MY GUANTANAMO DIARY: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me
Mahvish Rukhsana Khan
Scribe, pbk, $30
Review by Victor Billot
My Guantanimo Diary is an account of the conditions and backgrounds of some of the people detained and held illegally at the United States prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.
The author is a young American, the daughter of Afghan (Pashto) immigrants.
As a law student at the University of Miami, she became concerned about the treatment of prisoners at the notorious facility.
A native speaker of Pashto, Khan travelled to Guantanamo Bay as a translator for lawyers representing the detainees.
She eventually took on her own Afghan client under supervision.
Khan interviewed a large number of the detainees over more than 30 visits.
The view she quickly formed was that while a minority of those held had terrorist connections, the majority were innocent individuals caught up by miscommunication in a war-ravaged society and bad intelligence, or were victims of personal vendettas.
Regardless of their background, Khan sees the denial of legal due process to the detainees as an affront to democratic values, which she sees, somewhat naively, as American values.
Her secular outlook bumps up against the conservatism and religiosity of many of the inmates, but her shared cultural heritage creates a point of connection.
She sees some of the detainees freed and returned to their homes, and travels to Pakistan and Afghanistan to visit them, which provides another level to this story.
The book is a damning account of the failed policies of the United States in this area.
The military establishment Khan deals with seems to combine vindictiveness with incompetence.
Her accounts of brutality and torture, and the conditions at the camp itself, where solitary confinement cells for prisoners and fast-food restaurants for personnel co-exist in the same Kafkaesque world, are disturbing in the extreme.
Victor Billot is editor of the Maritime Union magazine.
