt

So a year after seeing the sights in Daytona Beach, Abdullah found himself facing an American interrogator in Kandahar.

Jack Hitt

Badr had learned of the West from more scholarly sources. He's a big fan of the Canterbury Tales and Gulliver's Travels. And he also knew about the Geneva Conventions and spoke up when he realized they weren't going to apply.

Jack Hitt

Finally, Badr and Abdullah were each taken out of the camps at Kandahar and put on a plane to Guantanamo. Remember, this is an international flight from Afghanistan to Cuba, over 20 hours long.

Jack Hitt

Once they got to Guantanamo, both Badr and Abdullah described being stripped naked, medically examined, and then put into cages until a new round of interrogations began.

Jack Hitt

Abdullah and Badr, by the way, arrived at different times at the base, and never knew each other. But they both described meeting lots of ordinary people, farmers, teachers, cab drivers, who were also sold to the Americans. Abdullah talked to one guy who sold by his own father-in-law. Badr met men who had never even heard of Osama bin Laden.

Abdullah was originally arrested while traveling in Pakistan. A man offered him a meal, and a place to rest, and later turned him over to the army for the bounty. Abdullah says he saw the money change hands at the jail. Once in American custody, he was accused of traveling to Afghanistan and proclaiming his desire to carry out Jihad.

Jack Hitt

So much of what we hear about Guantanamo is about the harsh treatment there. But of course, like any place, the days mostly pass in boredom. The interrogators might be rough, but the MPs and guards who had to spend time with the detainees sometimes would get comfortable and start talking to the prisoners.

Jack Hitt

To pass the time, the prisoners would sing together, or try out new poems they'd written. They developed a secret postal system for passing notes and photos, and figured out how to talk to each other through the air conditioning vents. Sometimes, the guards and prisoners would hold little competitions, like the styrofoam cup challenge. The object was to turn the cup inside out without cracking it. The guards went first.

Jack Hitt

Dart.

Jack Hitt

Since pen and paper were forbidden, Badr's brother wrote his poetry by scratching the words into styrofoam cups with his fingernails. After a year, they were allowed to use pens and to read books. Abdullah read David Copperfield. Badr and his brother composed some 25,000 lines of verse. The other inmates memorized the best of them. The most popular couplet went like this.

Jack Hitt

Get that? There's no oil or salt in the rice.

Jack Hitt

Finally, one day, four years after he left Pakistan, Abdullah was pulled aside by a military officer who had news. Abdullah was going home. Abdullah says he was asked by a government lawyer, a major, to sign a contract promising not to join a terrorist group and giving the US permission to rearrest him at any time. He refused to sign. Other detainees say they were shown similar letters and also refused to sign, believing this was just another trick.

Jack Hitt

But they told you they had made a mistake in the end?

Jack Hitt

And just as suddenly, Abdullah was on an airplane and back in Bahrain. He was quickly ushered past the news media and into a room where he saw his family.

Jack Hitt

When you saw your brothers and your father, what was that like?

Jack Hitt

Yes, I have, actually.

Jack Hitt

Americans are going to think that because you were at Guantanamo Bay that you were a terrorist. And that everybody there was. What would you say to them?

Jack Hitt

In the years Abdullah was gone, his parents moved to new house, a big house, with lots of rooms. But there was no bedroom for him. His old clothes were gone. They thought he would never come home. He says it's like he's come back from the dead.

Ira Glass

Jack Hitt. In the year since we first broadcast this show, Abdullah's gotten married. He has a six month old son. He's entered business school in Bahrain.

The other detainee that Jack talked to, Badr Zaman Badr is back in Pakistan. He and his brother wrote a book in Pashto about what happened to them in detention in Kandahar and Guantanamo. Because of this, Badr's brother has been detained by the Pakistan government.

In this past year, about 200 detainees have been released. About 385 are still in Guantanamo. 38 of them are currently classified as NLEC, No Longer Enemy Combatants. That is, they've been found to be completely innocent, but they're still in custody.

In September 2006, after criticism that not many truly dangerous prisoners were at Guantanamo, 14 high-value al-Qaeda prisoners were moved to Guantanamo from CIA black sites. And finally, just this week, the Justice Department filed petitions in federal court to try to curtail how often detainees can talk to their American lawyers, guys like Joe Margulies and the other attorneys that you heard this hour. An affidavit by a Navy lawyer, commander Patrick McCarthy, complained among other things, that those lawyers were providing information to the news media about the detainees.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Sarah Koenig and myself with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Feltes, Amy O'Leary and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Sam Hallgren, Seth Lind, Thea Chaloner, Tommy Andreas. Music help from Jessica Hopper.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

[FUNDING CREDITS]

Ira Glass

This American Life is attributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia. You know what he always says about us.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life.