S04 - Ep. 3: Ahmad the Iguana Feeder
2024-04-04 01:01:47
Serial returns with a history of Guantánamo told by people who lived through key moments in Guantánamo’s evolution, who know things the rest of us don’t about what it’s like to be caught inside an improvised justice system. Serial Productions makes narrative podcasts whose quality and innovation transformed the medium. “Serial” began in 2014 as a spinoff of the public radio show “This American Life.” In 2020, we joined the New York Times Company. Our shows have reached many millions of listeners and have won nearly every major journalism award for audio, including the first-ever Peabody Award given to a podcast. Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest Serial Productions news: https://bit.ly/3FIOJj9 Have thoughts or feedback on our shows? Email us at serialshows@nytimes.com
How much of that is true?
None of it is true.
Previously on Serial We are humanitarians here. That was my belief, that is how we talked about it, that is what we believed.
Everybody's in good shape, everybody's looking good.
I mean, just everyone was getting drunk and getting laid.
I tried to explain everything I can and try to persuade them that we're not the people. This whole thing, man, it's like, I still have resentment about this guy, I still think that he's complicit some way and we'll never know how.
From Serial Productions and The New York Times, this is serial season 4. Guantanamo. One prison camp told Week by Week I'm Sarah Koenig.
After September 11th, a call cascaded down through the ranks of the military. If you speak another language besides English, raise your hand Pashto, Urdu, Arabic speakers. We need you. So, at Travis Air Force Base in northern California, a slight young supply clerk named Ahmed al-Halabi raised his hand.
I felt important, by the way. Yeah, I'm like, wow, I'm like, everybody wants my skills, like, Yeah, I am here. So I went and they tested me and of course, I passed.
Of course, he passed. He's originally from Syria. A couple of months later, senior airman Al-Halabi landed in Guantanamo November of 2002, less than a year after the camp had opened. He'd be working as a translator, what the military calls a linguist, Ahmed said. He got no advanced training for this job.
Instead, as soon as they got off the plane, the new arrivals gathered in a huge, empty hangar for a briefing.
You get a quick briefing of, you know, you're here. Don't feed the animals, don't, you know, do this and that? don't touch the iguanas. It's going to be hot, hydrate, you know, just the basic information.
They literally are telling you about the iguanas and the animals the first thing you get off the plane. Yeah, of course.
That's, yeah, that's like the very first thing. And at every briefing you hear about the iguanas, every single briefing that you get, they talk about the iguanas. I don't know why, because they said this is an endangered species. Don't feed them, don't touch them, whatever, and you know, they go on with other things.
This was, and still is, an important rule at Guantanamo Don't feed the iguanas. But then when Ahmed was showing me photos later of his time in the Air Force and at Guantanamo,....
Oh, this is military.
This is iguana.
Of course, I'm feeding the iguana.
You're not supposed to do that.
I know that's what they said. No, they said, don't feed it, but it was very, very cute coming and looking for food, so I left something outside and ate it. So I'm like, she better, she needs more, more. Guantanamo.
If the government tells me not to feed the iguana, I will never feed the iguana, but Ahmed fed the iguana. I took this as an opening to analyze his relationship to authority. You're not a stickler for the rule, for the sake of the rule. It's more like, if it feels rational to you, you'll follow the rule, but if it feels totally irrational, you'll be like, what's the harm?
Is that true?
That is absolutely true. Okay, it's absolutely on point. I Okay, I mean, rules are rules, and I respect the rules, but there's an alternate to the rules.
You know?
It's just what the military likes to hear. What did they say? You know, the alt alt fact, right? Alternate facts.
Alternative Facts.
Right so, alternate facts.
Alternate rules?
Alternative rules? alternate, yeah.
At Guantanamo, Ahmed El Halabi followed some alt rules. That is, he broke some rules, rules he considered minor. His miscalculation was assuming that were he to get busted for breaking minor rules, the consequences he'd face would also be minor. That the punishment would match the crime. What he didn't bank on was that American investigators and prosecutors, in a fever of hypervigilance, were also operating under a system of Alt rules. And alt facts, which, once arrayed against him, nearly destroyed his life.
At age 24, Ahmed was facing the full force of the government, accused not just of being a criminal, but of being an enemy. And then, about a year later, the government let him go. What happened to Ahmed, it's safe to say, is also what happened to many detainees at Guantanamo. Someone with authority suspected they were dangerous and then looked for information to support that suspicion. But for the most part, the information our government gathered about detainees is invisible to the public, murky, often secret, uncontested. So that all these years later, we regular people don't really know what to think. Whether or not it was right to hold them or right to let them go.
We're left guessing.
Ahmed's case, though, made it back home to the mainland to a court-martial in sunny California. And voila. A fat record of trial, witness statements and search warrants and hearing transcripts that tell us exactly what went down. The who, the why, the what, in the name of all that is sacred. Garish details of the case against Ahmed Al-Halabi Ahmed's never told this story before, not in 20 years, not in full. It's going to unfold over two episodes, part 1 after the break.
Hi, this is Lori Leibovich, editor of Well. At the New York Times, there's a lot of misinformation in the health and wellness space, but at the New York Times, no matter what the topic, we apply the same journalistic standards to everything we write about. Whether it's the gut microbiome or how to get a good night's sleep, even if we're talking about something like, Is it bad for me to drink coffee on an empty stomach? Everything that our readers get when they dig into a well article has been vetted. Our reporters are consulting experts, calling dozens of people doing the research.
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Ahmed joined the Air Force in the year 2000.
He'd just graduated high school, was working two jobs restaurant, post office, living with his old school dad in Dearborn, Michigan. And experiencing the generational chafe of a 20-year-old who wants out from under. So he figures, let me check out the military, an option his father did not condone. But Ahmed, muscles forward, finds one of those storefront recruiting strips. Air Force recruiter signs him up. They send him here and there for training and finally off to Travis Air Force Base to work the night shift as an airplane parts guy. Not a flashy job.
But Ahmed thrived in the Air Force. he earned an early promotion to senior airman at the base commissary. He bought an aspirational lieutenant insignia and planted it on his desk. This was his 20-year plan, he'd be stationed all over the world.
He was in it to win it. Still, Ahmed knew he was an oddity at Travis, a Muslim, Syrian, Arabic-speaking airman. He figured he was anomalous for at least a hundred-mile radius, which people were mostly cool about, he said, until September 11th. And then his differences began to prick.
A few people made comments about his name Al-Halabi sounds like Airman Al-Qaeda to me, or questioned his loyalties. For the most part. Ahmed let this stuff slide. His English wasn't as strong then, and he wasn't confident he could marshal the arguments and the vocabulary to change anyone's mind. And then came the call for Arabic speakers. Ahmed and his Arabic were needed at Guantanamo, so they sent him to Guantanamo.
And suddenly he's seeing all these troops like him, Muslim, Arabic-speaking people who were also serving, and not just Air Force, Navy Army, Marines, National Guard.
And that was like, amazing, you know, that is the best thing I've ever seen. Like, I see uniformed, you know, people from my, you know, from my culture, right? Like, even though from different countries, like not even a Syrian, there's no Syrians.
Well, there was one guy, but he wasn't from Damascus, like Ahmed, so he didn't really count anyway. Ahmed's getting to know. This gaggle of linguists, about 30 people, Russian speakers, Urdu speakers, Pashto speakers, Turkish speakers. Most are Muslim, some are Christian, some are religious, some are not. Ahmed's Arabic spoken and written is excellent.
Many of the Arabic linguists at Guantanamo couldn't say the same. He's placed in the DocX office document exploitation, which means letters. Basically. His job is to translate letters detainees write to their families, and also letters the families write to the detainees. After they get translated, the letters go to the intel folks who decide what to censor.
So as soon as we arrived, we saw that there's boxes of backlog, boxes and boxes of backlog.
Outgoing or incoming?
We don't know, just huge boxes.
The DocX backlog, around 1,500 letters, by one estimate, was a big deal. The camp was holding 600-plus men at the time, another DocX translator told me. The International Committee of the Red Cross was complaining that some families hadn't heard from their detained relative for more than a year. But these letters, a lot of them, were complicated.
Impressive to read, maybe, but agony. To translate, the detainees would write of dreams, discuss stories from the Quran, which might require a high level of Quranic knowledge on the part of the translator. So you don't say translate? A reference to a 7th century martyr named Jaffer, who flies with the angels as Jaffer, the pilot. And thereby send the whole intel group into a TIZ because they think they might have a lead on the 20th hijacker, which happened.
Besides being devout, some of the detainees were erudite, Aukman remembers. Their written Arabic was dense and formal.
Quotes from medieval times, right, just on on, never-ending. They have nothing to do and they've got a month to write this letter, right? So they take their very long time. So you've got, like a half-page introduction and like, few sentences of news, which has no news.
And then another half-page of conclusion, one well-crafted letter like that. If you translate it word for word, it could take you hours. They're working long shifts in this trailer, and they're writing this stuff out by hand. So they start looking for shortcuts. Maybe instead of literal translations of all those poetic introductory prayers, for example.
Why don't we just say greetings?
So we did that, we started saying greetings and you just skipped, like five lines.
Aukman is a computer guy, he'd been working toward a degree in computer science. He's scandalized that they're doing this work with pen and paper. It's so slow. He's got a personal laptop.
So they ask the boss, can we bring in our own computers to use for these translations? The boss okays it. They're waiting on office computers. But in the meantime, sure, knock yourselves out. Aukman brings in his laptop. A couple other people do, too.
They begin to conquer the backlog.
Maybe some of what I'm telling you here sounds fiddly and small. But the details of Aukman's story, exactly how he did his job, exactly what he did in his spare time, these all start to matter now. Because many months later, Aukman's going to see a lot of these same details. Reflected back Funhaus style on a criminal charge sheet, his whole self mistranslated.
By the end of that first year, the prison complex was growing, more detainees had arrived on the island. The guards, the medical staff, the Muslim chaplain, everyone needed more help communicating, so Aukman started working inside the prison blocks. I'd assumed the translators at Guantanamo were treated with reverence, or at least respect.
They were skilled and rare, like neurosurgeons or magicians. But, in fact, Aukman and many of the other linguists occupied a liminal and sometimes lonely realm. At Guantanamo. There were a link between us and them, needed by all, but fully trusted by none. That betweenness at a place like Guantanamo would end up making Aukman and his cohort vulnerable.
So you're kind of in a what do you call it? between a rock and a hard place.
The rock was the detainees, who, by and large, hated the interpreters. They'd throw water on them or pee, or whatever else call them infidels.
There was also a very funny way they used to call, you know, so when we would come in from the gates of the cell blocks, you know, you say.
So means here they arrive like the low, the low class, low level people, right? they come.
Here come the bums.
Here come the bums, exactly, so here come the bums, exactly.
We would laugh because that's how they think of us.
The bums were working for the American oppressors, which, of course, Aukman didn't feel that way. He assumed the prisoners had done something to warrant their capture and detention. Aukman already had a sense of who some of them were from, reading their letters, or at least what their lives were like. But now he was talking to them face to face, hearing their stories.
There wasn't an outlier that was like, Oh yeah, this guy is really, really bad. So you can't not start having these thoughts like, what the heck did he do to arrive here? Is it true that this guy is guilty or no?
Aukman knew better than to openly ask that question, all the interpreters knew better. A friend of Aukman's, the guy we're calling Nasser, who helped the special projects team with the mock rendition of Muhammadu Salahi, Nasser's. The person who made me understand how carefully linguists like him and Aukman felt they had to tread. How the very same skills that earned them this important assignment made them equal opportunity targets, Nasser translated during interrogations, which sometimes got ugly.
As I'm translating, they would stop answering, or if they're one of those stubborn people that don't answer anything, they just have their head on the ground and they're hearing me say all these nasty, insulting things about his family and what we're going to do to his wife and his sister and his daughter and all of these things. He just puts his head up and he looks at me, he's like, you're one of them. He would spit on my face and I would just completely keep going, translating like, as if nothing happened, right? But leaving that, you're like, you know, am i one of them?
I mean, is he it?
I don't know.
Nasser's Muslim, he spent his teenage years in the Middle East, surrounded by news of war. He gets why? A kid from Yemen or Kuwait might be tempted by the adventure and heroism of running off to Afghanistan to join the Mujahideen to protect Muslim land from a foreign invader? That image of jihad, a positive image, was drummed into him, too, when he lived in the Middle East, both at home and in the media. But he's also American.
Like Ahmed, he was living in the U.
S on 9-11. He believes in this mission and he's good at this job. Truly bilingual in English and Arabic, he was a favorite of the interrogators, his fellow Americans shouting when they shout, matching their pitch.
Hours. Just like you think your Allah is going to help you, you think your Quran is correct. You know, it's a bunch of garbage. It's a bop, bop, bop, and I'm listening to this and I'm translating it.
I am translating it, I'm not changing any of the words. But I'm like, you're not only disrespecting this object that's in front of us, you're disrespecting me. I'm on your side.
I'm on your team here, or do I need to pick a team here? Am I on his team? There was some kind of personality, like, you know, identity crisis. Even within me. I'm like, Where do I belong here?
I asked Nasser a touchy-feely question, Did you ever say anything to the interrogators after about how it made you feel? Nasser said, No.
I didn't want to feel like I'm a sympathizer with the detainees because that would open up another can of suspicion.
Right, I'd always associated a sympathizer with nazis or McCarthyism, but after 9-11, this word made a comeback. Terrorist sympathizer, Al-Qaeda sympathizer, politicians are saying it.
It's coming up in congressional hearings. Muslims all over America were feeling surveilled, and they were surveilled. It was the dawn of the Patriot Act and no-fly lists. The FBI was asking thousands of Muslims to come in for voluntary interviews. People's phone records were gathered.
Their mosques infiltrated. So, yeah, Sympathizer was in the air. All the linguists I spoke to were hearing it, especially from the Guard force. If the detainees hating the linguists was the rock, the guards hating the linguists, that was the hard place. With the exception of a unit from Puerto Rico that everyone said was nice and reasonable. The guards, army, military police looked askance at the interpreters, especially the non-white, non-Christian ones.
Ahmed said they didn't even bother to hide their disdain.
Yeah, yeah, they would kick us out of the block. Sometimes, you know, yeah, so sometimes, you know. We'll be working, and, you know, either distributing books or, you know, trying to do our work. Like, you know, you, you get out, get out of here.
You sympathizers, you get out here, you're, you know, yeah, yeah, it was just right there in your face.
Stepping inside that relationship between the guards and the detainees was the most harrowing aspect of the job. For a lot of the interpreters. Ahmed included, now that he was working in the prison blocks, mostly because of what's known as irfing.
Irfing actually is disturbing to see it was, and I've never seen a reason for it.
IRF stands for Immediate Reaction Force, a team of guards who'd be called in. When a detainee was determined to be obstinate or combative. Their job was to forcibly remove the detainee from his cell, a process known un-euphemistically as a forced cell extraction. Euphemistically, it's an irfing. the irfings were frequent, they were violent and sometimes bloody.
Ten, maybe fifteen times, Ahmed said he was called in to interpret when an irfing was about to happen. He'd try to get the detainee to comply with whatever the guards were asking. He'd plead with the person sometimes, or maybe quietly ask the guards team leader whether all this was really necessary. But he says it rarely worked. Other linguists I talked to, including Ed Brooks, an army sergeant at the time, got the impression that Ahmed had an especially hard time witnessing the irfings. Which, to Ed, anyway, made sense. Ahmed lived in Syria until he was 16. Of course, he's going to identify more with the detainees than someone like Ed, who learned Arabic in the army. And described himself at the time as the quote most annoying type of born-again Christian unquote.
Ed, too, was disturbed by the irfings. He described them like this.
Like, five dudes in hockey gear would come to the cell, spray him with OC, which is pepper spray, and then store him in there and hogtie them. Cuff his hands and feet together behind his back, put him on a stretcher, take him out to the yard, spray his face with water to get the pepper spray out. And then, like, take all his items. And eventually, one of the colonels, I can't remember, who decided to start, like shaving them.
They would shave the beard.
Like, no, they would shave them completely.
Oh, like hair and beard.
Yeah, I saw them shave eyebrows all the time.
Ed said the official explanation for the shaving was a medical one, so that the pepper spray didn't cling to the person's hair and cause further skin irritation.
But everyone knew it wasn't that it was to shame them because a beard is a status symbol. The shaving was ridiculous and the guards would laugh about it.
Like it was a relief valve for animosity, it was bullying, simple fucking bullying. Like they had the chance to fucking. They had the chance and the excuse to do something, and they did it.
Ed's discomfort with the Irfings neither here nor there, but Achmed's discomfort would come back to bite him.
To relieve the pressure of their work at Guantanamo, troops commonly turned to the twin diversions of booze and sex. But Achmed's an observant Muslim, he doesn't drink or go to clubs. Wasn't looking for love, at least not in Cuba. He'd recently become engaged to a Syrian woman living in the UAE.
So I found refuge in going to the prayer area, just going and spending time there. Because there were some books, there were some Qurans, and it was peaceful. It was nice.
Soon enough, the Muslims who gathered for Friday prayer became a small circle of friends, including Army Captain James Yee, the Muslim chaplain, whose Arabic wasn't great. So Achmed started working directly with Yee. Running the detainee library, evaluating and delivering books and magazines to detainees. Nasser was also part of their group, so was a Navy petty officer, a Palestinian guy who worked in the DOCX office and who asked that we not use his name. And so was their commander, Air Force Captain Tarek Hashim.
Achmed and Captain Hashim hung out a lot, which was noteworthy. An enlisted guy and an officer palling around. They got scuba certified together. And for a while, Achmed said, the various linguist cliques, the partiers, the video gamers, the religious types all seemed to get along. But then, Achmed said, the mood began to shift. A bunch of people, Achmed included, were originally told they'd be going to Guantanamo for a 90-day deployment.
But early 2003 We're evading Iraq. The military needs everyone to stay put on duty. An Air Force commander is quoted in Guantanamo's weekly newsletter, announcing that airmen like Achmed are quote frozen in place, indefinitely, unquote. Their tours are extended until who knows when. Now that roommate you can't stand, you might be stuck with that person for six or eight or ten months. People are getting cranky with each other.
And some of the other linguists start resenting Achmed in particular. He's always hanging around with officers, Captain Hashim, Chaplain Yi. What's that all about? Why does he get to drive around with them?
Achmed said That was a big thing. Cars were a luxury on the island.
You know, I go with Captain Hashim, so let's go to the prayer area, let's go to the beach. We can go, you know, for breakfast instead of waiting for the bus.
So you started seeing some people with, you know, kind of jealousy, that. Why am I so close to Captain Hashim? For example? Why is the circle so tight?
People grumbled that Achmed was getting preferential treatment, better hours, better assignments. Captain Hashim chose him to go on what's called an Air Bridge mission, a military flight to pick up a bunch more detainees from Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan and bring them back to Guantanamo. An air bridge mission like that was a coveted assignment. It was exciting. The details were secret.
Achmed had only been at Guantanamo a couple months and he didn't even have security clearance, but Hashim chose him anyway, which caused an intense amount of grousing. The atmosphere got so acrimonious. A military inspector general came down from Miami to look into the complaints, according to a story later published in the Seattle Times. The favoritism was unsubstantiated by month, seven or eight, Achmed said. The alliances and antagonisms had subdivided.
Christians versus Muslims, Less religious Muslims versus more religious Muslims.
Tension, right? So we're no longer now wanting to hang with each other, so we became separate groups. We are not talking like properly, just talking work, and even the work is, you know, you do it, why didn't you do it?
It's not my job, you know, the smallest thing now becomes an issue.
To a point that some people moved out from dorms and changed so they no longer want to live with each other. Like I moved from a room to the kitchen.
His roommate was a loudmouth instigating Russian, so Achmed put a bed in the corner of the dining area, dragged over some lockers for privacy. He tried to keep the petty rivalries in perspective, keep his eyes on the prize, a visa for his soon-to-be wife, his summer wedding in Damascus.
Again, I didn't care like I'm leaving, I'm going to get married, I don't care about all of this. It's going to be history very soon.
And then you get the camera.
A disposable camera that Achmed had gotten from his Secret Santa Achmed had misplaced the camera. the Navy Petty officer said. Achmed was looking all over for it.
I remember one time Al-Halabi asking, he was asking me again and again. He said, Hey, remember? I had a disposable camera in the desk here? I used it yesterday. I'm like, I don't know if you use it. where did you put it? he said. I put it here on the desk.
So somehow that camera he used, somebody took it. Al-Halabi did look for that camera everywhere. I could never find it, and now we know where it went. The camera thing was the beginning of everything, like the beginning of the end of my career.
I believe so.
A couple of lousy snapshots we're about to do them in. That's after the break.
Achmed finally got permission to leave Guantanamo in June of 2003.
He started what's called out-processing, packed up some stuff into a box clothes, some snorkeling gear, a blanket. On June 24th, 2003, he took the box to the Guantanamo Post Office and mailed it back to his address at Travis Air Force Base in California. Also on June 24th, he signed a form that included a security debriefing acknowledgement. I affirmed. The form read that I have returned all JTF Gitmo defense information in my custody.
About a month later, Achmed flies out. He'd been anxious about making it off the island in time to catch his flight to Syria. But in late July, a seat suddenly frees up on an outbound flight to the military airbase in Jacksonville, Florida. As soon as he arrives at the Jacksonville terminal, some men approach him. Investigators.
I'd like to talk to you, Where's your duffel bag? And they just pushed me, so just like, took my hand, you know, and like, pushed me. And there was like one guy who opened the bathroom door and they locked the door.
So they pushed you into the bathroom and locked the door.
And like, you know what's going on? He said, You know, we're just going to do a quick search. You know? And you know, started going through my pockets and I'm confused, like, What are you doing? what's going on?
He thought maybe they've confused me with someone else, or maybe there was a screw-up in a translation. He remembers telling them, My commander, Captain Hashim, is here, somewhere in the airport. We were on the same flight. You want to grab him?
Maybe he can clear this up, no? They want to talk to Achmed alone. They handcuff him and escort him into the main terminal, where he's hoping the hundreds of people aren't seeing him at the center of this entourage.
The men, an Air Force investigator, an FBI guy, an air Force counterintelligence guy, drive Achmed to a nearby office. Sit him down, ask him if they can search his bags. He says, Okay, they ask him questions, they ask him. Did you take any photos inside Camp Delta? Unauthorized photos?
Did you take pictures? I'm like, well.
Well, he did take a couple pictures. He says. He can't remember exactly what he was thinking, but he had this disposable camera in his pocket. He's standing outside his office trailer, which is to his left, some fencing to his right, a guard tower straight ahead, and he snaps a photo. Maybe half accidentally. He says he thinks he was trying to figure out how the camera worked.
Then he snaps a second one, same view, but deliberate, composed, more carefully. The guard tower isn't manned. But still, he knew he wasn't supposed to take pictures inside the prison camp. Everyone knew no photo signs were posted everywhere.
Then I'm like, Oh shit, this is, yeah, this is, I need to stop. I'm not going to take any more pictures because, you know, they always talk about, don't take pictures.
He took a bunch more pictures with that camera of his friends, fishing the beach, etc.
All aloud. And then the camera disappeared, and Ahmed sweated it a little, asked around, but it never turned up, so he let it go. But here was an investigator asking him directly Did you take unauthorized photos?
I immediately went back to that moment and like, the camera went missing, so no one knows if I took any pictures. So no, I didn't take any pictures, right? And he said, Well, no, we have the pictures, like, Okay, so you have it.
Great, you have my camera, so yes, I took pictures, so I immediately acknowledged that if you have my camera, then okay. So I need the other photos because I'd like to see them, I didn't get to see them.
Yeah, you were sort of missing the point of the question.
I know actually I was more concerned.
Ahmed says he was actually relieved. He figured now he knew the size and shape of the trouble he was in. Personnel had snapped unauthorized photos before, according to a prison commander. At the time. The consequences for it were usually pretty soft.
Okay, good, you got me. Let's talk about the camera, and that's completely, you know, for me. I thought, this is what they all want to know. Okay, so you took pictures?
It was wrong. Okay, let's get on, let me go, I need to go catch a flight.
I've got a connecting flight today back to my base in California, and then in two days I'm flying to Syria to get married. My mom's meeting me in London on the way, everyone's waiting for me in Damascus, so can we move it along?
No, because suspicions Ahmed didn't even know we're cooking had begun to boil over. The camera is not all they want to talk about, and he's not the only person they want to talk to. Back at the airport that same day, July 23rd, 2003, investigators had also stopped and questioned Captain Hashim.
A month and a half later, September 10th, Chaplain James Yee took that same flight to Jacksonville to go on leave. He collected his bags.
And as soon as I got to the door.
These two FBI guys were there. Can we ask you a couple questions? U.S military has charged a former Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo with mishandling classified information.
It was all over the news. First, the announcement of Yee's arrest. He supposedly had secret documents in his backpack, then of Ahmed's.
Senior airman Ahmed Al-Halabi Al-Halabi worked as an Arabic translator at Guantanamo, trying to pass classified military secrets. Violations of the Federal Espionage Act. So far, three former workers at Guantanamo have been arrested in a probe of alleged espionage.
Alleged espionage, including charges Al-Halabi.
Third guy arrested was another Arabic linguist, Ahmed Behelba, a civilian contractor originally from Egypt, stopped at Logan Airport in Boston in late September when customs agents searched his bags. They found 132 CDs, mostly music and videos, but among them was one with classified information copied onto it, also in late September. Their friend, the Navy Petty officer, he's at a training in Los Angeles. When he sees a couple of Navy investigators in the lobby of the hotel where he's staying, he recognizes one of them from a prior assignment.
So when I saw him, I'm like, smiling.
So they look at you like, Oh, hey, how are you doing?
Yeah, but they look at me and their looks, like, look different, like, like, like, I am guilty or something.
He found out they'd questioned his shipmates back in Italy when he went to his commander for support. The guy told him I would advise you to hire a lawyer.
The investigators in Jacksonville interviewed Ahmed for four or five hours, including a break when Ahmed says they fetched him a limp filet-o-fish sandwich from McDonald's. Afterwards, they took Ahmed to jail. He still didn't know what was going on. Pretty soon, he sits down with a lawyer, Air Force major Kim London.
And she says, Well.
Admiral Hollaby, They're accusing you of very serious things.
Espionage aiding the enemy misbehavior before the enemy. Ahmed didn't even know what some of the words meant. Over time, this charge sheet would grow attempted espionage, making false statements, bank fraud. At its most alarming, it contained 30 offenses.
What Major London was seeing, and Ahmed was slowly catching up to her, was that the government thought Ahmed was a spy, possibly part of a spy ring, or even a sleeper cell. That first meeting, Major London talked him through it.
And she lays out all of the charges and that the government made it so clear that they have so much evidence. And you know that I'm going to go away for a very long time, if not in execution.
She told you that.
Yeah, so she said that this is so grave that, you know, execution is on the line.
As of July 2003, when Ahmed was arrested, the government's principal evidence against him consisted of two photos from inside the wire. He'd initially lied about having taken. And on his laptop, they'd found 186 detainee letters he'd translated that he said he'd forgotten to delete. Not exactly overwhelming, but then Ahmed rule breaker made this grave situation even worse for himself.
Remember that box? When Ahmed was getting ready to leave Guantanamo, he'd packed a box of his stuff and mailed it back to himself. At Travis Air Force Base in California. Now, that box is sitting at the base Post Office waiting for him. Ahmed's in jail, though he can't pick it up.
So he tries to get his mail, including this box, forwarded to his sister, who lives in Anaheim. Instead, in early September of 2003, an investigator figures out it's sitting there, they get a warrant, collect the box and bring it back to their office. Lieutenant Colonel Brian Wheeler was the lead prosecutor on Ahmed's case. The day the investigators opened the box at Travis, Wheeler was working the case at Guantanamo.
So after they opened the box, we had a conversation on Secure Line.
Oh, they called you.
Yeah.
Okay, were they excited?
Sure, yeah, I mean, we, uh, when you're working a case, uh, you're looking for more evidence, and and this was, frankly, I thought, better evidence than what they had so far.
Back at their office, the investigators opened some beers to celebrate their smoking gun. Inside the box, wrapped in a blanket, were a bunch of papers, many of them innocuous, but others well. There was a complete list of detainee names and their corresponding internment serial numbers or ISNs. At the time. The U.S government hadn't publicly confirmed the identities of any detainees, so this list was alarming.
Also in the box, they found papers related to Ahmed's Air Bridge mission to Afghanistan, the one some of his colleagues got worked up about. The papers included details about logistics and security, and they were marked secret, which meant Ahmed had knowingly sent himself classified documents. And even more, suspect had then tried to get the incriminating box moved to his sister's address.
We we have to be, uh, very suspicious about that.
It did not look good. Why would he have secreted these papers out of Cuba, why would he try to send them to his sister? Along with the box? Investigators at Travis also intercepted a letter to Ahmed from the Syrian embassy in Washington confirming Ahmed's passage to Syria. And Qatar. Was Ahmed trying to pass information about detainees to someone overseas?
The box contributed additional spying crimes to the already vertiginous charge sheet.
The government treated Ahmed not so much as a defendant, but as an enemy asset, an operative working for, who knows who, maybe Syria, maybe Al-Qaeda. They took no chances on security. While he awaited trial at Travis Air Force base, Ahmed was confined to a makeshift holding cell. A toiletless metal box that his attorneys would later describe as akin to the inside of a filing cabinet. Later, the Air Force moved Ahmed more than 300 miles south to a different base, which had better jail offerings. But they kept him isolated, forbade him from speaking Arabic on the phone or in person. For his arraignment, they put him in a kevlar vest and helicoptered him to court, masses of cops at the ready.
When they transported him by van, they fretted about being followed. During one drive, a guard reported that Ahmed was messing with his digital watch, perhaps timing the route. They confiscated the watch and claimed they were sending it out for analysis.
Meanwhile, back at Guantanamo, linguists were reading the shocking news of these arrests and not knowing what to think. Maybe there were spies among them, maybe they're going to accuse me next. One by one, the linguists were brought in by counterintelligence for questioning interrogations, basically.
Some that lasted six hours, nine hours, people were polygraphed, read their rights quote just to be on the safe side. A handful of Ahmed's fellow linguists, perhaps to hedge their bets, would end up writing insinuating statements about Ahmed. Describing him as excessively conservative in his beliefs or excessively shady in his behavior. Notably, the ones who gave such statements were not Muslim.
By late fall of 2003, months after news stories all over the world showed Ahmed being brought into court in handcuffs, the government's big balloon of a case against Ahmed was threatened by a big hatpin of a problem.
We weren't sure about the espionage.
That's Lieutenant Colonel Brian Wheeler, again, the prosecutor. The government, it appeared, had no evidence that Ahmed passed any information to anyone or that he planned to.
We had indications that something had happened.
What were those indications? Do you remember what the indications were?
Well, there's some things I can't talk about. You can quote me on this one? It was total bullshit.
And that's Donald Rakoff, one of Ahmed's three attorneys. He'd been in the air force himself for 28 years, but by the time he joined Ahmed's case, he was a civilian. Freer than the uniformed attorneys. To deploy spirited language.
This was probably the worst of any u.
S military court-martial I've ever been involved in.
And I've tried 200 courts-martial.
It was just a cascade of errors.
I know litigators tend to be fast and loose with the superlative insults, but it's true. Confusion abounded in Ahmed's case. The government tried again and again to find indications that the way Ahmed had done his job in Guantanamo. The way he translated, simplifying the prayers, the way he'd used his computer weren't simply shortcuts, they were deceptions. Investigators needled deep into his hard drive looking for evidence.
He'd uploaded secret information or embedded it in his personal website, or emailed detainee information to someone, but there was nothing. FBI agents secretly raided his sister's house in Anaheim, breaking a window and rifling through their home office, traumatizing her in the process. No evidence there either. Also getting to the government's case. They did not know what was classified and what was not.
Brian Wheeler, the prosecutor, told me that early on in the case, he'd gone to a meeting at the Pentagon, where he'd been informed in serious tones. That the list of detainees and their ISN numbers was classified not just secret, but possibly top secret, months later, after a formal classification review, they told him.
Well, maybe not so much. That's not secret at all. Well, that really affected things.
The 186 letters on Ahmed's computer weren't classified either. In fact, the only classified papers Ahmed had were the ones from the Airbridge mission. Meanwhile, the government's case against James Yee was falling apart, too. They'd accused him of mishandling classified information, but never produced any evidence to back it up. After two and a half months in a Navy Brig, they let him out and eventually dismissed the charges.
And Ahmed Mahelba, the linguist arrested in Boston, would end up pleading guilty to one count of unauthorized possession of classified materials, a crime he insisted was unintentional. On his part, he'd spend a year and a half in jail.
It had been only two years since 9-11.
We'd just had the biggest scare of our lives. So when you think about the weaknesses in the government's case against Ahmed, it's only fair to keep that in mind. If Al-Qaeda could take control of commercial airplanes and steer them into skyscrapers into the Pentagon, was it irrational to think that they could be operating inside Guantanamo, one of the most secure facilities on Earth? On the other hand, the number of times that simple, logical explanations for what investigators and prosecutors were seeing were brushed aside. The sheer sloppiness of some of their work, that, too, is remarkable.
Mistakes are one thing, but this started to feel like something else was at play. It's worth pointing out the investigators looking into Ahmed were young, in their 20s and inexperienced. The lead investigator, Special Agent Lance Wega, was so new at his job. He was still on probation with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, another agent on the team. He'd just turned 23. Their supervisors were a little older. But one of the investigators told me, as far as he knew, none of them had ever worked on a counterintelligence investigation before.
And within a couple of months of Ahmed's arrest, one supervisor was pulled off the case. He'd later plead guilty to mishandling classified documents and a slew of sex crimes against two young girls.
None of the investigators would talk to me on the record. But let's just say the people trying to prove Ahmed was a spy. This wasn't exactly the A-team. Some of the accusations they made against Ahmed were eminently checkable, but simply hadn't been before ending up on a charge sheet. The bank fraud allegations, for instance, complete nonsense. A military judge noted the prosecution's quote appalling lack of evidence for that one, or that Ahmed had lied about being a U.S.
Citizen when, in fact, he was a U.
S citizen, he'd been naturalized just a week before he arrived at Guantanamo. Other allegations were so thin, yet so casually and confidently weaponized, the only explanation seemed to be not just incompetence, but bad faith. After a court hearing, for instance, a government translator realized she'd made a mistake translating a piece of evidence the government was relying on to show Ahmed was trying to peddle secret information abroad.
But when she notified a prosecutor she'd misinterpreted a crucial word. He told her not to mention it to anyone. He, too, was thrown off the case.
To demonstrate that Ahmed was a sympathizer and possibly an extremist, the government assembled a patchwork of statements from far-flung sources, a couple of which turned into criminal charges. He was accused of making anti-American comments and then lying to investigators about that. The lead investigator, Lance Wege, testified that one such statement had been relayed by Ed Brooks, the Arabic linguist and formerly annoying evangelical Christian. Quote. Sergeant Brooks allegedly told FBI agents that senior airman Al-Halabi said. Quote that Camp Delta's detainees were treated unfairly and the guards deserve to be spat upon are words to that effect unquote?
But when I asked Ed Brooks about this 20 years later, he didn't know what I was talking about. It was the first time he was hearing he'd been part of Ahmed's case in any way to prove it, I read to him from the court record, special agent Wege said.
Oh my god.
Okay, yes, that just triggered it. I did say that in an interview, but it wasn't to slam him.
Ed said some investigator had come to him asking whether Ahmed had said those things, and Ed said, Yeah, he did. But here's what happened. There'd been an earthing that had gone south. The interpreters had suspected this one guard of denying a detainee food on multiple occasions and harassing him by keeping him awake.
And so the detainee had finally spat at the guy, the guards decided to earth him, called for an interpreter.
Halabi responded to this earthing They started without him, which was completely against fucking sob. They were dead wrong to do it, but they wanted to, so they earthed the detainee. They hogtied him. And then Halabi's there for the end of it, and Halabi had come back angry about it.
It was like they deserve to be spit on blah, blah, blah, not the guards, as in all this one earthed that had gone down badly. So that is super out of fucking context. The fact that someone would then take me and quote that as an anti-American, that's fucking ridiculous.
A bunch of statements in Achmed's case were like that, ridiculous, even in context.
It really is striking how so much of this, the inexperience, the tenuous connections, the lack of rigor and professional restraint, all echoes. Inside the case files of Guantanamo detainees, I've spoken to a handful of people who've seen inside the classified intelligence files. We kept on the detainees and most of them told me. Quote Yeah, we had some good information, but overall we should be skeptical, a former C.I.A. analyst named Gail Helt, who reviewed the detainee intelligence, told me. Quote the associations, the linkages that they made, like, I don't want to be unduly harsh to people who are working under very intense and immense pressure after 9-11. But the associations they made were stupid.
Another analyst, Jake Meyer, an army intel guy who worked at Guantanamo for about five years on and off, said Especially in the earlier years, they were working at breakneck speed to get information. And everybody's caught up in it, and you're producing, you're producing and compiling. This massive swirling pile of bullshit is what he called it, and some of what's in that swirling pile is good and important. Quote But as an analyst, we're supposed to be able to filter through all the other bullshit to find the good stuff. We found that we probably should have been filtering through our own bullshit. Unquote.
Achmed doesn't blame the government for investigating him. He just wishes they'd done it with an even hand, he said. I was able to give them the benefit of the doubt, they didn't give it to me. Okay? I asked him, So why did you take those papers home?
Everybody else seemed to know that wasn't allowed. What were you thinking when you packed up that box? For instance, with the classified Airbridge papers he was about to ship out, he said, and those documents he thought they were cool, he wanted to keep them.
And then, like, I'm not going to keep it with me. Let me just send it in a box in case they search and they find it on me, right? So I'm like, I'm just send it.
So you totally know you're not supposed to have it.
Yeah, like I said, you know, I had the inner self telling me, maybe I shouldn't do this. But like, what's the worst that can happen? Of course, the worst that can happen is getting arrested, right?
The word naive tends to come up when people describe Achmed. Back then he used that word to describe himself. Maybe that was true, but also true Achmed was the iguana feeder.
He didn't plan to do anything with those papers, he said, so he didn't see the harm in taking them and these documents. He told me he felt entitled to them. He'd just spent eight rough months working in a detention facility.
I'm like, Yeah, I deserve to keep something from that time because I literally had nothing, you know, leaving. Like, I was supposed to get a medal and I didn't, and I was very pissed off, you know, because everybody gets a medal. But for some reason or another. They didn't have medals at that time. And they didn't have the time to do a ceremony for us leaving. And I didn't get that.
So you know, like, well, let me get something, let me take something, so I took these documents or papers.
The most logical explanation for what Achmed did is this one. The one. He admits to that, despite the government's year-long effort to prove otherwise, his intention wasn't nefarious. It was just dumb, petty. What shocked Achmed about his case, he told me, was how sudden it all was. It was shocking, he said, to know that you can turn on one of your own this quickly and this heavily. I was taken aback for a second by this idea that they'd turned on one of their own.
Because did the military consider Achmed one of their own? Maybe they didn't, not really, and maybe that's why they didn't entertain the logical explanation for what Achmed did, or for what other Muslim personnel did consider. Around the same time, Achmed and Captain James Yee, and that other linguist, Achmed Mihalba, were all arrested and imprisoned and charged with crimes. A fourth person was also stopped on his way out of Guantanamo with a number of classified documents in his briefcase, his computer, his footlocker. He was an intelligence officer, older, a decorated colonel.
He was not Muslim, he looked and spoke like one of their own. His case ended with no detention, no criminal proceedings. Instead, he got an administrative ding and the benefit of the doubt.
The investigators I spoke to all denied that Achmed's foreignness, as Achmed put it, my accent, my funny name, my religion played any part in his prosecution. They were following the facts, they said. Full stop. But in the end, it's not just the wrongness of some of their facts that makes me disagree, it's the origin of some of those facts. The case against Achmed was spun up in part because of a guy named Jason Orlik, an Army reserve captain who worked as the camp security officer.
Captain Orlik's office shared space with the DOCX office for a while. And his swirling suspicions about religious Muslim personnel at Guantanamo were at the root of the government's investigations. As one of Achmed's lawyers said in court, Captain Jason Orlik, Frankly, your honor was the one that started this whole mess. To begin with, Captain Orlik didn't want to talk to me. But back when all this happened, the Seattle Times newspaper did a nine-part investigation, mostly about the Yi case, and Orlik did speak to that reporter, Ray Rivera at length, Orlik told Rivera. He became suspicious of Chaplain Yi almost as soon as he got to Guantanamo, when he sat through Yi's cultural awareness briefing for incoming personnel. Basic information about the detainees and about Islam.
The presentation made Orlik uncomfortable, as if Yi was justifying extremist actions. You could ask anyone who went through that initial briefing, Orlik is quoted as saying. Everybody who walked out after it was over sat there going. Is he on our side or is he on the enemy's side? After that, Orlik began keeping tabs on Yi and on Yi's group of friends, including Captain Hashim and the Navy. Petty officer. And Achmed. The way they prayed, in particular, rubbed him the wrong way.
Orlik himself was a devout Catholic and described himself in Ray Rivera's series as accepting of other religions. But he said the way Yi and his quote-unquote Muslim clique behaved was strange to him. In statements he made to investigators, Orlik said. Many times, our section could hear the Muslim linguists, including Al-Halabi, praying at the end of the hallway. Al-Halabi and Captain Hashim would try to get others to come to prayer. The room at the end of the hallway became crowded, with their recruits unquote, and they were fervent in their beliefs.
A lot of their religious beliefs mirrored those of the detainees. Unquote.
Orlik told the Seattle Paper that some of the non-muslim linguists, some of the same ones who'd complained about Captain Hashim favoring Achmed, began coming to him with information about sympathizery, things Achmed had supposedly said or done. Orlik himself couldn't open an investigation, but he could and did. Pass along his concerns, especially about Chaplain Yi, to the camp's counterintelligence officer, who took them seriously and who, in turn, pushed them up the chain. Until finally, in May of 2003, the military officially opened an investigation on Chaplain Yi and also on Achmed. Look, nobody wants to be accused of being a racist, prejudiced, bigoted, Orlik told Ray Rivera after the cases had fallen apart. But if we hadn't done anything, some of us would have lost our jobs.
But Achmed's lawyers did think Orlik was prejudiced. At the time, Captain Orlik and his pals were passing around homemade CDs loaded with offensive content. Achmed's defense tried to introduce this stuff in court, but the judge wouldn't have it. I've seen it, though, sexist, racist, jingoistic, juvenile, islamophobic images, cartoons and little films.
Even worse, some years after Captain Orlik left Guantanamo and was promoted to Major Orlik. He made a powerpoint about Islam, based in part on quote at Joint Task Force Guantanamo Bay. Unquote. If you google it, you'll see Orlik's dangerous argument that there's no such thing as a moderate or peaceful form of Islam. Accompanied by images of burning towers, severed heads, bloody children, quotes calling for death to all Christians and Jews, and many exclamation points. According to court records, Jason Orlik is the guy who ended up with Achmed's disposable camera. It's not entirely clear how and had the film developed and identified those two verboten photos, the incident that kicked off Achmed's case.
Lance Wege, the lead investigator, testified that he took extensive guidance from Captain Orlik when he was gathering evidence. Including about what documents in Achmed's possession were classified. What documents included quote unquote extremist content? Even though it turned out Captain Orlik didn't definitively know what was classified and didn't know Arabic, Lance Wege was praised for this investigation. By the way, a performance report noted that he developed one of the most prolific espionage aiding the enemy investigations in recent memory. Unquote. And that his actions led to 18 other investigations, none of which turned up any serious violations. Much less aspiring, but he got an extra 2000 bucks as a thank you.
By September of 2004, a little more than a year after it started, Achmed's case was a shadow of its most threatening self the espionage aiding the enemy. Most of the false statements, the bank fraud, had all dropped away until about half the original charges remained, and half of those his lawyer said, were rinky-dink. Meanwhile, the mood of the press had soured on the prosecution. Spying at Gitmo became three counts dropped against Gitmo translator. Finally, the government was grudgingly ready to let go.
A year earlier, prosecutors had offered Achmed a deal of 50 years in prison if he pleaded guilty to espionage. Now they were agreeing to zero, no more time at all. Achmed admitted to mishandling classified documents, violating a general order, making false statements. All to do with those two pictures and the Airbridge papers. He was sentenced to time served and a bad behavior discharge from the air Force.
After the evidence in Achmed's case was aired out, the world learned Achmed wasn't an Islamic extremist or a spy. He was just a young airman with sticky fingers who'd learned the harshest shoplifting lesson of all time. Or that's what the world should have learned instead. And this, too, is true for the detainees. Even after the investigation was finished, the suspicion wasn't. Even after sentencing, Achmed's case wasn't over.
As part of his plea, he agreed to be debriefed by the government. I assumed this debrief was a lessons learned sort of thing. The government trying to understand how its big, splashy case ended up more than a year and God knows how many dollars. Later, as dude gets caught with two boring photos and stale Airbridge instructions. I'm minimizing, I know, but surely somewhere someone with stars on his or her lapels was asking, what went wrong here?
The debrief was not that Achmed's case was about to get a lot weirder. That's next time.
Serials Produced by Jessica Weisberg, Dana Chivas and me. Our editor is Julie Snyder. Additional reporting by Cora Currier and Amir Kafaji. fact-checking by Ben Phelan and Jessica Suriano. Music supervision, sound design and mixing by Phoebe Wang.
Original score by Sophia Deli Alessandri. Editing help from Alvin Melleth, Jen Guerra and Ira Glass. Our contributing editors are Carol Rosenberg and Rosina Ali. Additional production from Daniel Guimet and Emma Grillo. Our Standards editor is Susan Wessling.
Legal review from Elamin Sumar. The art for our show comes from Pablo Delcan and Max Guter. 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.
Special thanks to Janelle Pfeiffer, Ray Rivera, Mahima Chablani, Jordan Cohen, Jeffrey Miranda, John Michael Murphy, Zoe Murphy, Pierre-Antoine Louis, Peter Rents and Colleen Wormsley.
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