Serial Serial

Love the series. Love the presentation style. Love how she sequenced the history and follows one path, then back to the returns to ground zero and continues on the other path. Not one story from beginning to end that would be so boring that it wouldn’t hold interest.

Reading the reviews, many many are ok until it comes to gitmo. Then, the series is “biased” for revealing the sad failure in history. Review Comments (defensive) like ‘we just wanted to do our jobs’ and ‘immediate post 9/11 we don’t know’, does not make history not worth telling and it does not disparage those who followed orders. It just uncovers ugly facts that those folks apparently believe are better left hidden because they turned out extremely bad. That’s not an excuse for wearing blinders, it’s a REASON for taking them off.

The review comment about the reaction to the first thing encountered being a GIFT SHOP is ridiculous. The story says (unsaid) the absurdity of a gift shop at what was turned into a military torture island with illegally held prisoners, even if post 9/11 the intention was good and just. I suspect those right wingers would think it’s also perfectly normal to have gift shop ar San Quentin or Alcatraz.

Jay is very intelligent and familiar with the justice system.it is that knowledge, coupled with the botched investigation that allowed him to put up a great act, and the officers with tunnel vision and no interest in the truth,helped him lie with no particular skills. When I take everything into consideration I strongly believe that Jay is more than likely the one responsible for the crime. I like the podcast but the investigative skills are lacking. At one point she calls some of the points as having the advantage of being the truth, apparently because they are coming from the prosecution side, but in reality they are based only on Jay’s claims. Sometimes she seems to cast doubts about things that don’t really prove or disprove anything, they’re just opinions formed while under the influence of marijuana, I understand taking all Adnan says with a grain of salt, but she seems struggling with being unbiased. What I don’t get is why the police didn’t look more at Jay as a suspect, maybe because he was smart enough to admit playing a part in it, however small, kept him from being looked for the more serious charges. He knew that just pointing his finger at someone else would make them more suspicious towards him. Also if I would be trying to frame someone, what better way to make random calls from the phone of the person I’m wanna frame.
The other piece is that people from minority or immigrant communities tend to over explain themselves because of how society views the people in those communities and the stereotyping and whatnot. It’s not that unique to Adnan.
Adnan was naive and Jay was smart enough to tell the story he wanted to anyone who willing to listen.
A teenager with no criminal background pull off a bloody murder without leaving any trace or dna but be stupid enough to ask help to an acquaintance? Jay, in his own words, is the only one with full knowledge of the crime and all the details.

I really like this podcast, at least season four which is what I listened to. At times, though, it makes me a little bit embarrassed to be very liberal in this country. The tone of this podcast is very condescending at times, as if the hosts are asking us to be indignant when there are probably lots of other things going on that they could seek to understand better. I think the tone matters in a piece like this. You don’t win friends by mocking a host of people as incompetent. It’s important to call things out, but it is also important to do so while showing that humans do bad things. As in we are all capable of doing them.As a scholar of transitional justice and all too many atrocities, I understand that humans can easily be pulled into doing very dark things. Call them out, but explain a bit more why this happens. Not to excuse them, but to show that nobody is necessarily above these things, sadly, and look for institutional answers.Saying, “these guys are so dumb, “does not do that.