This American Life with Ira Glass announced a change in this week's program. The new program is about former Guantanamo detainees. Here is the main bulk of the email.

This week, This American Life devotes its whole program to these men, including two rare and revealing interviews with former detainees."

If anybody actually met these guys," a lawyer for some Guantanamo detainees, Sabin Willett, declares, "you know, had them on tv shows and the radio, they'd be shocked. Because they've been told for four years that the people at Guantanamo are terrorists, that they're the worst of the worst. You're going to suddenly realize you've been lied to for a long time."

Reporter Jack Hitt speaks with the two former detainees, Abdullah Al Noaimi and Badr Zaman Badr, neither of whom have ever spoken before for broadcast.

Weaving together interviews with administration officials, lawyers representing the detainees, as well as former detainees themselves, This American Life presents one of the most comprehensive pictures to date of the situation at Guantanamo: how it represents a break with U.S. legal traditions, both military and civilian; and who, exactly, are the people being detained there.

As Hitt puts it in his story, "Is Guantanamo a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of mistakes?"

This question is especially relevant in the wake of the Pentagon's release last week of five thousand pages of documents about the detainees, after a Freedom of Information request by the Associated Press.

Former detainee Abdullah Al Noaimi attended Old Dominion University in Virginia, speaks fluent English, and has fond memories of Spring Break in Daytona Beach. He was held in Guantanamo for four years, before finally being released last year.

He tells Hitt about the physical abuse he suffered at the hands of his captors, but also of the moments of connection they sometimes shared, like a contest between bored guards and detainees, to see who could turn a Styrofoam cup inside out without breaking it.

Like many detainees at Guantanamo, he was not picked up off a battlefield, but was turned over to Americans by Pakistanis. Americans paid five and ten thousand dollar bounties for captives, and Al Noaimi believes he was turned over for a bounty.

The other interviewee on the program, Badr Zaman Badr, was held in Guantanamo for over two years for two jokes he published, he believes. He and his brother ran a satirical magazine in Pashtu. One of the jokes targeted a political figure who Badr believes turned them over to the Americans. The other joke - about President Clinton - came up repeatedly in interrogations at Guantanamo.

According to a recent Seton Hall Law School study of Pentagon documents, only five percent of the detainees at Guantanamo were actually apprehended by the U.S. Military. Only eight percent have been accused of being Al Qaeda fighters.

This episode of This American Life airs the weekend of March 11th and 12th in most places. Check local listings or www.thisamericanlife.org for exact times.