In 2006, while on a Dartmouth foreign study program, Latif Nasser walked the streets of Fez, Morocco, asking inhabitants what it meant to be Muslim. Little did he know that 12 years later he would return to the country to ask slightly different, and much more urgent, questions about identity.
On his second trip, in 2018, this time to Casablanca, Nasser wasn't a student but a journalist, investigating the background of a man he couldn't stop wondering about. The story has now culminated in a six-episode Radiolab podcast about the mystery man, a Guantanamo detainee named Abdul Latif Nasir. In The Other Latif, Nasser explores Nasir's true identity.
The resemblance to his own name had both startled and intrigued Nasser three years earlier, when he stumbled across a tweet from a nonprofit law firm advocating for Nasir's release. Until then, Nasser had thought his name was one of a kind. "At first I thought—this sounds crazy—I thought they were talking about me," Nasser says in the first episode of the podcast. He started googling and making phone calls. Who is this other Latif? Nasser's research uncovered a disturbing picture of a terrorist accused of being a military advisor to Osama bin Laden.
But is that the real story? "That is a question I have been obsessing with," Nasser tells DAM. "What, if anything, did this guy do? And is it proportional to what we've done to him?" Nasser's answers to those questions, which he sets out in his podcast, are nuanced and develop through an edge-of-your seat narrative.
To read the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine article: https://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/latif-nasser-other-latif-podcast