This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta.
In 2005, an audience filed into the Brava theater Center in San Francisco.
The house lights were on, making it easy to see a small group of men already on stage wearing orange jumpsuits and lying on small prison cots.
They were actors in the politically charged play Guantanamo honor bound to defend freedom.
The show told the stories of four british muslim detainees.
The narrative unfolds through the testimony of their families, attorneys, and us officials, along with letters that the men wrote while being held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
One of them was a guy named Ruh el Ahmed, who was from an area outside of Birmingham.
And him and three of his buddies were picked up in Afghanistan and were held in Guantanamo Bay for many, many years.
This is Nafis Hamid.
He played the role of Ruha in one production of the play.
What I remember from being in that show was just the way in which his letters were quite spirited.
In the beginning, he would be talking.
About how all the Guantanamo bay guards like him, how they get along.
They call him Slim Shady, how hes working on a six pack.
And then by the end, his letters.
You could just see, were getting more and more depressed, and you could just tell that this was someone who was entering into a dark and very, very negative state.
Ruhal Ahmed was accused of being an al Qaeda recruit, an enemy of the United States.
Throughout his more than two year stint in Guantanamo, he maintained that he was innocent.
He was eventually released without charges.