For years, Majid believed that if he could testify in court about what happened to him when he was held in a CIA black site, a judge and jury would give him a break. Finally, he got a chance to see if he was right. Prologue: Ira talks about the exciting new series that Serial is doing about Guantánamo Bay. We’re airing two of those episodes on the show – one this week and one next. (2 minutes) Act One: Majid Khan struggled with his identity when he was young. And then he realized exactly who he wanted to be – a member of Al Qaeda, carrying out orders for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He did bad things. But are the things that the U.S. Government did to him worse than his actual crimes? (38 minutes) Act Two: Majid finally gets his day in court. At his sentencing hearing, he describes to the jury what his interrogators did to him. (20 minutes) Listen to the entirety of Serial Season 4 about Guantánamo Bay.
A quick warning.
There are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show.
If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org from WBEZ Chicago, it's this American Life.
I'm Ira Glass.
I want to play something for you today.
And before I do, I want to get in front of something.
The story is about Guantanamo.
And I think lots of us hear Guantanamo at this point, and we think it's heavy and it's complicated and is it really still going on?
And don't I really know everything I already need to know about Guantanamo?
Maybe you've heard of coworkers Sarah Koenig and Dana Chivas over at Cereal have been rolling out season four of Cereal and it's all about Guantanamo.
And the premise of the show is enough time has passed that all these people who were there in its heyday could finally talk publicly about what really happened, what it was like to work there, what it was like to be imprisoned there.
And you hear all these ordinary people who are thrown into this extraordinary situation where they were, you know, guards and interrogators and commanders and detainees in this invented offshore prison with its own weird, brand new rules, and you finally get a very clear sense of what it was like in there.
But there are two episodes that they made that are about stuff that's just happened down there in the last couple years and about stuff that is going to happen that's going to be in the news.
And honestly, when I heard these two episodes, I thought, and I know this sounds kind of grand, I thought, really, every American should hear these.
They're the kind of stories that when you hear them, it totally changes how you understand the news after that.
And they're also just amazing stories.
And so what we're going to do this weekend next, we're going to do something we've never done.
We're going to run these two episodes from Serial, two full episodes on our show.
And so right now, today, here is the first of those two episodes.
Dana Chivas, co hosts this season of Serial g does this one.