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The Audio Long Read

From the archive: Forever prisoners: were a father and son wrongly ensnared by America’s war on terror?

The Audio Long Read

The Guardian

Society & Culture

4.32.4K Ratings

🗓️ 15 September 2021

⏱️ 49 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We are raiding the Audio Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors. This week, from 2018: Saifullah Paracha, the oldest prisoner in Guantánamo Bay, will probably die in detention without ever being charged. His son is currently in a US prison. Both have been in custody for almost 15 years, accused of aiding al-Qaida. But did they? By Saba Imtiaz. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod

Transcript

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0:36.5

The Guardian. Hi, my name is Sabai Mthialis, I'm the author of The Peace you're about to listen to

0:43.7

and I'm speaking to you from a very busy neighborhood in Garachi, Pakistan. So I had been interested

0:49.8

in this story for many years. All of the details were sort of in bits and pieces that I'd read.

0:54.6

We're very intriguing. There was, you know, one meeting that had happened at an ice cream shop and

0:58.4

I guess because of the profile of the men, the poroches were a very rich and privileged family

1:03.3

and there were not the kinds of people who, as one would say, this you would expect this to happen

1:08.5

to and I think that's why people were shocked when these events originally happened. In the early

1:12.6

2000s is that nobody would have expected that these rich and privileged people could end up in the

1:17.4

US roster system, so to speak. For me what was really interesting is that I couldn't really understand

1:22.6

how a father and son had both gotten into this and how this kind of narrative had been built around

1:27.4

them and yet no one seemed to know what the charges were. It was just very unclear and what was

1:33.2

most interesting to me was that they had really been kind of forgotten. So people would never

1:37.2

talk about them or reference them or pull protests for them. Things happened in the early years

1:42.3

after they were picked up but not anything after that. It's not even that people didn't care about

1:47.9

poor Pakistanis picked up on the battlefield but they didn't care about even rich Pakistanis

...

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