S04 - Ep. 1: Poor Baby Raul

Serial

Serial Productions & The New York Times

True Crime, News, Society & Culture

4.5 • 82.3K Ratings

🗓️ 28 March 2024

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Maybe you have an idea in your head about what it was like to work at Guantánamo, one of the most notorious prisons in the world. Think again.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Over here at Serial we love criminal justice stories.
0:06.0	Guantanamo is the most astonishing one we've ever seen.
0:10.0	Guantanamo is a prison and a court that we made from scratch right after September 11th.
0:16.3	We were at war in Afghanistan fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and pretty soon we'd captured
0:21.3	thousands of men.
0:23.0	Our makeshift holding cells in Afghanistan couldn't handle them all.
0:26.4	We needed a safe place to keep them,
0:28.4	away from the chaos, so we could sort them out.
0:31.6	And the place we chose was Guantanamo Bay, 8,000 miles away from
0:36.3	Afghanistan in Cuba. We already had a sleepy naval base there. We've had it since
0:41.7	1903. There's plenty of room and this
0:44.4	part was crucial. The Bush administration figured because the base was in
0:48.2	Cuba on foreign soil, the prisoners we delivered there wouldn't have access to US courts.
0:54.0	That was the innovation.
0:56.0	We wanted Leeway to hold these guys for however long we wanted,
0:59.0	and mostly we wanted to interrogate them,
1:02.0	however we wanted, to find out what they knew, especially
1:05.7	about Al Qaeda, because we didn't know a ton about Al Qaeda back then and we were petrified
1:09.9	they were about to blindside us again.
1:12.6	So that was the idea.
1:14.0	Guantanamo wouldn't be a traditional POW camp.
1:17.3	It'd be a new thing, with new rules.
	...

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