Serial S04 - Ep. 2: The Special Project
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Previously on cereal, I and I love kim o like it's it's long and I tried .

to explain .

everything I can and try to make them that in the people .

that look for.

you're not going to get thing from us and we're going to just tire you down.

And safe, legal, transparent care.

safety of humane and transparent.

Got right here. Ah he's probably a horrible person that is either killed or caused people to be killed. This kind of here doesn't shit.

From cereal productions in the new york times i'm dan achieves this is season four of cereal quan panama, one prison camp told week by week.

Danny was living in yemen in two thousand. One, he was in his twenties, married with two Young daughters, in another on the way when he decided to go to pakistan. To get rich.

I want to be like rich, like everyone. Everyone want to be rich, do you want? Okay, but so hard.

His plan was to export honey, but not just any honey. There's a tree that grows in the desert yemen called the sider tree. IT blooms twice a year. So the honey the bees make from the sider tree .

is rare and expensive. Our country is more expensive, tony in in the area like one.

a cost about one hundred and fifty dollars. And unless you can get to pakistan, where there's also set or honey, but it's much cheaper.

And danny says .

his plan was to go to pakistan, buy a bunch of pitter honey, swapped the labels to make IT look like IT was the more expensive sir honey from yemen, and then sell at the higher Price was a little bit of a scam.

Yes, something like that. So but I was Young, so that what?

Let me just post here and say, if you were an intel person investigating alki de an two thousand two I C U, and you raised die brow. I was in pakistan doing honeys. Sales and trade was considered a common l chia cover story along with charity work and finding a wife in afghanistan.

So keeping that in mind, danny was in crazy doing something, staying in a cheap motel, or, if you believe the american government, not a cheap motel. But I not quite a safe house. One, one night there was a knock on the door of his room.

He was pakistani, an intelligence. They arrested him in about a dozen other men at the motel, Denny said. They took him to some kind of a locker question him, beat him and eventually handed him over to the americans who flew him to their base in canada, a in afghanistan.

canada, in the first time you came like, they try to give you shock like a threat like they threatened to be. Not treats like threatened by talking. They do IT like they. They take a clock, says, standing in front of a table.

facing an interrogator, the guards pushed him over the .

table and behind you, big do he tried to like to of his bands? Yes, yes. Ask you.

You just answer the question. Have you seen bladon? no. Where is bloody? I was like, you don't think if you ask me in that moment, I you could be and I say, yes.

what did .

you say when they said was been laden .

to Denny? This was an insane thing to be asked. He told me he was never in aleta. He was just a victim of a wrong place, wrong time.

But even if, for the sake of argument, we say that danny was in alcade, he would have been so low level that asking him to look, keep in ladon would have been like asking a private in the U. S. Army to tell you where they keeps the nuclear codes.

Worth a try though, because in two thousand two, the number one question on the collective mind of the american government was, where is fucking bladen? And they wanted to ask that question in a lot of others. Of the hundreds of prisoners they were picking up in afghanistan and pakistan and elsewhere, sidna was shipped off to go on tonne o, where he was asked countless other questions and where he was held for fourteen years.

The reason i'm telling you the story about danny is because in many ways, he was a pretty typical guantanamo prisoner. Contrary to what the bush administration was saying publicly, guantanamo was not brimming with terrorist masterminds. Those guys were either in hiding or in secret CIA prisons, or they were dead.

The people who ended up a guantanamo, mostly low level fighters. Some weren't even in alki da or the taliban. Some weren't fighters at all. They just got caught up in the in discriminate sweep of the war, which meant the intel we are getting from this intel factory wasn't very good. The prisoners just didn't know that much.

But by the fall of two thousand, two, a year after nine eleven, the leadership at guantanamo was getting heat from washington to get Better intel fast. We were desperate to stop the next attack, and the commanders of chemo had a few prisoners they suspected actually wore high up and alka, if only they could get them to talk. Let me clarify something because a lot of people, when they hear guantanamo, think water boarding.

But that kind of torture, the most extreme physical abuse that was authorized in that era, that stuff happened at secret prisons. Overseas black sites Operated by the C. I.

I. Guantanamo was run by the military. And military interrogators had different rules from C. I, A. Interrogators about what they could and could not do to a detainee to get information, but equal tono. Some of the interrogators and commanders cut wind of what the C.

I, I was up to and decided they wanted to try out less conventional interrogation methods too. They wanted the legal freedom, like the C. I, A.

Had to get tougher on some of their prisoners. And so the special project team was born. An elite group of military interrogators and analysts and interpreters assign to break wantoning OS most important detainees. The story I am going to tell you is about one of the strangest, most elaborate ate intel Operations that ever took place, a antonio, to try to get one single detainee to talk, just one told by the people who planned IT and executed IT and by the target of the Operation himself. A guide me, mohamad ali, that's coming up after the break.

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Mister ex hid in the army, often on for sixteen years. When he arrived at gmo in february of two thousand three. He'd already heard about the special projects team, even though they'd only been around .

for a few months. If you were on special, I mean, basically you should instinct you I mean like you just you could you you could walk around like you are the shit because you supposedly were.

The reason i'm calling mr. X, mr. X, is because that's the name he used with the detainees.

And the only way he agreed to do an interview was if we didn't use this real name, because what he did IT guantanamo was controversial. Anyway, you slice IT as you're soon here. mr.

X was only a gimme for two months before he called the eye of the special project team. He thinks in part because of his creativity in the interrogation booth, a level and creativity. He recalled IT.

Now, like one time he wrote a poem for a detainee called you have lost something like that. And they made the detainee standard look at IT, while the national anthem played on the loop for eight hours. He was a related when the special projects team asked him to join them.

That's the word he used, a laded. One of his first cases was mohamed's sali, who was one of the most famous former granpa od ese. So he wrote a book while he was a gift.

Mo, which was made into a hollywood movie, the CIA and military intelligence suspected, saw. He was a member of the humble sell in germany, which had produce three of the nine eleven hydra's. The government bought slaw.

He had personally recruit them plus. So his cousin was have been ladd senior advisors in his inner circle. When slahi first arrived at one tonne o in August of two thousand two, he was questioned by the FBI.

They knew he'd been in aleta in the nineties in afghanistan. But sla, he said he'd left the group years before the FBI couldn't get much more out of him than that. Mister ex thought he understood why, because one day he went to watch the FBI interrogate, laughed from behind one way glass.

like all, oh my god. Like what is going on right now? Like he couldn't .

believe how friendly at all was.

They come in, there's all this greeting, a lot of hug again and and they said, hey, we brought you cake. I think IT was or something like that. Oh, thank you, my friend, my friend.

And then one guy, I can't think he, he had an irish last name like a brian or something. I can't remember. He said something, this living as I got slight.

He was like owl. Yes, my my irish barbarian friend. He he has no fear of anything going on. He has no concerns or ques about his future.

Slavi, isha point out, is absolutely the kind of guy who would make friends with his capture. His charming has a wide knowledge of american pop culture in politics and idioms. He can create an easy familiarity with a stranger within minutes of meeting them in the interrogation room.

What mister ex saw was like he talking circles around the FBI. Slaughter was the one in control. But now things would be different. The special project team was taking over his interrogations, and their approach be a lot less friendly, because after months of legal acrobatics and hand ringing over what is and is not torture, the secretary of defense Donald rums felt had just approved a set of twenty four techniques that military interrogators could use on detainees of guantanamo.

The special project team was free to dream up ways to put them to use to get slaughter, to talk as long as they got authorization for the harsher techniques they began with an interaction tag team, three interrogators would take turns, questioning, laughed for twenty hours a day, nonstop. They would appear in different rules. There was a woman who called herself self.

Mary SHE would play the good cop, a guy called Shelly. He was medium cup. And then there was mister ax, a character they invented whose purpose was to scared the shit out of slow. Hy.

I wanted to create A, A personal thing that was not human, that he could not relate to as a human being that had total in absolute control um and that was in many ways like a monster at night. You know, the thing that launch .

your nightmares. And when you're developing this character of mr. Acts, are you talking IT over with, you know, the team? Are you guys sitting in a confront room sort of White boarding IT out?

Like how does that even work hundred percent? That's exactly. Is just you you can compare to any kind of like you know a marketing team or something? You know hi, how we're onna reach our our target audience, you know people bouncing ideas off each other. And no, that's not good or not good, but let's take IT. And that's exactly how when mr.

X went down to the nex, the naval basis, walmart like store and put together a costume covers like a mechanic would wear, boots and gloves. A above the covered his empire face, except his mouth and eyes and sunglasses. So there was no skin showing at all. Mister ex was six feet toll, two hundred and ten pounds, much bigger than he towered over him in the small interrogation room.

And then I acted in a way that showed him that you have zero control, like I was a one hundred percent control. I know who you are, I know what you do, and i'm going to make your life a living here.

Mister x put strobl tes in the interrogation room and blasted metal music or the american national anthem on a loop. The room was often freezing cold. The air conditioner turned down as lows that would go or brutally hot.

The ac turned off in the middle of the cuban summer. Sometimes mister ax made slaw. He stand for hours and slaw.

He had a bad back. So this was exciting ating for him. Mister x wouldn't let saw he pray. According to government reports, the team threatened s. ughi.

A member of the special project team went to see slavi in disguise, pretending to be a navy captain who was working at the White house. He called the themselves capt. In Collins showed slaw. He a fake letter to talked about slaughters mother being arrested that SHE might be transfer the ground, amo or sheds be the only woman in an all male prison. This tactic, threatening his mother, was leader, determined to be illegal, but the rest of IT, the military said IT was all fine that was authorized.

But slaw, he wasn't changing his story, and they've been out IT for six weeks already. Mister x concluded that slaw, he was dug in.

I think we are all pretty much convinced that he felt that he could outsmart us and that he could out whether us.

They needed to go to plan b. And with the new and unprecedented freedom they had from the pentagon, they could get creative air things up. They decided to move ahead with a special secret Operation. They would actually take slaughter outside, not just the interrogation booth, but outside the prison itself, to try to join him into a new psychological state.

And what we decided was we wanted to recreate a psychological effect, which is called shock of capture, shock of arrest.

The shock of capture is this idea that a person is more likely to give up useful information when their first rolled up in a raise or unrest. Though I should note, it's a theory that some interrogation experts have told me is not backed up by research. But mister ex told me he's seen at work.

You Normally can really get somebody to talk about anything two fully right after their capture, because their, their men are scared to shit everything. Everything is dropped and they just let them all out. So we thought, you know, how can we, how can we regain that? How can we bring us back to that place?

Slow, he had been captured two years before. Obviously, the shock of his actual captured had already worn. So they would put him back into a state of shark with an elaborate ruse.

They would make him think he was being taken from guantanamo and handed over to another country, a country that would torture him. There is a term of art for this kind of thing. It's called a rendition.

This would be a mark rendition. But how to pull this off? At first, they thought about putting him in a helicopter and flying him around for a few hours, but that was deemed too risky. Too many people on the naval base would have to know about the Operation .

for IT to work. So came up with the boat, right? IT was creative. I got .

to say, this is Richard zooey. He was in charge the special projects him at the time. Mister xs boss, he was also the guy hood d pretended to be kept in Collins. In the civilian life, he was a homicide detective with the chicago police department. Zoie was a fan of this moca.

Ondijo boat ride was a high speed boat ride for about three hours in the bay, big.

large circles.

big enough where you couldn't really say, tell that you were turning .

after a few hours in the boat. The plan was to stop at a little island in the bay and makes luck. He think they were handing him over to the intelligence services of another country like egypt or Jordan.

They drive them around the bay little longer, and then they would take him back to land to a new isolated cell, one that have been altered to be as bleak as possible. Covered in tarp was no light coming in. He would have no idea where he was.

He was an unknown. Like maybe it's another country, maybe an island, maybe it's, you know who, but do not get anymore.

For the plane to work. They needed actors to convincing play the roles of foreign intelligence agents. They needed people who spoke area bec with egyptian or Jordanian accents. Conveniently, they had a few of those hanging around. How are you recruit into the mark rendition Operation?

So IT was just kind of a hallway conversation.

That's the guy they caused the Jordanian intelligence. Romina called him nsr, which is how the detainees knew him. Ncr was actually a two twenty two year old army engineer, an american in the native verb speaker, who was sent to get mood to be a linguist, and ended up with a key role in the mockin' tion Operation.

They just said, you know, we're going to a talk to this other language and act like, you know, one of you gonna like a Jordanian mohatta and the others can act like an egyptian mohamed tt. And you talk to each other about what you're gona do, how you onna torture him, how are you going to know, just cut him out and you know talk about to him or whatever, just to kind of put some fear into him and that that we will just ride around the boat for a while and and that's IT .

what you what did you think about the plan? And you heard IT.

I I didn't think much of that. I was like, okay, that's that's what you all need to do, how i'll do IT.

When I first heard about this plan, I have to say I thought IT seemed extra again, a little fantastical, a little reckless, a little stupid, like a war game kids might invent in their backyard, pretend to abduct a guy, pretend to take him to another country, pretend the hand and move to foreigners for torture.

But who knows, maybe I could work so he can do an interview with me for the story, because he's under contract with a documentation film company. But a few years ago, he talked to german reporter best in burberry for a poggi. He was making the tapes hood earlier of Richard soley, the head of the special project team is also from boston.

I reached to Sally multiple times for the story. He never responded, but both slaw, he enzo, told boston the story of what happened on the native democracy tion IT all began on a hot evening in late August. flaw.

He says he was in the interrogation booth with mary, the good cop interrogator. He was eating dinner and MRI the military field dr. Ashes as what they fed him at the time, when he heard a ton of noise like boot strapping and banging on wood.

I didn't not know they were come for me. They just game at me, beating from everywhere. How many people? To a third done with a dog just beating me, dragon me on the floor, beating me everywhere.

I they block my edip. That's how they beat me. What happens afterwards? 哎。 The merry tried to to stop them, but they pushed her away.

And then out, I couldn't see anything because they put stuff, they put, they put shackles everywhere, and they, they dragged because I couldn't stand. So they dragged me over the floor. And then I stopped breathing because because every breath was like, so painful through my broke ribs, really, really painful.

And said they were making fun because I was. Like gasping for anything when we are laughing. So so. And they are very violent.

slow, he says they dragged them outside and threw them into a truck. While all this was going down, mister x was waiting outside in a convoy of cars. He got the word to go, and they took off out the prison gates and into the scrubby no mans land between the prison and granta as little downtown. When they got to the boat launch, mister ex got out of his car in sauli for the first time that night. He was shocked.

Door opens up, marries there, and, uh, they pull him out. Man, I looked animals like, holy shit. His nose look broke.

IT was all bloody, a black coming of his nose. He at the gaggles on. But I could tell he his face around, his eyes had to have been swollen.

He had his lip was busted up like IT was fat and cracked, and there was blood coming out of that. And and I was like, holy shit, what the fuck happened, right? Was not in the plan at all at all.

Mister egg was passed as scary. He made himself out to be the slaw he he saw. His job is purely psychological, a game, heat and slaw.

He were playing with each other as opponents, one that required strategy. In coming on the part of the interrogator, he says he never got physically violent. Legally, he wasn't allowed to. Besides, he had standards.

There is something so base um about resorting to violence that I really think that IT is something that weak minded people do is just it's beneath the interrogator position.

Mister ex told me. He asked at some point that night what had happened. How did not he get his injuries? But zoie struck IT off, said slaw.

He had resisted when the guards came in to take him away and when zooloo was asked about a years later, he only remember to cut and slaw his lip. But regardless of slightly physical state, the plan was in motion. Zooly mister acts in a few others, put slightly on the boat, meet him, lie down on the bottom, and they all drives off into the bay.

So his arms were pin his sides under a life preserver. Almost like he was in a straight jacket. He had blackout goggles on ear muff s shackles.

His rips were injured, possibly broken. His face was butted up. And then.

and they kept open my mouth, this is my mouth. And they put put in water until I feel like i'm all like. Drown out under the world, they they stop. Then I started choking. So is like salt water is not really war, is not a regular world.

So he says, there were two people handling him.

One was holding my head, one was footing the water. So making sure I want, because I keep moving, because I didn't to want the water, but they are reporting IT. So they were holding down my head. Then when they did that, they fill me with ice.

ice down his jump s IT.

And the eyes was so painful. Because if I am Bruce and probably have opening, but they put eyes on the right away, so to hit, to help the wind one. And then when the water ran out, they started beating me again. This went to on four.

I don't know hours.

Mister ex disputes some of what's like he says happened. He says, yes, they did make him drink water, but just to keep him hydrated and IT wasn't salt water. He thinks that he smelled the sauli air and felt the sea spray and got confused slaw.

He says, no, he was not confused. IT was hot water. Mister ex also told me they did put ice down far.

He's jumped suit again, not to torture him, but to keep him from getting heat stroke. But both mister acx inza's say slaw, he was not beaten during the boat rides. IT seems they were committed to keeping him alive while simultaneously trying to scare him to death.

We are floating at one point. We start to float and never get down by the year. And i'm saying, remember, know who this is, mother fucker, you fucked up.

We get you out, right? So again, the height net and fear fuck mr. rex.

I mean, I I believe you genuinely thought like this. This is that i'm dying tonight. Like this, i'm going to die. His creator, artley, he was policing, he was sweating and was like, you know, like this mouth, like this slack job, kind of breathing fear, like just, but I always stick with me like the fear was so popal.

Eventually they pulled up to a small island. Richard zoey, the head of the special project team, drugs slow he onto the land. This is where they met up with noser, the fake Jordanian antil guy and the other linguistic fake egyptian and til guy.

So he had ARM of sun to prevent him from hearing but I had had little hole drilling so he could hear um although he knew he wasn't .

supposed to.

Here people who are talking all is at me like, that's what to get, terrorist things like that. Then mister july stepped up. Cam, I organize his voice. He made the speech, we think people who help us fight against terris. M.

we think people who help us fight against terrorism. Zoie was appearing in character again as captaing Collins, the fake White house guy he was talking to. NASA, in the other mean.

the other language are just talking shit about him, talking shit about what we're gona do to him, and saying we going this were going that, you know, look at these guys, they don't torture. They don't do anything. Wait until he comes in our hands and we're going to do this. And and and they didn't .

have a script and nsa would find out years later from reading slow his book. But while he had already been in Jordanian custody once before roster wishes, he had known at the time he thinks his performance would have been so much Better. While all this was playing out, mister egg was off the side. He didn't have a part in this scene, so he got to take five.

I said of the side had a cigarette, much White, as individuals were around there playing the rules, which of .

those were okay? Can ask you weird question that just popped into my head um that night before you go to start this Operation. Do you remember what you did? Did you have dinner? Do you remember getting dressed to remember how you felt like you .

nit is an interesting question because no, I was a um i'll tell you so it's very is curious question because there's you know discussion about my question remaining.

mr. Acts of a documentary film me scene about all these photo album someone found of nazi guards and staff at a concentration .

camp and the photo is just filled with these images of people parking, you know, drinking, eating, some thing, whatever, a dancing and otherwise conducting themselves in this very care free and and and wimmer ical manner. And when they want to doing those things, the most horrible things were happening on the face of the planet of the tank, right? And .

well.

I won't say that the things that every gma were even remotely close to what happened and I was sh with broken out at all. I will say that um there is A A absolute parallel to that dynamic. So you you .

left the you left .

the gate of delta or I go, whatever was you working camp delta .

or camp ago, two of the prison compounds at granton's o and .

then you went back to you, your place and you took a shower and lots of TV and cracked some beers. You had something to eat, and you went to the tiki bar there, or this club, whatever, and you drank and had a good time. And then you want back to work. Did the things eat IT? So I don't remember what I did, but I the night before the Operation, I probably probably chill out on beers and kicking IT my body.

He didn't know anything to worry about. After all, their plan had been approved by Donald d. Drums filled himself.

Not only is an approved, authorized, but it's the right thing to do.

Finally, around one, two in the morning, they took the lagi back to land, back to go, antony amo to a new cell. He was spitting distance from where he had started the night. But they hope that he would think he was somewhere new, maybe a new country. So he says he knew he was still a good. Now that part of the plan didn't work well.

not saying as an assault, but americans are not really a business geography. So I moved to a studium.

cuba, but slow. He also says IT didn't really matter where he was.

Also, what did make sense to mean is, I know where if they take me to would be americans who are calling the shots. So ba, egypt. And this would be americans.

americans who'd already had him disappeared from his home in molti, ia, rendered to Jordanian prison and then taken a bog m americans who sent him from bodrum to guantanamo, where he was treated to temperature extremes, food deprivation, sleep deprivation, loud music, the national anthem, straw blades, threads, to imprison his family, to bring his mother to guantanamo, where sh'd be raped, to have him rendered again.

That's the irony at the heart of this whole Operation. The idea was to trick, slogging into thinking he was losing the protections of american values and decency, immorality, and being handed over to a country that will torture people for information. But of course, he was already in the hands of the country like that.

Two weeks after the mock rendition isolated in a dim cell slaw, he finally agreed to talk what he told them after the break.

This is seria ic host to the serial podcast. If you are hooked on this show, and i'm guessing you are, then i'm hoping my job here is pretty easy to get you to subscribe to the new york times so you can listen to the rest of IT. My father was an ad man who taught me the best ads are declarative, no puffy.

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Slaw, his new cell was in an isolated part of the prison camp echo. He had no one to talk to, no sunlight. In his book, he wrote that he could tell whether was day or night by looking into his toilet.

The water appeared lighter during the day, eventually thought he wood report hearing voices seems a little creepy, and interrogator route to get more psychologist. His only interaction with other people was with the guards who brought him his meals, embarked orders at him, but nothing more. After two weeks of isolation.

mister x says mary, winning with a pillow and a snickers bar, and he collapse and wet with a baby, according to her, and said, i'm ready to talk slaw.

He says he wrote out a confession. He includes a version of IT in this book.

I came to canada with a plant to blow up the scene and town time to my accomplices were have. Has many and that are of has he want after .

he can fast lui want to see him.

he just gushed information he gave so much.

During the explosive simulations of I picked up.

IT was labor intensive, trying to transfer IT from notes into reports to get them submitted.

I might provide the financing. Thanks to canada, the plan was discovered in sense to failure.

He was so prolific that I got him a computer I had IT scribed brought him in to, and we would finish our session, and then we would leave him with written signals, and he would sit up and he would type twenty, thirty, forty pages of response to some of these things. He would create link charts. He did amazing stuff. I'd said the guy had a photographic memory, or the next .

best thing was supposed a lot of sugar to mix with the explosives.

IT worked very, very well. All I say is this, everybody in the team got a defense military service metal. It's a high award in the american .

military .

in that sitting. IT refers to the single most important source of information on alkali in europe. So I have .

think he played .

out very well. failure. I I do .

that that I am as guilty as any other participants. And I am so sorry, ashamed for what I have that signed him old for that. How much of .

that is true?

None of IT is too.

Shortly after he confessed while he recanted, he later said he made things up just to get the torture to stop. Despite zoe's assessment over the last twenty years, this idea that democratic dian was a huge success has largely fAllen apart under scrutiny. The military attorney assigned a prosecutes law, hye, for what amounted to war crimes.

He resigned from the case when he found out about slaheddine ment and concluded he had been tortured eventually. Slaw, he chAllenges imprisonment in federal core. And the judges in that case, judge James Robertson, saw a lot of the government's entel on flag. Jj Robertson rotten his opinion that, yes, well, the government did show that slaw. He was an ali of sympathiser, possibly even, quote a fellow traveller.

He concluded that the government had not proven that while he was a member of alkyls a at the time of his capture even more, he wrote, quote, the government's problem is that is proof that the law he gave material support to terrorists is so atta ued or so tainted by coorg I N in this treatment or so classified that IT cannot support the successful criminal prosecution. And quite, he ordered that law. He be released. The government appealed the ruling in captain he at guantanamo for six more years, until he was finally released in twenty sixteen back to his home country of montana.

So the special projects teams in interrogation plan for slahi produced dubious little, foiled the potential terrorism prosecution and did untold damage mohamad slighty himself. What was the government's take on all of this? At first, in two thousand and five, the army investigated accusations of detail abuse antonym o and concluded there was, quote, no evidence of torture or inhumane treatment.

But then a few years later, the senate released a report detAiling the abuse of detainees, including slaughter, and laid the blame on bush administration lawyers in top hanagan brass. Today, what they did to slack, heat, the mock rendition, the threats, psychological abuse, all of IT would be illegal. Congress has since passed laws to ensure that, plus now the official standard for interrogations for all government agents, not as the military is, the armies and interrogation manual, which explicit prohibits torture.

So if the american government were a person, one might reasonably conclude these reports in this corrective action to be a kind of ma copa, an acknowledge that what was done to slaw, he was wrong. I promise not to make the same mistakes again. But governments, of course, are not people.

They don't have feelings, they don't have to take responsibility or issue apologies, at least not in the case of guantanamo. The emotional baggage of that place in time, which was not so very long ago, is still Carried by the people who were its me in players, mohamad slaw. I, first and foremost, the members of the special projects team.

They have not reached a consensus about what they did to love. He, when zoee spoke a reporter about burgers in twenty twenty one, he felt no ambiguity about democrat edition Operation or how he went down in his mind. Slaughter was a kater, and they broke him in whatever slaw he says about his confession. Today, the Operation worked.

Of course he has to record everything. Of course he has to say he's torture. Of course he has to say that everything was made up and everything was brutal.

He was added while he wasn't treated all that badly. For a bad guy.

stop your your tears and your hand ringing. His condition there was not much different from the condition of prisoners that are in supermax in the united states. I'm not concerned about him.

He wasn't tortured, he wasn't physically beaten. He wasn't tortured. He was beaten in the in the respect that um we won. He lost in the mental game, in the mind game of trying to keep the information inside. Now you .

can sit here .

and look at IT twenty years, twenty years later, and say, all these terrible, terrible people, they made him .

feel alone.

But the more important mission there was to get the intelligence and maybe save lives, maybe save you of life. So all right, I think we're done.

Zooey cut the interview short after go on, tony o. Zoie went back to working at the chicago police department in the years since, according to court documents, he's been accused by multiple people of falsifying evidence and course in confessions through threats and physical abuse, including four people whose convictions have been vacated. They've all filed civil suits.

One case has been dismissed, the other three are still pending. Zoey, in the city of chicago have denied the allegations. He's now retired. Now, sir, the fake Jordanian tortured flash real airbed linquest says when he first started working with a special project team, he wasn't all that bothered by their tactics. He thought most of the detainees would have gotten far worse treatment in their own countries.

And I thought, you know, they brought this to themselves. We need to gather information. These are the people that we need to get IT from. So any way we can get information that would complete our puzzle, we need to pull in.

Looking back on the slappy Operation today, nsa feels like, yeah, IT was morally uncomfortable but also, admittedly the creative he's not turn up about his part in IT. He was a soldier doing his job. Mister eggs.

On the other hand, six months after he got home from gun honnami, he had a psychotic break. The reality of what he participated in came crashing down on him, the psychological torture he inflicted on flawed and other detainees, the fact that he hadn't reported up the chain that saw he had been abused. That crop of unextinguished gret, to borrow a phrase from heart of darkness, what he understands now about the interrogations at guantanamo is that sometimes would happen in the booth wasn't actually about getting intel.

What I have realized over the inner venting two decades is that IT was there was because you go in with a person and they would like, not want to talk to, and they pray her, whatever. And then I was like, okay, you son of a beach, so i'm going to do this for eight hours, and I want to just make you miserable. But you rote IT up like you, you know, you wanted to believe that what you're doing was an attempt actually break them.

He'd finished session and write up a report. A voted happened in the interrogation booth for the record. And just like that, through the alchemy y of paperwork, his anger was transformed into professional practice.

IT was cathartic, presented his craft manship and IT felt good. Today, mister x has a lot of shame about what he did back then. He'll tell you that what he did, his law, he was torture.

And the torture doesn't work. The torture produces untrustworthy, crappy. Until that, he is haunted by the image of slaw he's face when he was taken out of the truck that night.

But he still thinks like he was a terrorist. He thinks lahey is minibar, ating everyone and always has. And that eats at him. And the fact that IT still eat at him all these years later, that eats at him too. He just wants a guy out of his head.

this whole thing man, it's like, I still have resentment about this guy, right? Like I still think you know that he's complicated somewhere. We will never know how um and but this is how conflicted this whole thing is how deep is its its tendrils have essentially itself in my being and his i'm sure and i'm just i'm tired to feel like that like i'm tired to feel like i'm angry at him for being who I think he is and not admitting IT. I'm tired at the fact that we did what we did to try to make him tell us things and and i'm just tired of thinking about IT in general .

like I like I just .

wish I could just really and.

For his part, mohamad sa, he says he's doing OK. Now, aside from mercury nights res and dillard ating ptsd, he got married to an american, had a baby, got divorced. A lot of guantanamo detainees, when they released, struck to overcome the label, so they try to keep IT quiet, their time at the world's most notorious prison for supposed terrorists.

One, tony, is just not a great look when you're trying to settle down, have a family, restart life. But slaw, he hasn't run away from IT. He was already something of immediate darling by the time he got out of get mo, at least in the small world of franti o media.

In fantoni o darlings, he has nearly forty one thousand followers on eggs, a best selling book called guanta, a diary, a movie called the Martinia. He gives speeches, the conferences, doesn't interviews regularly and one of the messages he's been out there delivering his forgiveness he befriended one of his guards, Steve wood, who visited him in molti, ia. He's been in touch with other guards and interrogators, including mister ax.

Though mister ax wasn't interested in all he's forgiveness. The americans took fourteen years of his life, mark m. In and deliver ways and now this man once accused of being a key player in nine eleven, he's taken the moral high ground though after what was done to him, he didn't have very far to climb.

Forgiveness, though, is a funny thing that can be freed, healing to forgive. But it's also a power move. An acknowledged that the person you're forgiving need something from you that only you can give. In that dynamic, the forgiver is on top. So forgiveness is also an active event, and on that battle field, at least slaw, he is the Victor.

Cereal is produced by Jessica weisberg, Sarah ic and me. Our editor is july snyder. Additionally reporting by bast in burberry and core career that tucking by then fAiling music supervision, sound design and mixing by fb wine original scope by Sophia daily Alexander, editing help from alvin melis, jan guera, alan voice, David custom bomb and iron glass.

Our contributing editors are Carol rosenberg and rosina ali. Additional research by ama gilla. Our standard's editor is Susan westling.

Legal review from alee sumac. The art for our show comes from pollo delkin and max guter. Additional production from Daniel gay men.

The supervising producer for zero productions is in day tribu. Our executive assistant is mac Miller. Sam donny is deputy managing editor of the new york times.

A special thanks to Susan B. T. Jack bag Kitty to couch alone, delicate ier ala. dr. Magia va, mark fan, john gets jaco event of age, Steve climate, cha mill, kd, lord mires, coff muller, curson noise, nadia rayman, Steve lady and Steve wood.