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It was a sunny day in Could 2015 when Sarah Koenig and Dana Chivvis stepped off a U.S. military-chartered aircraft and onto the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
They have been there to study the unofficial story of Guantánamo, the place, after Sept. 11, the U.S. authorities had opened a jail to carry folks it suspected of being members of the Taliban or Al Qaeda.
So started a narrative that might span practically 10 years and tons of of hours of interviews.
That story is advised within the new season of “Serial,” a podcast from Serial Productions and The New York Instances. Over 9 episodes (the primary two drop on Thursday), Ms. Koenig and Ms. Chivvis, the season’s co-hosts, current a mosaic of life at Guantánamo utilizing the experiences of those that have survived and served there, as Ms. Koenig put it within the season’s trailer. That features former prisoners, guards, interrogators and extra.
“There’s been an amazing quantity of wonderful and essential reporting on the place within the realm of geopolitics and policymaking,” Ms. Chivvis mentioned. “However what we have been attempting to do was recreate the world of Guantánamo by the non-public tales of people that have existed and lived and labored and been imprisoned there.”
Between Ms. Koenig and Ms. Chivvis’s first go to to Guantánamo in 2015 and Thursday’s season premiere, there have been a couple of false begins, and interviews with greater than 100 folks. When Ms. Koenig and Ms. Chivvis first visited, they discovered that many sources have been hesitant to talk on the file. Some personnel didn’t wish to threat their careers. Former detainees they reached out to have been nervous about unpacking their experiences, or simply needed to maneuver on.
“Individuals would inform us actually attention-grabbing and loopy issues off the file,” Ms. Chivvis mentioned. “However as quickly as we turned our microphones on and caught them of their faces, they completely clammed up.”
Their editor, Julie Snyder, had the concept of placing collectively a pilot for a TV present a few fictionalized model of Guantánamo. She thought folks may be extra candid in the event that they have been contributing on background, not as named sources.
“That was when loopy, debauched tales began arising,” Ms. Koenig mentioned.
By 2020, they’d accomplished a script for a pilot that attracted curiosity from a manufacturing firm. However by then, Ms. Koenig thought sufficient folks might need returned to civilian life and conform to share these tales on the file.
“I figured it was price a shot,” she mentioned.
Her hunch proved appropriate: With a couple of extra years’ distance from their deployment or detainment, former guards and prisoners have been keen to talk candidly. So Ms. Chivvis and Ms. Koenig re-interviewed folks on the file. The pair additionally returned to Guantánamo in 2022. This time, they have been in a position to observe and report on court docket proceedings. Additionally they carried out extra interviews.
Over the course of their reporting, Ms. Chivvis and Ms. Koenig compiled tons of of hours of interviews spanning practically a decade, which they wanted to form right into a story.
“Now we have this unimaginable, huge array of tales and individuals who will discuss to us on the finish of the day,” Ms. Koenig mentioned. “So then it was simply deciding which of them to concentrate on and why.”
Over the previous 12 months, the crew combed by the recordings and determined to dedicate the season to particular person folks’s tales, presenting listeners with a wealthy vary of views and personalities.
“What’s cool concerning the podcast is that you simply hear either side,” Ms. Chivvis mentioned. “You hear from detainees about what it’s wish to survive day after day as a prisoner and then you definitely hear from a bunch of American service members who labored there about what life was like on the opposite aspect of the wall.” (The city, she mentioned, was surprisingly vigorous and had a sturdy celebration scene, with guards blowing off steam after their shifts at space bars. Within the season’s trailer, somebody even known as it “la la land.”)
The sequence additionally examines the query of why, 15 years after President Obama signed an government order to shut the jail, it stays open with 30 detainees. President Biden renewed the initiative to shut the jail in 2021, however progress has been sluggish going.
“I believe most individuals don’t take into consideration Guantánamo,” Ms. Chivvis mentioned. “It’s a kind of issues that you simply relegate to a web page within the historical past e-book in your thoughts.” However as a result of Guantánamo continues to be open, she added, “it’s not really historical past but.”
The hope, Ms. Koenig mentioned, is that individuals will come away from the podcast with renewed curiosity in Guantánamo, a spot they won’t have thought of in years.
“We wish to carry them into a really sophisticated subject on this approach that’s intimate and compelling” she mentioned. “I believe — I hope — that individuals will perceive Guantánamo in a approach they haven’t.”