“My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me” by M. R. Khan,

A Guantanamo Diary

Reviewed by

Beej K Singh

January 7, 2009


“My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me” by M. R. Khan, ISBN: 978-1-58648-498-9 was published by Public Affairs, New York.

Mahvish Rukhsana Khan – a girl of Afghan heritage, an idealist, and a student at the Law School of the University of Miami – passionately felt that many of the detentions at the Guantanamo Bay facility (Gitmo) were illegal. On a day when she was rattling on and on to her fiancé about the perceived window.google_render_ad();injustice, he got tired and said – “Why don’t you stop complaining and get involved – if you feel so strongly about it?!”So, she did. She used Google to locate the key lawyers representing the Gitmo detainees. She interacted with them and soon found to her astonishment that since none of them spoke Pashto, many of the Afghan detainees had been simply unable to communicate with someone who would understand what they had to say. She sent out her resume, got through the process of getting a “Secret” security clearance, and was taken on as an interpreter by one of the lawyers. Over time, her role grew as she helped with more and more of the detainees – many of whom came to trust her as a “fellow Afghan” – someone who brought to them Starbucks “chai” (the beverage closest to the type of tea they would have had in Afghanistan). The older ones among them even addressed her using the term “bachai” (child) and she could connect with them as only an Afghan could. Later on, she visited Afghanistan to collect evidence needed to prove the innocence of individuals. Out of this experience and her related research comes her book “My Guantanamo Diary”.In her book, Khan chronicles accounts of ten or so Gitmo detainees and intersperses those accounts with a liberal dosage of her own observations on the circumstances surrounding those individuals and also her personal views on various Gitmo-related issues. Khan did not have access to any of the “high value” detainees at Gitmo. However, she appears to believe that a large number of the Gitmo detainees were like the ones she interviewed.Khan initially went to Gitmo with only a vague set of ideas of what she would encounter – perhaps expecting to run into hardened terrorists – the type that Donald Rumsfeld had called the “baddest of the bad”! Instead, the first inmate she met was the pediatrician Dr. Ali Shah Mousovi who – upon the fall of the Taliban – had returned to Afghanistan from an exile in Iran and had been picked up the very second night of his return. Some of the other detainees include an eighty year old partially paralyzed man, a goat herd (who seemed too smart to be a goat herd), a businessman, a Sudanese journalist, and a former police chief. As she met more and more of the Gitmo detainees and became familiar with their stories, Khan appears to have come to the conclusion – as would many readers of this book, that many of Gitmo’s Afghan inmates were individuals against whom there was no credible evidence of any wrongdoing – some were perhaps simply swept up by events around them, or they had been at the wrong place at the wrong time, or because a neighbor, or some enemy had made false complaints against them (possibly to obtain a bounty) – leading to an indefinitely long incarceration in a facility far away with virtually no access to any legal redress and no ability to prove their own innocence. Khan also drops some hints that some individuals may have been picked up in Pakistan and “groomed” in local jails (to grow a beard and other Taliban-like outward features) before being “sold” to the Americans.The question that comes through most strikingly from Khan’s remarkable accounts is – how can a system supposedly full of safeguards go so wrong so quickly – and stay that way for so long?! To quote Khan – “The Guantanamo cases raise lasting and fundamental questions about American willingness to abide by its principles and adhere to the rule of law, especially when under threat”.What also comes through rather strongly is that many of those individuals could have been cleared with a simple check of fact – available to even the most hardened criminals in the U.S. Such an opportunity was mostly denied. The incarcerators seldom sought out any witnesses of their own, even the “accusers” were often classified – and there was rarely an effort to find the witnesses that were requested by the detainees. Instead, those in charge saw it fit to merely put away those detainees by using one pretext or another, deny them their day in the court and hide from public view or scrutiny any accounts of what was happening. In the process, what appears to have been done was to go about deliberately creating an unreal zone – a space that was not the U.S. and yet was not, for all practical purposes, a part of the rest of the non-U.S. world either, a space where the executive exercised the unusual powers of wartime without the encumbrances of the Geneva convention, where those in charge had control to do whatever they pleased without the element of accountability, a space where tragically, human beings in charge of other human beings often turned into less than human beings and treated others as such. In this man-made space, while the detainees languished under U.S. control, they had no recourse to the protections guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. As Ms. Khan puts it so eloquently (if with some humor) even the Gitmo iguanas were protected by the U.S. wildlife laws – but its detainees had no protection whatsoever!Another part that comes through touchingly from this book is how – when some of these same detainees were eventually freed and were able to return to their interrupted lives –even though many had lost years to what turned out to be unjust incarceration, few if any hold a grudge against the Americans – and virtually none do so against the American people.It is unlikely that anyone but one of the Afghan heritage, like Ms. Khan, could write a book like this. The U.S.-born and brought up author, like any lawyer, knows the rights of individuals and the legal recourses for ensuring that those rights are respected – with the ability to interface with the legal community, if necessary, for the same. She also appears to be young enough to not have a vested interest in “protecting” a track record which could be attacked by an adversary, and idealistic enough to not care for such protection. Further, it is unlikely that a book like this could ever happen without at least some support from right-minded individuals in and around her – who believe that fundamental rights of citizens ought to be respected and not, as alleged, simply thrown away in the name of fighting terror. Ms. Khan has the benefits of having an insight into the Afghan mind and can make a distinction between mere cultural issues – like women being under a burqa – versus what constitutes a fundamental denial of human rights in a Taliban-like societal setup. She is no apologist for the latter but it is also important to her that in the name of fighting Taliban-like adversaries, the U.S. does not grab the right to ride rough-shod over what is among one of the most sacred features of the U.S. Constitution – a presumption of innocence on the part of the individual until the individual is actually proven guilty. Khan is not naïve enough to believe that Gitmo does not house evil characters. She also admits that since the detainees were themselves the primary source of information, some of the accounts could be less than accurate or embellished. The point she makes again and again is – while the Gitmo may house innocent as well as evil detainees, it is only through an honest examination of their records that can one separate one from the other.Some accounts of the detainee treatment – as reported to Khan by the detainees, are particularly disturbing. Khan notes that there are cultural attributes of Afghanis which make them very reluctant to discuss some of the humiliations they may have encountered. However, it is not possible to independently corroborate those accounts.Another touching part of the accounts is that of the two Pakistani poet brothers whose creativity Gitmo could not extinguish – and in fact one of whom wrote thousands of pieces of poems during his incarceration but – in a tragic irony, after being freed one brother disappeared in Pakistan (possibly picked up by its security agency) and then the other brother wrote no more – in the process, Pakistan “accomplishing” what even Gitmo had failed to do.In the touching finale, Khan is able to visit the pediatrician, her first interviewee, in Afghanistan and see him now reunited with his family after a lapse of many years. In spite of the apparent deep bonding that had formed between the two – he is only able to shake hands as an expression of his clear gratitude – Afghan culture precluding any acts of hugging between them. The book has plenty of humorous moments, too – like when Khan describes how she had the Gitmo Base Commander’s letter (of reprimand) framed and hung right above her toilet, or when one of the detainees asked her supervisor – a married but childless lawyer – what he “had been doing for the past fifteen years!” or how the Censors would not declassify any poetry or art in communications from Gitmo detainees because it might contain “coded messages”, or when a Habeus lawyer gets accused of slipping an Under Armour brief and a Speedo bathing suit to his client.“My Guantanamo Diary” is a book which needed to be written – not only to archive the sad events in the lives of the detainees it describes– but also to come to terms with the serious aberrations from due processes that the U.S. appears to have allowed itself to commit in that facility. It is a book which needed to be written so that it will be possible for successive generations to believe that even in the 21st century, in an age when all kinds of information stays at one’s fingertips and all kinds of accountability processes exist at every step, it is possible for the government to indeed trample over individual rights without serious hindrance from the judiciary or legislature and with only tacit support or even mere callousness on the part of its citizens. So the question remains – how could it all go so off-track so quickly?!It is not the fault of the U.S. Constitution – that ultimate document around which all our lives are centered and from which all our laws evolve. That document provides a set of iron-clad safeguards. It is simply that even iron-clad safeguards can be breached by those who are given the sacred task of guarding its provisions and just as important, of not violating its intents. The situation that prevailed in the U.S. post nine-eleven was unusual – it was unlike anything else the country had ever witnessed. However, because it was such an unusual situation, it was all the more important to guard the core values guaranteed to all. The basic fault of the approach seems to have been to adopt expediency at the expense of the presumption of innocence and claiming that such protection did not exist for a subset – and arrogate to oneself the power to decide who was worthy of that protection, and when. Khan attempts to capture an insight into such a mindset in describing how a Pentagon attorney tries to intimidate her when she approaches him to get the “Pentagon perspective” on what she had seen and recorded. The attorney (among other things) calls her Washington Post article of a couple of years earlier “strange”. To quote Khan:He and I have a different idea of what is “strange”. Strange is American soldiers torturing prisoners. Strange is giving rewards of $5,000 to $25,000 per prisoner, and stranger still is the U.S. making many arrests without first investigating allegations put forth by locals who stand to gain financially from them. Strange is holding men for over five years without charging them. Strange is military’s removal of organs from prisoners who committed suicide before sending their bodies home for burial. Strange is calling a paralyzed 80-year old man an “enemy combatant”. Strange is that while U.S. soldiers throw the Quran in buckets of feces, the administration had figuratively done the same to the U.S. Constitution.Khan’s book raises clear-cut questions. The questions remain – and they need to be answered through a comprehensive and honest examination – to be done by more than one party. Any acts of flinching from such an examination – and there is always an understandable reluctance to delve into the past (especially if it has unsavory aspects associated with it) would merely leave room for those same mistakes to repeat on a later day. There has always existed a fault line between the desire to administer justice fairly so as not to inadvertently punish the innocent and the desire to administer justice expeditiously so as to keep the country secure. Converting that fine fault line into an immense chasm was the real tragedy of the massive earthquake that the event called nine-eleven represented – and during the darkest days of Gitmo that chasm looked ever-widening and almost permanent!One can not predict earthquakes and one would hope there won’t be too many – but having been through one, it would be unacceptable not to prepare for the next one – to prepare for what to do if and when it comes. And also for what NOT to do – otherwise the lessons from the Gitmo tragedy would be lessons in vain!