This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. In 2005 an audience filed into the Bravo Theater Center in San Francisco.

The house lights were on, making it easy to see a small group of men already on stage,

wearing orange jump suits and lying on small prison cots.

They were actors in the politically charged play, Guantanamo, honor bound to defend freedom.

The show told the stories of four British Muslim detainees. The narrative unfolds through the testimony of their families,

attorneys, and U.S. officials, along with letters that the men wrote while being held at Guantanamo

Bay in Cuba.

One of them was a guy named Ruhel Ahmed who was from an area outside of Birmingham,

and him and three of his buddies were picked up in Afghanistan

and were held in Guantanamo Bay for many, many years.

This is Nafiz Hamid. He played the role of Ruha in one production of the play.

What I remember from being in the show was just the way in which his letters were quite spirited

in the beginning.

He would be talking about how all the Guantanamo Bay guards like him, how they get along, they call him Slim Shady, how he's working on a six-pack.

And then by the end, his letters you could just see, we're getting more and more depressed, and you could just see were getting more and more depressed and you could just

tell that this was someone who was entering into a dark and very very negative state.

Rual Ahmed was accused of being an Al-Qaeda recruit, an enemy of the United States.

Throughout his more than two-year stint in Guantanamo, he maintained that he was innocent.

He was eventually released without charges.

As an actor, Nafiz felt his job was to inhabit the prisoner's life and character.

With any character that you play, you know, whether they're innocent or guilty, you try not to judge

them and try to just become one of them as much as possible.

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