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Episode: Serial S04 - Ep. 1: Poor Baby Raul

Author: Serial Productions & The New York Times
Duration: 00:41:33

Episode Shownotes

Maybe you have an idea in your head about what it was like to work at Guantánamo, one of the most notorious prisons in the world. Think again. To get full access to this show, and to other Serial Productions and New York Times podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify,

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Summary

In the first episode of Season 4 of 'Serial,' titled 'Poor Baby Raul,' the complexities of Guantanamo Bay are explored, revealing how it became a facility for indefinite detention post-9/11. The episode discusses the ethical implications of conversion from traditional POW camps to a unique prison system, the perception of detainees, and the personal struggles of Army Specialist Raul Sanchez. Through interviews and reflections, the narrative uncovers the profound emotional and psychological impacts on both detainees and military personnel, challenging listeners to rethink the representations of this controversial facility.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Serial S04 - Ep. 1: Poor Baby Raul) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:03 Speaker_10
These first two episodes of Serial Season 4 are free. But to hear the whole series, you'll need to subscribe to The New York Times, where you'll get access to all the serial productions and New York Times shows. And it's super easy.

00:00:15 Speaker_10
You can sign up through Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And if you're already a Times subscriber, just link your account and you're done. Over here at Serial, we love criminal justice stories. Guantanamo is the most astonishing one we've ever seen.

00:00:32 Speaker_10
Guantanamo is a prison and a court that we made from scratch right after September 11th. We were at war in Afghanistan, fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and pretty soon we'd captured thousands of men.

00:00:45 Speaker_10
Our makeshift holding cells in Afghanistan couldn't handle them all. We needed a safe place to keep them, away from the chaos, so we could sort them out. And the place we chose was Guantanamo Bay, 8,000 miles away from Afghanistan, in Cuba.

00:01:01 Speaker_10
We already had a sleepy naval base there. We've had it since 1903. There's plenty of room, and this part was crucial.

00:01:08 Speaker_10
The Bush administration figured because the base was in Cuba, on foreign soil, the prisoners we delivered there wouldn't have access to U.S. courts. That was the innovation. We wanted leeway to hold these guys for however long we wanted.

00:01:22 Speaker_10
And mostly, we wanted to interrogate them, however we wanted, to find out what they knew, especially about al-Qaeda. Because we didn't know a ton about al-Qaeda back then, and we were petrified they were about to blindside us again.

00:01:35 Speaker_10
So that was the idea. Guantanamo wouldn't be a traditional POW camp. It'd be a new thing, with new rules.

00:01:46 Speaker_10
The problem — well, there were many, many problems — but the problem that dogged Guantanamo the whole time, and which became apparent pretty quickly, was that these weren't the guys we thought they were.

00:01:57 Speaker_10
All told, 780 Muslim men and some boys were held at Guantanamo. And even the ones who were Taliban or al-Qaeda, they were overwhelmingly low-level, like foot soldiers.

00:02:09 Speaker_10
Other prisoners, we never figured out exactly who they were or if they posed a threat to us. Our intel wasn't so hot. We'd shipped all these prisoners to Guantanamo without a solid plan for letting them back out.

00:02:24 Speaker_10
Many people sat there for two, three, five years, and some 12 years, 14 years, 16 years. We didn't know what to do with them. 30 men are still held at Guantanamo. And the cost? The last time someone tallied it up, $13 million a year. Per prisoner.

00:02:45 Speaker_10
Guantanamo is probably the most expensive lockup in the world. Astonishing, no? Dana Chivas and I, Dana's worked on previous seasons of Serial. She's gonna be my co-host this season.

00:03:00 Speaker_10
Dana and I have been trying to do a story about Guantanamo for years, almost a decade. Our first attempt was in 2015.

00:03:09 Speaker_11
Sarah and I had flown down to Guantanamo, or Gitmo as it's often called, for the official media tour, the only way we could see the prison. The experience was strange, almost as soon as we arrived.

00:03:22 Speaker_11
We were picked up at the airport by two soldiers from public affairs.

00:03:24 Speaker_02
Would any of you guys like to stop at the small little mini mart real quick on this side? It's just a small one just to get if you want a snack or something.

00:03:31 Speaker_02
They also have souvenirs there, but you'll have another chance to get more souvenirs on the other side.

00:03:40 Speaker_11
Guantanamo has three gift shops. Recently, the gift shops did a collaboration with Disney, so you could bring home a t-shirt that says Guantanamo Bay with a Minnie Mouse on it. Or one with palm trees that says, it don't gitmo better than this.

00:03:55 Speaker_11
For the mindful, there was a coffee mug with a simple mantra, be here now, Guantanamo Bay. We passed up the souvenir offer on day one. Maybe you caught Sarah's hesitation in the tape. Um... Because how inappropriate.

00:04:10 Speaker_10
But by day three... Oh, I'm totally getting a bobblehead.

00:04:13 Speaker_11
There we were, shelling out cash for Fidel Castro bobbleheads to bring to our loved ones back home. To be at Guantanamo is to be worn down into a, if you can't beat em, join em, posture. It's a company town. A company is the U.S. military.

00:04:33 Speaker_11
Everything in the town belongs to the U.S. military. The car wash, the high school, the bowling alley, the Ground Zero paintball range. And of course, the story of Guantanamo that they tell you at Guantanamo about what they're doing.

00:04:49 Speaker_11
That also belongs to the military.

00:04:51 Speaker_00
Our mission today is to provide safe, humane, legal and transparent custody of the detainees here.

00:04:57 Speaker_11
They didn't talk about the history of the prison, why it's here, what went on here, who's still being held here.

00:05:04 Speaker_11
They talked about the mission, and they kept it tight, from the camp commander all the way down the chain, our public affairs escorts, a medical officer, a guard. Safe, legal, transparent care.

00:05:16 Speaker_03
Safe, legal, humane, and transparent. Legal, transparent care in custody of detainees. Care in custody of the detainees. Providing compassionate care for these detainees. Transparent care in custody and control.

00:05:29 Speaker_11
The UN has said the treatment of the detainees at Guantanamo is, quote, cruel, inhuman, and degrading, and that their detention and past torture are violations of international law.

00:05:41 Speaker_11
But at the prison itself, what we heard from our military tour guides was about how well cared for the detainees were.

00:05:47 Speaker_13
They can give their own clippers, toothpaste, soap. They also get some snack-type items based on their compliance.

00:05:55 Speaker_11
It's not that anyone was unprofessional or impolite with us. The soldiers we spent the most time with, the public affairs escorts, were considerate hosts, picking us up a little after 6 a.m., engaging in small talk.

00:06:08 Speaker_11
Sarah and I spent a lot of time oohing and aahing the sights they pointed out.

00:06:12 Speaker_10
Look at the color of that water.

00:06:14 Speaker_11
Yeah, it's amazing. Commenting on the weather.

00:06:17 Speaker_10
It's really, really, really hot. Is Afghanistan hotter, I'm sure, right? Yeah. Volume's hotter? Well, yes. Volume's hotter.

00:06:28 Speaker_11
While behind us sat two prisons housing 122 men, the vast majority of whom had been there for more than a decade without charge.

00:06:35 Speaker_12
This is beautiful. This is so pretty. It's like a garden.

00:06:46 Speaker_11
My tolerance for all this polite chit-chat wore thin. Standing on a cliff above the sparkling sea, next to a small building where the adolescent prisoners were once held, I had a tiny meltdown.

00:06:58 Speaker_12
I think I'm hitting the part of the day where the fucked-up-ness has just gone to my head. What'd you say? I think I'm hitting the part of the day where like the heat and the fucked-up-ness of everything is like just taking out my sensibility.

00:07:10 Speaker_12
What do you mean? I don't know, I just feel like loopy from all of this.

00:07:13 Speaker_10
Oh, you do. Well, it's exhausting because you're like pretending. Everything is pretend. We're in a play and we're playing our part.

00:07:20 Speaker_12
Everyone's doing their part. It's the pretending that's making me lose it right now.

00:07:27 Speaker_10
Recently, I looked back at my notes from that time. I'd written, went to some lookout area. I pretended to give a crap about the view. You could see naval thingies in the water, used to tie up battleships in the bay. It was a nice view, for sure.

00:07:40 Speaker_10
Lots of hills. Some green, swampy, mangrove-looking things out on the bay. And then, it really is like theater. You're pretending to report, or else you're pretending to report the story they're telling you.

00:07:51 Speaker_10
And they're pretending to believe that the story you're doing is the one you've told them you're doing. You're pretending to believe all the bullshit they have to tell you, and they're pretending that they're believing that you're believing it.

00:08:01 Speaker_10
And everyone knows the only information you want is stuff they either don't know or couldn't or wouldn't talk about, even if they did know. Everyone acts chummy and yucks it up. Including us.

00:08:13 Speaker_10
What we wanted to know is what the people working at Guantanamo thought about Guantanamo, how they saw their jobs. They were part of something extraordinary.

00:08:22 Speaker_10
So I was asking pretty much everyone I met what they thought about the detainees and their status, sincerely asking, does this place feel like it's winding down? A lot of the prisoners have been cleared to leave.

00:08:33 Speaker_10
They aren't even supposed to be here anymore. How do you feel about that? and they'd look a little stricken.

00:08:38 Speaker_10
They said things like, I don't know, I don't have any personal feelings, you know, toward these people, or this line of questioning makes me completely nervous. One guy told me it was unfair of me even to ask.

00:08:50 Speaker_10
We started to give up on the idea we could have a normal conversation with anyone. Lucky for us, one of our public affairs escorts was a delightful ray of sunshine in the form of Army Specialist Raul Sanchez. Raul was cheerful and chatty.

00:09:04 Speaker_10
He seemed looser than the other escorts.

00:09:06 Speaker_02
— We're like a Disneyland employee. That was a joke. Definitely a joke. It's nothing like Disneyland.

00:09:16 Speaker_10
They have no churros here, so... — Within an hour of meeting him, we'd learn Raul was from Arizona, newly married, he was leading a group for LGBT service members, co-hosting a show over at the radio station, and he seemed genuinely interested in the history of Guantanamo.

00:09:32 Speaker_10
So after a couple days, I pitched my question to Raul. Raul, I said, some of these guys have been cleared to leave for four or five years now, and yet all around us there's this massive apparatus to sustain their confinement.

00:09:45 Speaker_10
Do you ever struggle with that idea?

00:09:46 Speaker_02
I never struggle with the idea.

00:09:52 Speaker_02
because I feel that we have pushed our limits so far to make such a humane environment for them that every day we're trying to seek new ways to try to make this place a better environment, to make it a better living situation.

00:10:16 Speaker_02
That's, oh my gosh, poor baby Raul.

00:10:22 Speaker_11
That is present day Raul Sanchez, years after Sarah and I met him at Guantanamo. I played him that same tape you just heard of him answering Sarah's question about the detainees. He told me he remembered that conversation.

00:10:34 Speaker_02
My gosh, because she caught me. That question caught me. That was in a moment where I was realizing things and she caught me, which is why I don't sound as quickly eloquent as I usually do.

00:10:47 Speaker_11
Yeah, you didn't sound as canned.

00:10:50 Speaker_02
No, I didn't have a canned answer because I was agreeing that they should just leave.

00:10:56 Speaker_02
In that moment, I felt like, at least I feel right now in my heart, what I want in that moment was just for you to take me back home with you guys and take me off the island. Yeah, I felt trapped.

00:11:06 Speaker_02
I felt trapped because I couldn't say anything I couldn't know I was I was now in that moment. I was now lying

00:11:14 Speaker_10
Raul, of course, couldn't tell us any of this back then. He was still on the job. — That's why we never did a story in 2015. We couldn't get anyone to open up to us.

00:11:24 Speaker_10
But even as Guantanamo faded as a topic of national discussion, we kept thinking about it, wondering what was going on down there. We figured there has got to be a way to do this story.

00:11:35 Speaker_10
We even tried writing a TV show about it, a fictionalized version of Guantanamo. Which, humbling. But while we were researching it, we had all of these fascinating off-the-record conversations with former personnel and former detainees.

00:11:49 Speaker_10
And so we started to wonder, maybe enough time has passed, enough people are back in civilian life. Maybe they'd be willing to put some of those stories on the record.

00:11:58 Speaker_10
So we tried again, contacted guards, interrogators, commanders, lawyers, chaplains, translators, also former prisoners, more than a hundred people. And a remarkable number of them said, OK, I'm ready. Here's what happened.

00:12:21 Speaker_10
There's been great journalism about the legal maneuvering to justify Guantanamo, and about the detainee abuse, about the politics and policy. But what we were after were the insider stories.

00:12:33 Speaker_10
A history of Guantanamo you could only get from the regular people who went through it. The people caught inside a justice system that at its core was made up. What were they thinking?

00:12:44 Speaker_10
If they could speak as themselves, for themselves, what would they say now that they couldn't say then? A lot, as it turns out. From Serial Productions and The New York Times, this is Season 4 of Serial, Guantanamo. One prison camp told week by week.

00:13:02 Speaker_10
I'm Sarah Koenig. And I'm Dana Chivas.

00:13:20 Speaker_11
Before we get back to Raul, we just want you to hear what Guantanamo is like, how it feels to live there and work there and be imprisoned there from a bunch of people we've talked to. It's the backdrop to all the other stories this season.

00:13:35 Speaker_11
For example, maybe you have an idea in your head of what it's like to work at Guantanamo. Put that aside for a second.

00:13:41 Speaker_03
I mean, I love Gitmo. It's la-la land.

00:13:47 Speaker_11
Jake Meyer was 25 when he arrived at Guantanamo to work in military intelligence.

00:13:51 Speaker_03
You know, you're on 42 square miles. You've got like five great beaches. You know, it's always summer. You don't have much to worry about. You know, like, there weren't any worries. You know, I didn't pay any taxes. I didn't pay any rent.

00:14:05 Speaker_03
You know, if you wanted to go scuba diving after work, I mean, you could be at the beach geared up and in the water in 20 minutes.

00:14:14 Speaker_11
Guantanamo, for years, was portrayed as a key component in the war against terrorism. But it also happens to be on a Caribbean naval base, stocked with booze.

00:14:23 Speaker_14
— I partied my ass off in Gitmo. Everybody's in good shape.

00:14:27 Speaker_02
Everybody's looking good. Everyone's tan and hot. Everyone's drinking and young. Massive amount of drinking.

00:14:33 Speaker_03
Massive amount of partying. I mean, just everyone was getting drunk and getting laid.

00:14:38 Speaker_14
And then the Puerto Rican National Guard. Gosh, they had the best beach parties.

00:14:43 Speaker_11
Thousands of young, fit soldiers and sailors. For some of them, it's their first time away from home. Guantanamo is where they've landed to come of age. I talked to one guy, Patrick, who was on the prison's quick reaction force.

00:14:56 Speaker_11
It's kind of like a SWAT team. He turned 21 at Guantanamo. He started his deployment trying to hit on women in bars, but ended up falling in love with another man, a sailor. They had to sneak around. What would you do together?

00:15:09 Speaker_11
What types of activities would you do? Like where would you go to just be alone? Lots of sex.

00:15:15 Speaker_03
Okay. You asked and I felt the need to ask in that way, I'll just be explicit.

00:15:18 Speaker_12
I asked the question and I heard myself asking.

00:15:20 Speaker_03
Sexual activities, activities of a sexual nature.

00:15:22 Speaker_12
Sexual activities, okay.

00:15:24 Speaker_14
Where?

00:15:26 Speaker_11
Never mind.

00:15:28 Speaker_14
So it felt very like college-like without it being obviously the next day wasn't classes, it was Gitmo.

00:15:35 Speaker_11
Remember, the original purpose of Guantanamo was to get fighters off the battlefield, out of the way, to a place where we could question them. Guantanamo was a hastily built intel factory.

00:15:47 Speaker_09
Chaos. Simply put, it was chaotic. Well-meaning chaos, but chaos nonetheless.

00:15:55 Speaker_11
That's Paul Rester. He oversaw the military's intel shop at Guantanamo in the early days. When he first got there, Guantanamo was already crawling with people from three and four letter agencies, CIA, FBI, DIA, NCIS.

00:16:10 Speaker_11
Some were seasoned Al Qaeda investigators, others were fresh out of army intel school. All were competing for access to the detainees. To streamline the scheduling, they teamed up, three interrogators plus an interpreter.

00:16:23 Speaker_09
So that's four people trying to interrogate a single detainee.

00:16:30 Speaker_11
At the same time. They're all sitting in a room together.

00:16:32 Speaker_09
At the same time. And oh, by the way, the only person in the room that's got any area studies knowledge of what they're talking about is the detainee.

00:16:44 Speaker_06
I tried to explain everything I can.

00:16:48 Speaker_11
Omar Deghais, a former detainee, was picked up in Pakistan.

00:16:52 Speaker_06
and try to persuade them that we're not the people they're looking for.

00:16:57 Speaker_11
— For him, and for a lot of other detainees who didn't know much or anything at all about al-Qaeda, the interrogations were maddening. The same questions, over and over again, for months, sometimes years. They'd say, I've already answered that.

00:17:11 Speaker_11
Go back to the file. Or they'd stop speaking at all. The American strategy could be mystifying. Another guy, Murat Karnas, he was 19 when he was taken to Guantanamo.

00:17:23 Speaker_11
He said he had this one interrogator who kept talking about the time he spent in Germany, where Murat's from.

00:17:29 Speaker_01
He told me a lot of stories about his life and it was really boring, but he told me lots of stuff from his hashish, using hashish and stuff like that with young German parties and a lot of crazy stuff.

00:17:45 Speaker_12
You just, did you say anything? Did you just sit there and listen to it?

00:17:48 Speaker_01
Yeah. I couldn't go away. I was, I had shackles on the ground. I was locked to the ground. I couldn't stand up.

00:18:01 Speaker_11
In the beginning, the detainees didn't have a choice about the interrogations. They were forced to go. That's what made Guantanamo Guantanamo.

00:18:10 Speaker_11
To do what we wanted to do there, we ended up breaking international law, sidestepping the Geneva Conventions, which give certain protections to prisoners of war. Instead, the government argued that the men we'd captured weren't prisoners of war.

00:18:24 Speaker_11
They were something else. They called them unlawful enemy combatants. And, according to this line of thinking, unlawful enemy combatants were not protected by the Geneva Conventions. Which meant we could play by a different set of rules.

00:18:40 Speaker_11
We could scream at them for hours, leave them shackled to the floor,

00:18:45 Speaker_01
One time they told me my family, my mother and father, they died in a car accident. They told me a lot of things.

00:18:55 Speaker_11
It's awful.

00:18:57 Speaker_01
They told me all my family, my brothers and mother and father sit in the car and they had the accident. But he didn't, he told me, he can't tell me any details. and he's not allowed to talk with me about it.

00:19:09 Speaker_01
So he just told me that very short and said, I can't tell you this.

00:19:15 Speaker_11
Was this an interrogator who said this?

00:19:17 Speaker_01
It was an interrogator, yeah. I didn't know if I should believe him or not. I didn't know.

00:19:26 Speaker_11
Murat didn't learn his family was alive until years later, when his lawyer gave him a letter in his mother's handwriting.

00:19:40 Speaker_10
Unlike normal American prisons, there weren't huge divisions among the inmates. They were from all over the world. Afghanistan, but also Arabs from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Libya and Morocco, Kuwait, Tunisia, Sudan.

00:19:52 Speaker_10
There were a few Europeans, two Australians. Those guys tended to be released first. They spoke different languages, which was a barrier in the beginning, but then they started learning each other's languages, including English. They were Muslims.

00:20:05 Speaker_10
They'd all been grabbed in the same conflict. Omar Dagayes said they knew who was who, who was al-Qaeda.

00:20:11 Speaker_06
Of course we knew who was al-Qaeda. They were obvious because they spoke the way they spoke, how they communicated, even inside they had a different system.

00:20:20 Speaker_10
By and large, everyone got along. The abiding antagonism of the cell blocks was between the prisoners and the guards. Often the guards would come in hot, hostile, or scared. They'd been told, like the rest of us back home, that these were the guys.

00:20:34 Speaker_10
These are the men who attacked us on 9-11. But after a while, some of them would start to doubt. A former guard who worked in the blocks in the early years, he said by the end of his tour, he could differentiate among the detainees.

00:20:46 Speaker_10
He was like, wait a minute.

00:20:48 Speaker_08
This guy right here, yeah, he's probably, you know, probably legit a horrible person that has either killed or caused people to be killed. This guy over here doesn't know shit. He just sits in his cell and cries and wants to go home.

00:21:01 Speaker_10
After nine months or a year, the guard unit would rotate out and the cycle would start over. The prisoners had different strategies for getting through. A former detainee from Yemen who goes by Danny, he spent 14 years at Guantanamo.

00:21:15 Speaker_05
I'm very optimistic there. I was like, I always like looking at the sunlight and bright side and try to make from lemon juice and everything. But it was so hard, so harsh, so mean.

00:21:38 Speaker_10
If you protested or provoked, you risked all manner of physical abuse, including being trampled by a team of guards in riot gear. Some detainees, Omar, for instance, fought back.

00:21:50 Speaker_10
Omar figured, I'm going to get my ass kicked regardless, so I might as well make their lives harder. He remembered after one particularly brutal confrontation, Omar had a bad eye, and he said a guard had gouged it.

00:22:01 Speaker_10
And afterwards, they put him in a new cell where he could see his reflection. Omar said he hadn't seen himself in a long, long time.

00:22:09 Speaker_06
They had like an iron mirror. It wasn't a mirror, it was like a round thing on the wall. And it was the first time I saw my face and I saw how my hair went like completely white, my chest was white.

00:22:25 Speaker_06
My eye was like, I was shocked to see my eye was completely white. It's like shocking.

00:22:36 Speaker_11
What were you most scared of in Guantanamo when you were there?

00:22:39 Speaker_06
Most scared of? I don't know. Maybe the... We don't know what's going to happen. It's like you've been there for years and there's no... No foreseeable outcome. There's no, like how long am I gonna stay in this prison? I don't know, it's crazy.

00:23:06 Speaker_06
There wasn't a logical system how people are released and why and what. It's mostly nothing to do with the law, nothing to do with what went on in interrogation. It's more to do with other politics outside the prison.

00:23:25 Speaker_10
Guantanamo the prison wasn't built to last, and nobody wanted it to last. But nobody could manage to shut it down. Even President Bush, whose administration started Guantanamo, he talked about closing it less than five years after it opened.

00:23:38 Speaker_10
Didn't happen. Next came President Obama in 2009. He was going to close Guantanamo within a year. Congress blocked that plan. Guantanamo was a beast no politician wanted to touch. And the military couldn't empty it out either.

00:23:53 Speaker_10
We'd hoped to put a bunch of people on trial for war crimes, but most of them we couldn't even charge, much less convict. The evidence we had was too problematic, or we'd abused them too badly, or they were too small fry, not worth the effort.

00:24:06 Speaker_10
We tried other ways to sort them, to determine which detainees posed a threat and which ones didn't. But the people who did get cleared for release or transfer, a bunch of them, they still couldn't leave. We had nowhere to send them.

00:24:19 Speaker_10
Couldn't send them home, we considered their governments too unstable. Couldn't find another country to take them, refused to take them in ourselves. A decade in, and we were all stuck. And so began the languishing of Guantanamo.

00:24:34 Speaker_10
Jake Meyer, the Intel analyst. He first got to Guantanamo in 2005.

00:24:39 Speaker_03
The uptempo was high. Everything was moving like you were a part of something big. So you're caught up in the momentum. You're caught up in, you know, this constant Intel collection, you know, as fast as you could, as fast as you could get it.

00:24:53 Speaker_10
Six years later, he came back.

00:24:55 Speaker_03
Totally different story.

00:24:58 Speaker_10
By then, 2012, the Intel mission, Guantanamo's primary mission, was pretty much done. There were about 170 prisoners left. We'd gotten whatever we could from them. The beehive energy of the place had dissipated.

00:25:10 Speaker_03
You know, and there's a lot less people there. It's like a ghost town. So, you know, the party moved on, I guess. And like everybody was kind of just like, what is going on now? There's just this feeling of everybody's just like, why are we still here?

00:25:29 Speaker_10
The majority of prisoners were living communally in a new, modern prison by this point. They had access to movies, books, CD players. They did art projects, made fantastical things out of cardboard.

00:25:40 Speaker_10
They could finagle special items from the NEX, the big store on the base. Interrogations were optional, and one former detainee told me, kind of pleasant. But the perks didn't obliterate the facts.

00:25:52 Speaker_10
President Obama's second term had begun, and Guantanamo stunk of permanence. In early 2013, the detainees began a hunger strike, which grew and grew, attracting attention all over the world. The hunger striker's message was the same as ever.

00:26:09 Speaker_10
Either charge me with a crime or let me go.

00:26:14 Speaker_11
And that's pretty much how things were when Sarah and I got to Guantanamo in 2015 and met Raul. The prison was maybe closing, maybe not closing. And there were 122 men still there, with no idea of when or if they would ever leave.

00:26:29 Speaker_11
So when I called Raul years later, what I wanted to know was, what did people like him, whose job it was to tell the official story of Guantanamo, what did they really think about working there? What was the unofficial story?

00:26:43 Speaker_11
Of course, Raul can't speak for the thousands of people who have worked there over the last 22 years. But he did have a story to tell me, about why he was so desperate to leave Guantanamo, and what happened to him after.

00:26:57 Speaker_11
By the time Sarah and I met him, Raul had been in the army for eight years already.

00:27:01 Speaker_02
Before Guantanamo Bay, the military was my entire world. I was talking about it every single day, every day. I loved it. I took advantage of the military. The military did not take advantage of me.

00:27:14 Speaker_11
Raul told me when he was graduating from high school, he needed some direction. The military gave him that, and he got to do incredible things. They sent him to Hawaii, paid for him to go to culinary school.

00:27:25 Speaker_11
He got a $20,000 bonus when he enlisted in 2007. Before Guantanamo, he deployed to Kosovo and to Afghanistan, which, surprisingly, he loved Afghanistan. Lost his virginity at Bagram.

00:27:39 Speaker_02
I became super gay there. Like, I would get my hair dyed black. I would get my eyebrows waxed because on the German side, they had a Russian ran barber salon. And so we would go in there and get facials. And it was crazy.

00:27:55 Speaker_11
After Afghanistan, Raul's next deployment was to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Pearl of the Antilles, which it says on the signs at Guantanamo, the Pearl of the Antilles. Raul had never been to the Caribbean before.

00:28:09 Speaker_11
Raul's job was to escort reporters like Sarah and me around the base and into the prison. Like most of the public affairs staff, and most of the staff at Guantanamo actually, Raul didn't know much about the detainees.

00:28:21 Speaker_11
But he was excited to tell reporters about all the good the military was doing for the prisoners.

00:28:26 Speaker_02
I was so excited for you to come out there, for Fox News, for BBC, for Al Jazeera News to come, so I can share the message of what we had to do as a military, and that we were going over and above as if we were some, you know, Salvation Army, and that we are there to keep them safe and to send them back to be with their family.

00:28:48 Speaker_02
And that's what we're doing. We are humanitarians here. That was my belief. That is what we were fed to be told. That is how we talked about it. That is what we believed.

00:29:00 Speaker_11
But the job was really stressful, and not just for the public affairs staff. A lot of people told us this. The flip side of the drinking culture was an intense anxiety, a fear of getting in trouble. It was like they were under the world's microscope.

00:29:15 Speaker_11
Sometimes the detainees would tattle on the guards. Sometimes their own leadership would go after them.

00:29:21 Speaker_11
Slip-ups, mistakes, and boneheaded decisions that would normally be handled with a slap on the wrist could wind up in Article 15 proceedings at Gitmo. Raul told me he preferred the fear and anxiety of Afghanistan. At least it was fleeting.

00:29:34 Speaker_02
At Guantanamo, you're like on edge the entire day. You can't really think. You can't be productive. And that's what was happening there.

00:29:42 Speaker_11
The public affairs staff especially were in a tricky position, caught between reporters who were notoriously impatient with government public affairs types and their own commanding officers who were watching their every move to make sure they didn't say too much or the wrong thing.

00:29:57 Speaker_11
So they kept to the safe harbors of their talking points. present day Raul demonstrated for me. For instance, if a reporter had asked, what percentage of prisoners are hunger striking right now?

00:30:09 Speaker_11
A question Sarah did ask, Raul might have said, thank you so much for that question. Our enteral feedings are overseen by our nursing staff.

00:30:16 Speaker_02
and making sure that they're really staying safe, you know, because our biggest takeaway and our biggest mission here at Guantanamo Bay is making sure of the safe and humane, legal, transparent care and custody of our detainees.

00:30:27 Speaker_02
And so, you know, this fully falls into that humane part. We want to make sure that we're caring. Oh, yeah.

00:30:36 Speaker_11
The safe, legal, humane thing. Raul said part of its power was in just how long it was.

00:30:42 Speaker_02
It didn't roll off the tongue, but what it did do was, it was just long enough to make you roll your eyes or not ask those questions or be inconvenienced. You know, it was just long enough.

00:30:54 Speaker_12
You're so right. We were so bored by the time you got to the end of that line that we just... Yeah.

00:31:00 Speaker_02
Like, you're not going to get anything from us and we're going to just tire you down. Yeah.

00:31:05 Speaker_11
What was the worst question a reporter could ask you?

00:31:09 Speaker_02
Camp 7.

00:31:11 Speaker_11
Camp 7. For nearly 15 years, Camp 7 was the super-secret compound where the government held its most important prisoners.

00:31:20 Speaker_11
These were the people accused of plotting 9-11, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other supposedly high-ranking members of Al-Qaeda, prisoners who had been held and tortured in secret CIA prisons overseas.

00:31:34 Speaker_11
For a long time, everything about Camp 7 was classified. Who was there, what went on there, and certainly its location at Guantanamo, down an unmarked, dusty road, tucked away in the scrubby hills.

00:31:46 Speaker_11
So if a reporter asked a question about Camp 7, like, if we have extra time, can we look for Camp 7? Which Sarah did ask.

00:31:54 Speaker_10
If we have extra time, can we look for Camp 7?

00:31:57 Speaker_11
Raul and the other public affairs people would deflect.

00:31:59 Speaker_14
I've never had anything said to me about Camp 7. I know nothing about it.

00:32:05 Speaker_07
— I mean, you hear rumors, but as far as what they tell, I don't know anything about it.

00:32:10 Speaker_11
— What are the rumors?

00:32:13 Speaker_07
— That there's a Cam 7, a secret Cam 7, yeah.

00:32:17 Speaker_11
— Raul got the impression they were supposed to act as if it wasn't worth thinking about, like it might not even be real.

00:32:25 Speaker_02
— Doesn't exist. Don't even ask about it. It's a media thing.

00:32:32 Speaker_12
Like a media myth?

00:32:34 Speaker_02
Yep. And it was violently made sure that we didn't know anything. It was like, you don't know anything. Don't say you know anything. Colonel Heath is the only one who could talk about it. You know nothing.

00:32:43 Speaker_11
But he said they did know about Camp 7. The existence of Camp 7 had been reported nearly eight years before. A simple Google search would surface a rash of information about Camp 7.

00:32:56 Speaker_11
The stuff Raul had learned in his public affairs training, about transparency and truth in journalism, he took it seriously. But now he was starting to feel uncomfortable.

00:33:05 Speaker_02
We didn't have this experience of being shady. We didn't have this experience of, you know, telling lies. There was a point where we all were so drained that that's when a lot of us signed up to do that secret mission I told you about.

00:33:24 Speaker_11
The secret mission after the break. Raul's secret mission came a few months into his deployment. He didn't really know what he was signing up for. He just knew it was a chance to get away from the tours and the reporters and work inside the prison.

00:33:55 Speaker_11
The mission was combat camera. It's not specific to Guantanamo. It's a regular military job. Instead of carrying a weapon during an operation, you carry a camera to document it for the commanders and for posterity, I suppose.

00:34:08 Speaker_11
Although the DOD has never released combat camera recordings from the prison. Raul's job on combat camera was to film the detainees who were on hunger strike as they were forced from their cells and then force-fed.

00:34:21 Speaker_11
He didn't really have a problem with the idea of force-feeding the hunger strikers.

00:34:25 Speaker_02
It was an act of protest. And so the military had to keep them alive. I mean, what are they going to do? Could you imagine the story that gets out if a detainee died on our watch because they starved to death?

00:34:40 Speaker_11
During his shifts, Raul would sit in the combat camera office until a call came in. He'd make his way to the cell block in a golf cart.

00:34:48 Speaker_11
And then, wearing a face shield for protection, he would film the guards as they burst into a prisoner's cell, strapped the prisoner to a board, and carried him out.

00:34:57 Speaker_11
Next, the guards would put the prisoner in a feeding chair, his arms, legs, and head all fastened to the chair with straps.

00:35:05 Speaker_11
Once the prisoner was secured and couldn't move, the medics snaked a feeding tube up his nose and down his throat into his stomach, and pumped the Ensure, or whatever nutrition drink they were using at the time, into his body.

00:35:17 Speaker_11
Raoul filmed the whole procedure. Sometimes, as the prisoners were being force-fed, they would speak directly into his camera.

00:35:24 Speaker_02
They would talk. They would be like, you know, why am I still here? Can you send me home? You know, I don't want to be here anymore. You know, I'm just like you. I have a son who's your age.

00:35:34 Speaker_02
And there was a certain one that would always talk to me and talk at me because he was used to combat camera. So he would talk at me and tell me to save him and just show those videos to the public. And yeah.

00:35:54 Speaker_02
I think in the moment I was just very numb to it. At that time I was just numb to it.

00:36:03 Speaker_11
But he says he kind of had to force himself to be numb. A vague unease was floating around in his psyche. It was easier to ignore it. And that worked OK until one day his perspective on the military and on Guantanamo shifted.

00:36:19 Speaker_11
What happened was he got in trouble for something that had nothing to do with combat camera. Raul's roommate told his commanding officer he thought Raul was having an affair with one of Raul's friends.

00:36:31 Speaker_11
Raul was married, and adultery is a big no-no in the military. An investigation was launched. Raul was put on probation for 60 days and was passed over for promotion. Then, months later, Raul got in trouble again for failing a breathalyzer test.

00:36:49 Speaker_11
All of this was a shock. He says he wasn't having an affair, his roommate was just homophobic. And he says he'd only had one glass of wine, that they gave him a second breathalyzer and he passed. But his commanding officer punished him anyway.

00:37:03 Speaker_11
He had devoted years of his life to the military. He believed in the military, lived by its definitions of good and bad. Now, suddenly, he was on the outside of the good guys club.

00:37:14 Speaker_11
And being on the outside, he started looking at things on the inside differently.

00:37:19 Speaker_11
So when Sarah asked Raul that question you heard earlier about whether he ever struggled over the imprisonment of the detainees, and he gave her that pained answer, he says what was actually going on was he was starting to glitch, to ask himself those same questions Sarah was asking everyone.

00:37:37 Speaker_11
He was starting to feel complicit in what he called stealing people's lives. Soon after we met him, Raul and his unit returned to Arizona. When they had first deployed to Guantanamo, Raul was a cheerful, confident guy, a model soldier.

00:37:54 Speaker_02
By the time he left, I came away thinking that I was a piece of shit.

00:37:58 Speaker_11
A few months after he got home, Raul says he had a panic attack and eventually got a diagnosis of PTSD from Afghanistan and Guantanamo.

00:38:07 Speaker_11
Which is striking, considering in 2011 and 2012, when Raul was in Afghanistan, we were actively fighting a war there. Hundreds of Americans were killed in Afghanistan during those two years.

00:38:20 Speaker_11
And then here he was, at Caribbean Guantanamo Bay, where he could sip pina coladas in the sunshine and go to the beach if he wanted. And he comes home and falls apart.

00:38:30 Speaker_02
I think it's weird that I don't have any negative ties to what happened in Afghanistan and what happened in Kosovo.

00:38:38 Speaker_02
And I assume because I trained for those possibilities, we go through, we have a simulation of what it's like to be flipped over in a truck sideways and upside down, and you have to navigate yourself and unbuckle yourself inside of a Humvee.

00:38:53 Speaker_02
Like those are the trainings we do. So I was trained. for Afghanistan. I was trained for Kosovo. You cannot train for Guantanamo Bay.

00:39:09 Speaker_10
You cannot train for a thing if you don't know what it is, if the people around you aren't being honest about the whole trembling heart of the endeavor.

00:39:17 Speaker_10
What made Guantanamo so confusing was that to satisfy our terrified post-911 needs, we had to shove aside the old, time-tested rules about how to treat war prisoners. And for the ordinary people who had to operate inside the new rules,

00:39:32 Speaker_10
There was a gap between what they were being told and what they were seeing for themselves. Thousands upon thousands of military personnel, hundreds of prisoners, everybody trying to bridge that gap. Everybody scrambling through the same experiment.

00:39:47 Speaker_10
This season of Serial, a history of Guantanamo, told by people who know things the rest of us don't, about the consequences of an improvised justice system.

00:39:56 Speaker_10
It's going to be six stories, starting with a guy who acted out the stuff of nightmares, which, at the time, all part of his job. That's next time. Serials produced by Jessica Weisberg, Dana Chivas, and me. Our editor is Julie Snyder.

00:40:30 Speaker_10
Additional reporting by Cora Currier. Fact-checking by Ben Phelan. Music supervision, sound design, and mixing by Phoebe Wang. Original score by Sofia Dele Alessandri. Editing help from Alvin Melleth, Jen Guerra, and Ira Glass.

00:40:44 Speaker_10
Our contributing editors are Carol Rosenberg and Rosina Ali. Additional research by Emma Grillo and Amir Kafaji. Our standards editor is Susan Wessling. Legal review by Elamin Sumar. The art for our show comes from Pablo Delcan and Max Guter.

00:40:59 Speaker_10
Additional production from Daniel Guimet. The supervising producer for serial productions is Ndeye Chubu. Our executive assistant is Mac Miller. Sam Dolnik is deputy managing editor of The New York Times.

00:41:10 Speaker_10
Special thanks to Katie Mingle, Alyssa Ship, Anita Badejo, David Kestenbaum, Elizabeth Davis-Moore, Nina Lassem, and Michelle Shepard.