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My Guantanamo Diary
By Mahvish Rukhsana Khan - PublicAffairs
Publication Date: June 23, 2008
The New York Times Book Review
Voices of Victims by Jeffrey Rosen
My Guantánamo Diary The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me. By Mahvish Rukhsana Khan. Illustrated. 302 pages. $25.95. PublicAffairs.
In 2005, while a law student at the University of Miami, Mahvish Rukhsana Khan decided to volunteer as an interpreter for Afghan detainees at Guantánamo Bay. The American daughter of Afghan immigrants (her parents are Johns Hopkins-educated physicians), Khan thought it unfair that the detainees could not understand their lawyers, who did not speak Pashto, and although she didn't know whether they were guilty, she believed they were entitled to prove their innocence.
But after more than three dozen visits to the Guantánamo prison camp, Khan writes, "I came to believe that many, perhaps even most" of the detainees were "innocent men who'd been swept up by mistake." A number of the men she met insisted they had been sold to the United States by bounty hunters, after the American military dropped leaflets across Afghanistan promising up to $25,000, or nearly 100 times the annual per capita income, to anyone who would turn in members of the Taliban or Al Qaeda.
I began "My Guantánamo Diary" wondering whether Khan was too credulous, especially after she conceded that "it may appear to some readers that I gave ample, and perhaps naïve, credence to the prisoners' points of view." But by the end, I was more or less persuaded by her conclusion that most of the Afghans she met were not guilty of crimes against the United States, and for a simple reason: the military ultimately released most of them.
Once you know the endings to Khan's stories, they read like the gripping narratives of the wrongly accused. There is Ali Shah Mousovi, a pediatrician who says he returned to Afghanistan in 2003, following years of exile in Iran, to open a medical clinic and rebuild his country. Soon after his return, American soldiers broke down his door, accused him of associating with the Taliban and took him to the Bagram Air Base. There, he says, he was blindfolded, hooded, gagged and repeatedly kicked in the head by American soldiers, who spat on him, cursed him and paraded him naked.
Flown to Guantánamo, he had to wait a year and a half for a hearing, where he was told the evidence against him was classified and was denied the right to call witnesses in his defense. He believed he had been sold by bounty-hunting political opponents, and as a Shiite Muslim was viewed by the Taliban as an infidel. "It's still not clear to me what I am being charged with," he told his silent judges. Finally, after three years of numbing boredom and petty humiliations at Guantánamo prison, Mousovi was released and returned to a tearful reunion with his family in Iran.
There is Haji Nusrat Khan, a detainee around 80 years old, who hobbles on a walker after having suffered a stroke. In Afghanistan in 2003, he went to the American authorities to complain about the arrest of his son; days later, Nusrat himself was arrested, beaten at the Bagram Air Base and sent to Guantánamo - turned in, he said, by a bounty hunter. Accused, like his son, of harboring a cache of weapons, he claimed that he and his son were supporters of the American-backed Karzai government, which had paid them to guard arms seized from the Soviets. In an intrepid and suspenseful chapter, Khan travels to Afghanistan to visit the family of another detainee and to bring back a home video of his family; later, when she returns to Guantánamo and shows Nusrat's son a similar home video of his children, he weeps. Nusrat was released in 2006.
Other Afghan detainees who languished for years at Guantánamo before being freed include a goatherd who was turned over to the Americans by his cousin after they quarreled and two poetry-writing members of the Pakistani opposition, who were turned in by their political rivals and repeatedly questioned at Guantánamo about a joke they had told involving Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.
Khan captures the bizarre culture of Guantánamo, where lawyers struggle to represent their clients - and to bring them chai lattes from the Starbucks on the base - in the face of military officials who try to obstruct her and the lawyers at every turn. Like Khan, many of the lawyers came to believe that their clients were innocent men who had been swept up by mistake. Khan says she has "made every effort to verify" the prisoners' accounts, but her sources are sparse and most of them seem to be news media reports. She does not address the possibility that the subset of prisoners she met - Afghans seized in Pakistan and sold by bounty hunters - were more likely to be innocent than other detainees.
Nevertheless, her gut-wrenching first-person accounts of detainee abuse by American soldiers at the Bagram Air Base are consistent with the findings of a recent report by the inspector general of the Justice Department on detainee interrogations in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq. F.B.I. officials observed detainees being subjected to sexual humiliation, body cavity searches and other indignities similar to the abuses that Khan reports.
The fact that many of the prisoners Khan describes appear to have been innocent of the vague accusations against them, were imprisoned for years without formal charges or fair hearings and were eventually released by the United States without apology or compensation makes the abuse they suffered during years of imprisonment all the more outrageous. By giving us the perspective of the detainees, "My Guantánamo Diary" provides a valuable account of what we can now recognize as one of the most shameful episodes in the war on terror. It is hard to read this book without a growing sense of embarrassment and indignation.
Washington Post Book World
MY GUANTANAMO DIARY The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me By Mahvish Rukhsana Khan | PublicAffairs. 302 pp. $25.95
When President Bush first announced that prisoners at Guantanamo would be called enemy combatants rather than prisoners of war, it was clear what was coming, though official obfuscation hindered a serious public discussion of torture and human rights for a long time. This year, however, the torments endured by detainees have been extensively documented. My Guantánamo Diary joins such indispensable documents as Murat Kurnaz's Five Years of My Life in chronicling events behind the thick secrecy surrounding the prison. Khan is an attorney who volunteered to represent prisoners. She is American-born, but her parents are from Afghanistan; she has straddled two cultures throughout her life and can translate fluently. Her contribution here is to show us the humanity of those who have been waiting for years -- often in conditions that drive human beings mad -- to learn what they are accused of and when, if ever, they might be released.
These stories will sink permanently into the reader's consciousness: the way Al Jazeera reporter Sami Al-Haj (since released) describes being force-fed, for instance. The young suicide whose family was unable to confirm the cause of death because his body had been shipped home with various organs missing. Eighty-year-old Haji Nusrat Khan, illiterate and paralyzed by an earlier stroke, describes being mercilessly beaten at Bagram Air Force Base and forced to take off his clothes in front of a female soldier. And then there's the letter to a detainee from his young daughter; military censors had painstakingly blacked out every single "I love you."
Publishers Weekly
[Starred Review]
In her moving debut memoir, a young journalist recounts her time as a translator for the detainees of notorious Guantánamo Bay prison. As a law student and American-born daughter of Pashtun (ethnic Afghan) immigrants, Khan seeks a translator position at one of the private law firms that represent the Guantanamo inmates, some of whom spend years in prison before offered a "fair" trial—or even access to counsel. Shockingly, many of the detainees Khan encounters are average citizens placed in prison due to unfortunate circumstances, the blind aggression of modern anti-terror tactics and the incompetence of its enforcers; one detainee, elderly stroke patient Nusrat, was detained after questioning the authorities regarding the arrest of his son (accused of having ties with al-Qaeda). Revealing near-universal abuse, both mental and physical, inflicted on the prisoners, Khan's account is plenty powerful—and that's before she travels alone to war-torn Afghanistan in order to prove her clients' innocence. Khan also divulges her poignant reunions with several prisoners following their release, a bittersweet breath of fresh air amid a nightmarish, eye-opening and important account.
Kirkus Review
[starred Review]
Based on what she learned . . . at the notorious detention center, the American-born daughter of Afghan immigrants indicts the Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners there.
Khan explains how she found her way inside the heavily guarded Guantánamo Bay facility. Her parents had made sure she learned the Pashto language of their homeland, and while she was a law student at the University of Miami she became outraged by what she learned about Guantánamo operations, which she judged “a blatant affront” to American principles. Khan did not assume that all detainees at Guantánamo were innocent of terrorism-related crimes. She did believe, however, that each had the right to a lawyer and a fair hearing on the charges alleged by the federal government. She contacted Michael Ratner, an attorney at New York City ’s Center for Constitutional Rights who was challenging government policy at Guantánamo. Because none of the lawyers trying to assist the detainees spoke Pashto, Khan’s usefulness was apparent from the time of her initial visit in 2006. Despite the security precautions, she kept notes; the text alternates between the stories she heard from detainees and her personal experiences inside the facility. She was stunned, for example, by the treatment of Ali Shah Mousovi, a pediatrician in Afghanistan who was classified as a terrorist for reasons that neither he nor Khan could discern. Arrested while trying to open a medical clinic in an Afghan town, Mousovi told Khan that he had been beaten, spat upon, stripped naked and forced to remain awake for days while standing stock-still. Khan heard similar accounts from detainee after detainee; she judged them credible, and her outrage grew. She holds back little in her searing debut, realizing that few other observers are in a position to reveal the truth as she found it.
A gutsy and disturbing exposé of U.S. civilian and military personnel out of control. (Agent: Lynn Franklin/Lynn C. Franklin Associates)
Library Journal
[Starred Review]
In this highly disturbing and impassioned memoir, Afghan American law school graduate and journalist Mahvish Khan writes of her experiences serving as a translator for lawyers representing detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Khan perceptively details a catalog of horrors and humiliations suffered by the prisoners, including many instances of torture, lack of medical care, and other human rights abuses. She highlights the plight of many so-called enemy combatants who ended up at Guantánamo only because of large bounties paid by U.S . forces for turning over suspected terrorists. With no right to a fair trial and often facing a litany of trumped-up charges, the falsely accused have little recourse; many resort to suicide attempts and hunger strikes in desperation. Khan's blistering exposé of the blatant injustices inflicted in the name of fighting terrorism will leave many readers shocked and disillusioned. This is not for the faint of heart. With parallels to Clive Stafford Smith's The Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side and Murat Kurnaz's Five Years of My Life, this work is highly recommended for all public libraries.
Bookseller
”Outraged by the treatment of Guantanamo detainees, Afghan-American lawyer volunteers to translate for them. Understanding their customs, she made friends with many of the prisoners, and here tells their compelling and disquieting stories.”
Booklist
"Stunning details all but hidden from the daily news reports may bring American readers to conclude, as has Khan, that 'my government has duped me.' "
My Guantanamo Diary By Mahvish Rukhsana Khan
Hardcover: 320 pages
US $25.95
CAN $31.50
UK£15.99
ISBN: 9781586484989
ISBN-10: 1586484982
Published by PublicAffairs
Selling Territory: World
US/UK/Asia: Public Affairs
Foreign Distribution: UK, Canada, Southeast Asia, Public Affairs; Austrailia (Scribe); Finland (Minerva); Portugal: (Bizancio), Sweden (Bonniers), Lebanon (All Prints), Brazil (Larousse).
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