830: The Forever Trial
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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 WBZChicago, it's this American life, I'm out of a glass. If you heard of your last week, you know that we're doing something unusual for these two weeks. We're featuring stories about Guantanamo, made by our colleagues at cereal. And the one this week is really the one that killed me when I first heard it. We're about some of the very last people still at Guantanamo, five men who were accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks, stories about their trial. And as Sarah Canning points out, of everything that's happened at Guantanamo, the trial of these five men is the one place that you would think we could get to some kind of justice. And then, in this story, step by step and piece by piece, Sarah lays out why that seems so unlikely to happen. In fact, these men were tortured in CIA black sites for years, messes up their cases in all kinds of ways. But that is just one of the problems in the cases. And there's this one section of the story that I think is especially eye opening, and that is the section where Sarah explains what's probably the best possible outcome we could hope for in these cases and why when that hits the news someday, if it ever happens, it sure to be deeply misunderstood by lots of people, maybe by most people. So with that, I turned things over to serial host Sarah Canning. Every couple of weeks at the bland hour of 5 p.m. on a Tuesday, a group of people you've never heard of clicks into a Zoom meeting. They're all family members of people who died on September 11th. Hi. Hi, everyone. Hi, everybody. There's Colleen, a nurse practitioner in the Bronx, and Terry, retired documentary filmmaker in Boston. Diane and Savannah, retired ordained minister, Valerie, who used to work in nonprofits and her omnipresent feline, trying to get the cast tail out of my face. Barry, a graphic designer in Oregon, oh, Barry got a haircut. And Phyllis in New York, a retired teacher, who recently turned 80. You are not 80. I know I'm not. I'm not. They've known each other a long time, many of them for a decade or more, through career changes and new grandchildren and health troubles. Well, well, well, yeah. What would we do without each other? Yeah. Yeah. The first meeting I sat in on, June of 2022, I assumed they'd be like a support group. Instead, the topic that day was the physical and mental well-being of the five men accused of orchestrating the attacks that killed their relatives. If the men don't get the death penalty, there's a very real possibility they won't, what should the men's punishment be? I think, you know, we're hearing that the 9/11 defendants don't want to leave Guantanamo. No, because they think they're going to Florence, Colorado, which is very uncomfortable or worse compared to Guantanamo.
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