My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me

by Mahvish Khan

Overview

Mahvish Khan is an American lawyer, born to immigrant Afghan parents in Michigan. Outraged that her country was illegally imprisoning people at Guantanamo, she volunteered to translate for the prisoners. She spoke their language, understood their customs, and brought them Starbucks chai, the closest available drink to the kind of tea they would drink at home. And they quickly befriended her, offering fatherly advice as well as a uniquely personal insight into their plight, and that of their families thousands of miles away.

For Mahvish Khan the experience was a validation of her Afghan heritage — as well as her American freedoms, which allowed her to intervene at Guantanamo purely out of her sense that it was the right thing to do. Mahvish Khan's story is a challenging, brave, and essential test of who she is — and who we are.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781586487072
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	06/23/2009
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Mahvish Rukhsana Khan is a recent law school graduate and journalist. She has published in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media. She lives in San Diego.

Editorial Reviews

I began My Guantanamo Diary wondering whether Khan was too credulous, especially after she conceded that "it may appear to some readers that I gave ample, and perhaps naive, 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…By giving us the perspective of the detainees, My Guantanamo 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.
—The New York Times

Jeffrey Rosen

My Guantanamo 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's] 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 Washington Post

Juliet Wittman

Based on what she learned as a translator 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 Guantanamo 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 Guantanamo operations, which she judged "a blatant affront" to American principles. Khan did not assume that all detainees at Guantanamo 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 Guantanamo. 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 outragegrew. 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 expose of U.S. civilian and military personnel out of control. Agent: Lynn Franklin/Lynn C. Franklin Associates

Kirkus Reviews