It was all a big mistake. Ahmad Al-Halabi was sure this had to be some sort of misunderstanding that he could clear up before his flight in a few hours.
It was July 2003, and Al-Halabi, a 24-year-old American citizen and Air Force airman, was being escorted through the naval air station in Jacksonville, Fla., by four government agents who said they wanted to talk to him. They walked him into an empty bathroom, where they searched his pockets and removed a small Quran that he always carried as an observant Muslim. They told him they had some questions, but they didn’t want to talk in the restroom; he would have to come with them. Al-Halabi told them he was worried about making his flight, but he agreed. They told him they were going to handcuff him.
“Why?” he asked.
“We’ll explain as soon as we can,” one officer said.
A jacket covered his handcuffed wrists but hardly hid the spectacle: A young man in jeans and a Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt, surrounded by four men, one on either side, one behind him and one in front. The terminal was crowded with people — some of them could be his co-workers. He was too embarrassed to look up, but he felt their eyes on him. The agents led him to a waiting car and drove to a small office nearby.
He wondered if this was about his leave. Al-Halabi had been serving as a translator at Guantánamo Bay, America’s sprawling detention center on the eastern edge of Cuba for hundreds of foreigners held as terrorists in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. He was traveling to Syria for his wedding. The trip required many days of travel; the paperwork was complicated. Had he done something wrong? Or had something happened in Guantánamo?
Call my supervisor at Travis, Al-Halabi urged the agents, referring to his home base in California; he will explain my travel has been cleared.
Instead, the agents asked him what he knew about Wahhabism, an austere form of Islam tied to Al Qaeda. They asked him if he ever took photos inside the detention facilities.
No, Al-Halabi said.
The agents showed him pictures of fences and a guard tower at Guantánamo Bay and asked him if he recognized the images. Well, yeah, maybe, he said. He had taken pictures to test a disposable camera and then lost the camera, he told them. He didn’t know what had happened to it. Maybe he had broken a rule, but he figured it wasn’t a big deal.
All he could think about was getting back to the airport. He reminded the agents over and over that he had a flight to catch.
“It doesn’t look like you’re going to make that flight,” he recalls one saying.
He still thought that whatever was happening could be fixed quickly. He had, in his eight months translating for the U.S. military, seen his share of misinterpretations — lousy translations that could easily have dire consequences. Once, in a letter written by a detainee, a translator misunderstood the name of a 13th-century writer for the Arabic word for nuclear, which it resembled. Al-Halabi had to clarify that the man was not requesting books about nuclear weapons.
At times like that, he saw himself as a helpful bridge between the worlds he inhabited: military and Muslim, American and Arab. But experiences like those now made him feel overwhelmed and frightened. Some of the Guantánamo detainees seemed to him to have landed in detention through a mix of bad luck and bad information. Now here he was, another Muslim suspected of something nefarious.
After questioning, he was taken for a medical exam, during which he pleaded with the doctor for help. “You know, sir, believe me, I’m innocent,” he told him. The doctor said he was there only to make sure Al-Halabi was healthy. Officials then stripped him naked, he says, and told him to squat, so they could make sure he wasn’t hiding anything on or in his body. He was given prison clothes, and someone ordered him to stand straight. His holding cell had a bed wrapped in plastic, a metal toilet and a small window. He could see a storm raging outside.
That first night in jail was “the worst night of my life,” Al-Halabi recalls. He lay on the bed, exhausted but unable to sleep, his mind circling around the same questions: What did I say wrong for me to be here? How do I tell my mom? What the hell is happening?
Two days later, he finally learned the answer: The U.S. government said Al-Halabi was a spy.
Federal prosecutors would file 30 charges against Al-Halabi, including espionage and aiding the enemy. Two other men that Al-Halabi worked with at Gitmo were also arrested and charged: Captain James Yee, a Muslim chaplain and Al-Halabi’s friend, and a civilian translator on the base, Ahmed Mehalba. Military officials suggested in interviews at the time that they had broken up a spy ring on the base made up of Muslim and Arab American service members and contractors.
The charges against Al-Halabi included accusations that he emailed classified information, took unauthorized photos of the base, lied to investigators and mishandled classified documents. Investigators claimed he was passing sensitive information about the base and its prisoners to an agent of the Syrian government. The espionage charge could carry the death penalty.
“I didn’t know what espionage was,” Al-Halabi says. “I had to look it up.” As his lawyers read the charge sheet, Al-Halabi was “shocked and horrified,” he says. “I was telling my lawyer: ‘No, this is a lie. They are wrong.’” He remembers thinking, Maybe if I tell my lawyer, “No, it’s not true,” they will listen to her. Years later, he laughs aloud at how naïve that sounds. “How could I think like that? I was truly just trying to get by. I was just trying to be a good soldier.”
In 2003, the nation was still raw from 9/11. The last piece of steel from the twisted remains of the twin towers was removed from ground zero only the previous year. The war in Iraq had just begun. The Department of Homeland Security had just been created. For the nation, the charges against Al-Halabi, Yee and Mehalba captured the country’s worst fears — enemies could live among us and infiltrate our defenses.
Since the attacks, the New York City Police Department had been surveilling Muslim neighborhoods. In Southern California, the F.B.I. sent an informant into mosques. Federal prosecutors brought terrorism cases across the country. Muslim truck drivers, waiters and tourists were swept into investigations, interrogations and prosecutions that almost invariably led to lesser convictions or, in some cases, fell apart.
No case more perfectly captured the fear-driven frenzy of those post-9/11 years than the Guantánamo Bay spying case, perhaps the highest-profile collapse of them all.
In less than a year, all the criminal charges against Yee were dropped. Mehalba served 17 months for removing a disk of classified information from the base so he could continue to work and taking it with him while traveling to Egypt to visit family. Al-Halabi spent nearly 10 months in confinement awaiting his trial’s resolution, even as many of the charges against him were dropped, including the most serious ones of espionage and aiding the enemy.
He entered four guilty pleas and was given a bad-conduct discharge from the Air Force. He left the United States and faded from headlines.
I wrote about Al-Halabi’s case for The Detroit Free Press in 2003. I spoke to his father, sister, lawyers and friends and traveled to Guantánamo Bay to talk to his commanders and see where he had lived and worked. But I had never spoken to Al-Halabi, who was in custody at the time. The case seemed extraordinary: The government said he was a dangerous traitor; his father told me he was a sensitive boy whose “heart is pure.”
Several years ago, Al-Halabi friended me on Facebook. I was always curious about how he felt about being wrongfully accused of spying and also how he felt about America and his place in it. He had decided to return to Dearborn, the Arab American enclave outside Detroit, when his father became ill and then stayed after his death. In 2022, we spoke for the first time by phone, nearly 20 years after his arrest. He said he was ready to tell his story.
I met Al-Halabi at a large, popular Middle Eastern restaurant in Dearborn on a cold afternoon last year. I got there early and watched for the man the government once said was a spy. In walked a tired-looking father, now 45, carrying a chubby-faced baby. Rana, the woman he was on his way to wed when he was arrested, stood beside him with their three daughters and young son. We took a large table in a corner. The children bounced in their seats. His oldest, 16-year-old Lian, quiet with attentive eyes, was the same age he was when he arrived in Dearborn from Syria. She focused on her phone, but her eyes darted up from time to time as she listened.
Over the din of clanking plates, Al-Halabi mentioned his time in jail. His youngest daughter, Taleen, froze. “Baba went to jail?” she asked, wide-eyed.
Al-Halabi paused. Lian stared at him from behind her screen.
“Well, not really,” Al-Halabi began, slowly. “I went to confinement, not jail. For example, if someone you know stole something, he goes to court and the judge says, ‘You go to jail for one year or two years.’ But when they put you in confinement, they just hold you in one place. You’re not supposed to go until they find the truth.”
The younger girl seemed appeased. Lian studied Al-Halabi. I asked her if she knew her father’s story. “I’ve heard of his case, but not the story,” she said.
“Honestly, I have mixed feelings,” Al-Halabi told me later about revisiting this moment in his past. “Like, I really don’t want to go through all this again. You know, open doors that I closed.” But he and Rana both agreed it was time. Their children would eventually learn the truth — the internet would mean they could easily stumble on it — and it was best for it to come from them. And after the ordeal he suffered, Al-Halabi somehow remained positive, even patriotic, about the country that had once called him a traitor. It was still his country, and he wanted his children to know it was theirs too.
“They all believe Omar can be president because he was born here,” he said at the restaurant. He thought it was possible, too. Omar, his youngest, grinned and drooled as he gnawed on a piece of bread.
He wanted his children to understand that “the system worked,” even when America was at its lowest moment. He was not executed; he was set free. His return to Dearborn, he said, was in a way a vote of confidence in the country’s future. “I’m optimistic,” he said.
It was an extraordinary thing to hear from a man whose experience so vividly reflected the anxieties of Arabs and Muslims in America after 9/11. In the months after the attacks, the communities were targeted by government officials searching for terrorists and recruiting informants. The F.B.I. questioned 5,000 Arab or Muslim men in the United States, nearly 600 of whom lived in southeastern Michigan, home to one of the largest concentrations of Arab and Muslim populations in the country. Among the questions they were asked: Do you know of anybody who is advocating, supporting or planning a terrorist attack of any kind? Do you know anyone raising money for terrorist activities?
Al-Halabi’s case deeply rattled Dearborn. Here was an immigrant kid who did the most American thing possible: join the military. And now, he was on trial for his life. Al-Halabi seemed like proof that even the most basic elements of your identity — your name, religion, accent, country of origin — could be used against you.
Al-Halabi arrived in Dearborn from Syria in 1996 as a painfully shy teenager who spoke very little English. He enrolled in high school as a freshman, and after school, joined his father and brother working in Middle Eastern restaurant kitchens.
His father had left for the United States years earlier to earn money in Dearborn. Before leaving, he explained to Al-Halabi, then around 10, that he would eventually come to America and, maybe, one day join a great military. That idea stuck in young Al-Halabi’s head.
In Michigan, he saw soldiers at parades and admired them. He thought that joining the American military would not only be “cool” but that he could “be part of a greater good.” He was even more thrilled to learn the military would help pay for his education. It was, for him, a path out of Dearborn’s kitchens and into a career. “I’m on Cloud Nine,” he remembers thinking at the time. “This is exactly what I want to do.”
He learned English quickly, and he was soon translating daily American life for his family, who were still not fluent. Many of the elderly or newer immigrants in the community often needed help, and they turned to Al-Halabi, too. “People would call me, like they would want to ship this package, so I would call FedEx, or call their credit-card company for missing a payment,” Al-Halabi told me. “For some reason, I got very good at it.” Within a few years, he felt he understood his new country and could help explain it to his community. And helping adults interact with the world was teaching him how that world worked.
Soon after graduating from high school in 1999, he walked into a Marine recruiting office in suburban Detroit ready to enlist. But the recruiter erroneously told him he couldn’t join with only a green card; he needed to be a citizen.
“I said, ‘OK, fine,’ and I walked out of the Marines and into the Air Force,” Al-Halabi says. The Air Force recruiter gave him an aptitude test and offered him a position in logistics. The quiet teenager, who had been on an airplane only once, when he moved to America, left Dearborn to become an Air Force airman.
At Travis Air Force Base, a compound between San Francisco and Sacramento, Al-Halabi decorated his room with an American flag and posters of fighter jets. But his English, he discovered, was not as strong as he had believed. “Everyone was talking so fast,” he remembers. “There were all these new words.” He also found it hard to fit in when most of his colleagues liked to drink and party. “It wasn’t my scene,” he says.
As a clerk for the 60th Supply Squadron, he worked coordinating delivery loads onto massive C-5 airplanes. It was a lonely job that often required him to work nights, but Al-Halabi didn’t mind: The schedule allowed him to study English and take classes at a local college.
Two years later, he was on assignment in Kuwait, where his Arabic skills proved useful. His superiors were impressed with his meticulous record-keeping and could see that he was working hard to improve his English. In early 2001, he was named Outstanding Airman of the Year for his squadron and promoted to senior airman.
On the morning of Sept. 11, Al-Halabi was at breakfast at Travis when word of the attacks filtered out. When he learned who was behind the attacks, “it was devastating,” he says. It was the last thing Arabs and Muslims needed “as we’re trying to, you know, assimilate. And now we have this.”
He had little time to consider what, if anything, this might mean for him, though, because the base was put on high alert and his squadron went to work for 22 hours straight. He remembers being “shocked” at how fast everything was moving, how quickly the base shifted from the normal rhythms of military life to a wartime footing.
A couple weeks later, he says, federal agents came to visit him. They asked him if he knew anything about the attacks or if he knew anyone who had been flying that day. His father, he told them, was supposed to fly from Los Angeles to Detroit after visiting Al-Halabi’s sister, but his flight was canceled. The agents also asked if he felt discriminated against as a Muslim and Arab, and urged him to tell his commanders if he was singled out because of these identities.
That the agents would ask him about discrimination made him feel as if this country cared about him, but he also found himself wondering why they would think he had any information about a terror attack. Why would they come to him?
Al-Halabi became a U.S. citizen a few months later, and the next year, his superiors asked if he would be willing to serve as a translator at Guantánamo Bay, where the military was holding suspected terrorists. There weren’t enough Arabic speakers in the military, they told him, and Al-Halabi could put his language skills to use. He said yes, proud and excited to be able to be part of something so important.
Before Al-Halabi left for Guantánamo, he took personal leave to travel to the United Arab Emirates, where Rana lived, to ask her to marry him. The pair, who were introduced through Al-Halabi’s mother, had spoken and emailed frequently but never met. They decided that Rana would leave her family and become a military wife. “Getting things in motion was extremely important for me,” Al-Halabi says. “I was extremely hopeful.”
But even before he left for Guantánamo, he had become a target of the suspicions swirling around Muslims in the United States at the time. Some of those suspicions, voiced by his fellow service members, later found their way into interviews with investigators and witness statements during Al-Halabi’s trial. After his own lawyers interviewed Al-Halabi’s colleagues at Travis and Guantánamo, they found that some suspicions of Al-Halabi were tied directly to his religion and ethnicity.
One colleague told them that he started referring to Al-Halabi as “Taliban” because he thought it was odd he wanted to take his leave in the U.A.E.
A female service member told investigators that she was suspicious of phone calls Al-Halabi made to his father. “It was right after Sept. 11, so I was watching everything around me,” she later told Al-Halabi’s lawyers, noting that he was communicating in Arabic.
Al-Halabi says that at the time, he thought his tensions with this woman were nothing more than typical work politics: He didn’t like her and tried to avoid speaking to her. But to this woman, he was a Muslim being secretive about his activities. She grew so wary of him that she followed him around Travis Air Force Base one day. He drove to the parking lot of a store and looked at other cars for 15 minutes, never entering the store. She confronted him, she told Al-Halabi’s lawyers, telling him he was a terrorist. “He said, ‘I’m a U.S. citizen, I went to an American school.’ And I said that doesn’t make you a nonterrorist.”
Al-Halabi felt annoyed by this woman but wasn’t worried at the time. It wasn’t the first time he had heard these kinds of insults since 9/11. On another assignment in Kuwait, an Army master sergeant called him “Airman Al Qaeda.” It stung, but who would take an accusation like that seriously?
The whispers and allegations were not enough to prevent his superiors from deploying him. He traveled to the U.A.E. and got engaged to Rana and shortly after that deployed to Guantánamo Bay.
He knew he was not a spy, but he also knew innocent people could be killed by governments. Mistakes were made. America was at war.
In November 2002, Al-Halabi arrived at the heart of America’s global war on terror. The look of the sprawling base didn’t fit its reputation, with low-slung stucco houses that conjured the suburban neighborhoods of any American town. There was a high school for the children of the military families stationed there, a McDonald’s and a bowling alley. “It seemed nice,” Al-Halabi recalls. “It seemed like a normal place” with views of a beautiful blue-green sea.
When the prison first opened earlier that year, detainees were kept in open-air cages, known as Camp X-Ray, built far from where the officers and their families lived. Eventually, though, they were moved into more permanent cellblocks, called Camp Delta. An entire system was built to hold them, including a field hospital, a dental facility and interrogation rooms, all guarded by special units rotating in from around the United States.
Al-Halabi was assigned to a small group of linguists that included some Muslims as well as Arab Christians. The immediate need was for translations of letters the detainees were writing home, so that censors could black out sensitive information and also possibly glean intelligence. But soon new commanders on the base wanted the linguists to gather information in other ways: They directed them to walk the cellblocks and chat with detainees — a strategy of “passive intelligence” gathering.
These conversations caused friction with the military police guarding the cells, who began to see the linguists as sympathetic to the detainees. Guards, Al-Halabi says, called them “terrorists” and “detainee lovers” and threw in racist slurs. Al-Halabi felt caught between two groups of people, neither of whom respected the work he and the other translators were trying to do. The guards were suspicious of them but so were the detainees, who called them “infidels.”
The linguists were led by Capt. Tariq Hashim, who bonded with Al-Halabi over their shared Muslim faith. The two men befriended Yee, a Muslim convert who served as the Muslim chaplain on base. Yee was married to a Syrian woman and turned to Al-Halabi for help with dialect. Soon, the three men were spending free time together and worshiping together as well, Al-Halabi recalls.
Al-Halabi knew that the clique they formed might have rankled their peers, but he did not realize it also made them a target of suspicion. He would only learn this later, during his trial. One captain, an intelligence officer at Camp Delta, told investigators that the Muslim service members and civilian workers would pray “while non-Muslims were performing their duties.”
“They were fervent in their beliefs and encouraged other Muslims to participate in their religious activities,” he said in another statement, referring to Al-Halabi and his small circle of Muslim friends. “A lot of their religious beliefs mirrored those of the detainees.”
Looking back after his hearing, Al-Halabi thought there might be an additional explanation for his peers’ behavior: the cars. Cars were rare on the sprawling base, and not everyone was allowed to have them. The three men would drive to the beach together, pray and hang out around the base. “Having a means of transportation is a huge privilege,” Al-Halabi says. “And these two captains have cars and I’m friends with both of them. Wow.”
Even as Al-Halabi was becoming an object of distrust to his peers, he and the other linguists were also trying to meet the increasing demands of their work. In 10 months, Al-Halabi says he translated 2,750 documents and more than 2,000 interviews, in addition to reviewing the work of other translators.
The translators were under pressure to work as fast as they could, because detainees were complaining to the International Committee of the Red Cross that they weren’t getting their mail quickly enough. In the beginning, Al-Halabi hand-wrote his translations, because the military hadn’t provided enough computers for the team. A few translators began bringing their own laptops to work and connecting to the base’s network. Al-Halabi was one of them. Eventually, once the translators were allocated more computers, they were prohibited from connecting their own laptops to the network or downloading translated detainee documents onto them. This would become a critical point in the government’s case against him, which claimed, after later discovering translation files on his personal laptop, that he had downloaded classified information to an unapproved device. Al-Halabi and his lawyers argued that these were not sensitive or classified files, because he had created them himself in order to translate the original letters.
Al-Halabi’s case was further complicated by the fact that the more he learned about the detainees through this work, the more sympathetic he felt to many of them. He thought many of the detainees he met didn’t belong there. They were just insignificant people caught in a big net: a grocery-store owner, a driver, people sold out for cash rewards who had made enemies back home but didn’t know anything about terrorism.
“I’ve spoken to doctors, pharmacists, businessmen volunteering to, like, build a mosque or something,” Al-Halabi told me. “And they just get picked up.”
Al-Halabi began speaking up to his family and his colleagues on the base about how he felt. Once, when a detainee started mouthing off to an intelligence officer, Al-Halabi said to the officer: “How can you blame these guys for feeling this way? They don’t have attorneys and some of them are innocent.”
Those sentiments would later be used against him as prosecutors portrayed him as a terrorist sympathizer. After his own arrest, he said he realized that “a lot of individuals in Guantánamo were arrested and jailed for years on end,” he told me. “And they’re innocent. I immediately thought that could be the case with me.”
In early 2003, Al-Halabi was chosen to go to Afghanistan to pick up more detainees, a plum assignment that his colleagues resented him for, he says; they were convinced Captain Hashim, who oversaw the linguists, had played favorites.
Al-Halabi was given his travel and mission orders, which the military considered sensitive, although, he says, he didn’t understand what that meant at the time. “I wanted a souvenir of my work,” he says, so he kept them. It was dumb, he told me, but insisted it was not malicious. This was, however, one of the charges that stuck: Al-Halabi would later plead guilty to mishandling classified documents by taking them to his Guantánamo quarters in an unsecured manner.
Days after Al-Halabi was arrested, Rana, her parents and her siblings were waiting at the airport in Damascus to meet him and his mother for their wedding. He hadn’t been in contact for a week, and that wasn’t like him. She held bouquets of flowers to present to his mother, and strained to get a look at the people coming off their flights. Finally, she saw her. Al-Halabi’s mother was in tears. Al-Halabi was gone, she said. They hadn’t heard from him and had no idea where he was.
Some of Rana’s friends wondered if Al-Halabi was backing out of the wedding. She did not. “I just thought, Something is wrong,” Rana told me. More than a week later, they learned Al-Halabi had been arrested. Details were scant, and they didn’t know why, but Rana was flooded with relief, “OK, he’s alive,” she told herself.
The wedding was postponed. As worried as she was for Al-Halabi, she had no answers to offer her family and friends about where her groom was. Then, one morning, sitting at breakfast with her family, there was Al-Halabi on television, in his military uniform, accused of being a spy. Rana was in shock. Friends told her to leave him: They hardly knew each other; she was young; she could marry someone else.
“But I believed he was innocent,” she says. “All the world was against him.” She had made a decision: “I will not be against him.”
When I spoke with Rana and Al-Halabi at their home in Dearborn, she had recently recounted those anguished days to Lian, their oldest. Her daughter wanted to know how she could have stood by a man she barely knew and someone charged with spying at that. Rana repeated to her what she found herself saying over and over again: She just believed he was innocent. She told her daughter the same thing she told her own father 20 years earlier, “I will wait for him forever.”
During his months in confinement, she and Al-Halabi were allowed short phone calls with a military translator on the line. They didn’t talk about anything significant but took comfort from the sound of each other’s voices. Sometimes, though, those calls made her scared to leave her family for a strange and seemingly hostile land. What if they were already married when he was arrested? I will be alone by myself in America, she thought.
As the case dragged on, Al-Halabi started to feel his hope slip away. He knew he was not a spy, but he also knew innocent people could be killed by governments. Mistakes were made. America was at war. At one point, he heard that the military executes people by firing squad. He couldn’t sleep for weeks afterward.
“I couldn’t think of anything else,” he told me in Dearborn.
Sitting next to Al-Halabi on their living-room couch, Rana listened closely. “He hasn’t told me some of this,” she said to me.
Every job he applied for fell through. It was easy enough to search for his name on the internet and see that he had been charged with spying.
Among the accusations the government made was that Al-Halabi’s planned trip to Syria to marry Rana was part of his supposed spy mission. The letter he had received from the Syrian embassy approving his travel also gave him permission to go to Qatar, the government said. Why would he travel to Qatar if he were just going to Syria to marry? Al-Halabi’s lawyers showed him the letter in his cell and pressed him for an explanation.
“These people,” he muttered. They had mistranslated a word that meant “homeland” but sounded like Qatar. Not only was it a mistake in translation, but it didn’t even make sense. Why would the Syrian government be able to give him permission to travel to Qatar? The government translator would later acknowledge her mistake.
One by one, nearly every allegation in the case evaporated. The government could not prove that Al-Halabi had emailed classified documents. Arabic writing found in his room was deemed to be typical articles of Islamic faith.
Nearly 10 months into the hearing, as the charges continued to be dismissed, the military judge turned to Al-Halabi and said, “You’re not going to be in confinement tomorrow,” he remembers. It was “the most beautiful sentence” he had ever heard. He had been in custody for 295 days, and he was suddenly, unexpectedly free. He would still need to come back to court, but he would not spend another night in detention.
Al-Halabi eventually pleaded guilty to four violations. He did take unauthorized photos, and he did lie at first to investigators about them. He did move classified documents from his Afghanistan assignment to his Guantánamo quarters improperly. And he did mail documents to his quarters in Travis Air Force Base and retained them without authorization. The military judge sentenced him to time served. After the trial, the Air Force released a statement: “The case demonstrated the fairness and effectiveness of the military justice system,” Col. John Kellogg said. “As the evidence evolved, the charges were reduced accordingly.”
In late November 2004, Rana flew with her father from U.A.E. to Travis Air Force Base to meet him. On Dec. 1, she and Al-Halabi were married at the Solano County courthouse in California. Al-Halabi would have to spend the next several months being debriefed, but the newlyweds were still thrilled to be in each other’s company.
Within a year, though, Al-Halabi had to face the fact that his dream of making a life with Rana in America and rising in the U.S. military was over. Every job he applied for fell through. It was easy enough to search for his name on the internet and see that he had been charged with spying. Who would want to give him a chance?
They decided to move to Dubai, where Rana still had family. Al-Halabi worked as a consultant for a real estate developer. They had children and put the past behind them. “I never thought of coming back to America,” he told me. He was angry about how he was treated, disappointed that all his plans were thrown so far off track.
But when his father’s health started to decline, Al-Halabi decided to return to Dearborn in 2015 to be with him. His father died of cancer four years later. By then, Al-Halabi and Rana had decided they would stay. Enough time had passed. Dearborn seemed different, America seemed different — far from the fear and anxiety of those early post-9/11 years. Al-Halabi, who now works for a nonprofit group helping refugees, started to think back on his military service with pride.
Al-Halabi tailgates at University of Michigan football games, where he has joined a veterans’ group. He recently translated a document that a war-memorabilia collector brought to show the group. “I told him, ‘This is letterhead from Saddam Hussein’s desk,’ and he went crazy,” Al-Halabi says. “He was so happy to finally know what it was. And it made me happy.”
He says he sometimes thinks about working for the government again, if they could use him. He would translate, he says, but not just language: culture. The world could use that now, he thinks.
In a way, he says, his first instinct on the very day of his arrest turned out to be true: It was all a misunderstanding. And somehow, in the end, as he had felt sure it would be — but not before the days and nights of anxiety and not before the dashing of his early dreams — it was all cleared up.
For more about Ahmad Al-Halabi and the history of Guantánamo, listen to the new season of “Serial” on the NYT Audio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Tamara Audi is a journalist based in Los Angeles who has reported and edited for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Wayne Lawrence is a documentary photographer and visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York. His work is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The post The Guantánamo Spy Who Wasn’t appeared first on New York Times.