My Guantanamo Diary

by Mahvish Khan

  CHAPTER THREE

  GETTING THERE

  The journey to Guantánamo begins at the commuter terminal of the Ft. Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport. With the exception of one corporate law firm that always makes a grand entrance in a chartered private jet, the attorneys doing habeas work at Gitmo fly one of two commercial airlines, Air Lynx or Air Sunshine.

  At the counter, you’re asked to show clearance documentation provided by the Department of Defense. Then, you hop onto the luggage scale because seating on the tiny puddle jumper prop planes is determined by body weight. The ten-seat cabin is so small that it’s impossible to stand fully upright. Before boarding, everyone hits the bathroom because there aren’t any lavatories on board. Some people bring earplugs or large headphones in a futile attempt to drown out the noise of the engines.

  Surprisingly, we don’t have to go through any kind of security procedures before boarding. There are no metal detectors to walk through and no X-ray machines to scan our baggage. Nor does anyone bother to open our checked luggage.

  “Why don’t you guys look through our bags?” I asked one of the Air Sunshine workers on an early trip.

  They used to, he replied, “but sometimes people pack dirty laundry, and I don’t want to touch that stuff.”

  In preparation for takeoff, the copilot stands with his neck craned sideways to avoid hitting his head against the cabin roof while giving safety instructions. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard Air Sunshine, nonstop to Guantánamo Bay,” he says. “Life vests are under your seats. Help yourselves to plenty of drinks.” He points at a red plastic cooler in the middle of the aisle filled with an obscure grape-flavored soda called Faygo.

  On my first trip, I started looking around for my life jacket and frantically told Peter that I couldn’t find it. He laughed.

  “Don’t worry. If this plane goes down, your life vest isn’t going to do you any good,” he said.

  That was reassuring.

  The flying experience itself is a little dodgy, and there’s almost always some sort of drama. On one flight, we had no copilot, and I prayed all the way down that the pilot didn’t have any history of heart disease in his family. Once, a big brown cockroach joined us on the flight and crawled up an attorney’s leg. She screamed. So did I. When the bug started flying around the cabin, I think the weight distribution was definitely altered.

  The lack of lavatories on the planes often leads to some dicey situations. Even though Cuba is only ninety miles from the mainland, the flight takes three hours because the plane has to go all the way around the island to avoid Cuban airspace. Air Lynx used to carry bags of sand for passengers to use for relief but eventually stopped because none of the passengers seemed to know what they were for. Occasionally, some attorneys use an empty Coke bottle if they’re desperate.

  That’s not a terrible arrangement for a man, but it doesn’t work quite so well for a woman. On one trip back to Florida, a female paralegal tapped my shoulder just forty minutes into the flight.

  “What do I do if I need to go to the bathroom?” she asked with a look of discomfort on her face.

  “You hold it,” I advised.

  “Well, what about in the case of an emergency?” she asked. I tried to think creatively because she looked really uncomfortable, and a Coke bottle wasn’t going to do the trick.

  “You could use the drink cooler,” I suggested seriously. I could tell that she was starting to panic.

  “Do they ever land the plane early?” she asked.

  “There’s nowhere to land. We’re over the middle of the ocean.”

  She hobbled back to her seat, but ten minutes later she was hovering above me again. She stuck her head past the curtain that separated the cockpit from the cabin and told the pilot, a woman, about her dilemma.

  Without a word, the pilot handed her an empty Snapple bottle and asked the passengers at the rear of the plane to move forward.

  “I’m so embarrassed,” the paralegal said, turning crimson.

  The pilot, though, was unfazed. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Once someone went No. 2 in the middle of the aisle.” She held up two fingers.

  The paralegal looked horrified. “What did you do?” she asked.

  “I put on my oxygen mask and flew the plane.”

  We feel lucky when the flights are uneventful because no one likes incidents on airplanes. One time, all the passengers were pulled off the plane because the engine wouldn’t start. We sat around on the Gitmo tarmac for a half-hour waiting for a jump start. It’s also not uncommon for an overweight passenger to break one of the twenty-year-old seats, forcing us back out onto the tarmac while a spare is brought in. Once, during a stormy night flight, the plane dropped several hundred feet. Screaming passengers hit their heads on the low cabin ceilings, and belongings went flying.

  The worst thing, though, is when the plane leaves early from Cuba. On a few occasions, the Iranian Air Sunshine pilots— there are three who rotate, Farshad, “John,” and Mohammad— have decided to leave Guantánamo Bay before the scheduled departure time. They are a lovely bunch, but why they think this is okay, I don’t know. Lawyers have arrived on time only to see their plane disappearing off down the runway.

  Upon arrival, we’re greeted by armed U.S. Army personnel who direct us to customs, which consists of a couple of brown tables where more Army boys rifle through our bags.

  The base is divided into two areas, the leeward side and the windward side, by the two-and-a-half-mile-wide Guantánamo Bay. The main base is on the windward side, which is where the detention camps are built. There are nine camps (of which we are presently aware) named 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, Echo, and Iguana. Each numbered camp is subdivided into several blocks with alphabetical names: Alpha, Bravo, Charley, Delta, Echo. There’s also India, Tango, Romeo, Whiskey, Foxtrot, and Zulu.1

  Camps 1, 2, and 3 consist of rows of adjacent steel-mesh cages with one man per cage. Camp 4 is a medium-security prison for “compliant” detainees and houses up to ten men per room. They are allowed to watch nature films, sports, or prescreened movies once a week. Camp 4 prisoners are also allowed to pray and eat communally, and they have greater access to reading material, an exercise bike, and a soccer ball. Many show up to attorney meetings with broken or injured toes because they play soccer in flip-flops.2

  Once Camps 5 and 6 were built—these contain solitary-confinement cells—many prisoners were transferred there from Camps 1, 2, and 3. Camp 7 holds the fifteen high-value detainees and is run by a special military unit, code-named Task Force Platinum. I have met mostly Afghans in Camp Echo, which is used for habeas meetings (and other classified activities). Sometimes meetings also take place in Camps 5 and 6 and Iguana.3

  Habeas counsel are lodged on the leeward side at the Combined Bachelors Quarters (CBQ) for $20 a day. It provides cable TV, a phone, dial-up Internet, a small kitchen, and maid service. Strangely, each room has four twin beds. On my first trip, I debated whether to sleep in a different bed each night.

  For several months, some rooms were under renovation, so the attorneys were lodged two and three together. That led to some gossip about whose snoring sounded most like that of a dying animal.

  In the early summer months, it rains, and that caused another problem. Hundreds of orange crabs would take cover in our rooms. I freaked when I saw the creatures rushing under my door. I ran out immediately to ask for a room on the second floor. Attorney Carolyn Welshhans of Dechert’s Washington, D.C., office was more valiant. She took to smashing the ugly things with a metal trash can.

  Gitmo is a strange place, but you find yourself conforming quickly to its clockwork military rhythm. Every day begins at 7:30 AM. It’s almost always bright and sunny. The Jamaican gardener, William Bartley, holds the garden hose with one hand and waves at visitors with the other, laughing and addressing us at the top of his lungs with the Jamaican term of endearment, “Hello, my Dods!”

  We smile and wave back.

 
“Hi, Bartley!”

  Everyone at Gitmo seems to have a story. Sometimes, when I had downtime in the evenings, I would wander off to the Clipper Club, the local greasy spoon, and chat up the Jamaicans who made me pizza and deep-fried hot dogs and chicken strips. The place was usually dead, and the guy behind the counter would happily chat away while intermittently commenting on the American Idol contestants. He had five children with five different women. At one point, one of the women was threatening to tell his wife about their child. She was blackmailing him for gifts and money. I was amused but tried to give him advice as I ate his fried chicken fingers, fried cheese sticks, or something else equally deep-fried.

  The CBQ desk workers were exceedingly polite Filipinos who wore Hawaiian shirts, as if we were checking into a Maui resort. All of them earned well below minimum wage, but they said it was still better than the jobs back home. At night, they would log into their accounts on Myspace.com and chat with friends in the Philippines or watch TV in the lobby.

  In the morning, we all meet at the concrete circular tables at the front of the CBQ to wait for the bus, which leaves at exactly 7:41 AM. It pulls up to the dock at 7:51 AM, just as the ferry that will take us to the windward side is arriving.

  At exactly 8:20 AM, we’re dropped off on the other side, where a military escort greets us and hands out our habeas badges. Next stop is Starbucks and the food court to have breakfast and pick up food for the detainees. Then, on to Camp Echo, where meetings with detainees are held.

  The only part of the Gitmo experience that doesn’t run with military precision is the counsel meetings themselves. More often than not, there’s a delay in bringing the prisoners over to Camp Echo. Once, we had to wait five hours on the bus. Naturally, this frustrates the attorneys, considering the time, money, and weeks of work they’ve spent preparing. And the ice cream we’ve brought turns to soup.

  At the end of our visit with Ali Shah Mousovi, our military escort drove Peter and me and another group of attorneys to the Navy Exchange. Adjacent to this large supermarket are a Subway, a gift shop, and ATM machines. Across the street are a KFC and a McDonald’s. At the exchange, we picked up a stack of porterhouse steaks, charcoal, potatoes, chips, lots of beer, and assorted wines. Everyone barbecues for dinner because, unless you head for the Clipper Club, there’s nowhere and nothing to eat on the leeward side.

  Over a steak dinner that night, I commented on how nice our military escorts were, that they joked and laughed with us. One of them had given me pointers on pool in the CBQ lobby. Everyone brought them beer and cigarettes. I had expected them to be more aloof, even hostile.

  But Tom Wilner, a partner with the Washington, D.C., office of Shearman and Sterling, was having none of it. “Yeah, they’re nice,” he retorted. “But this whole place is evil.”

  His words hit me hard. Tom was one of the most passionate lawyers working at Guantánamo. He would get angry talking about the conditions under which the detainees lived, reminding us that most of them were held in isolation in metal cells, separated by thick steel mesh or concrete walls. Each cell was fifty-six square feet. Many of the lawyers compared it to something slightly larger than a king-size mattress. That tiny space held a concrete bed and a steel toilet.

  And in the cells, every man ate every meal alone. Sometimes prisoners were allowed out just two or three times a week for about fifteen minutes to exercise, often in the middle of the night. Many never saw sunlight for months at a time.

  “It’s naïve for us to think that evil is committed only by people who appear like monsters or ogres,” Tom said. “Guantánamo is evil. It’s a place where men have been imprisoned for more than five years without charge and without any sort of fair hearing on the basis of only the flimsiest of allegations.”

  Tom and his firm took on the representation of twelve Kuwaiti detainees in March 2002, after a group of families contacted him. At first, like most of the lawyers, Tom took the cases because of the legal principle at stake. But when he was finally allowed to meet his detainee-clients in January 2005, his attitude changed.

  “I was no longer fighting just for disembodied legal principles but for real people who had suffered,” he said. “The case changed for me, from one purely of principle to one of human suffering, with individuals counting on me to protect them and give them a fair chance to show their innocence.”

  He said he didn’t know whether any of his twelve clients were guilty or innocent, only that they were entitled to a fair hearing. “When I got to meet them, and after talking with them, I realized that most of these guys were totally innocent and had been swept up simply by mistake.”

  I thought of Ali Shah Mousovi when he said that. Even the presiding officer at Mousovi’s hearing had declared that he found it “difficult to believe” that the United States had imprisoned Mousovi and flown him “all the way to Cuba.” He had spent so much time away from his family and country. Was it because he had been swept up simply by mistake?

  One of the things Tom hated most was having to tell his clients that a close relative had died while they were detained. But he’d had to do it countless times: Fouad al-Rabiah’s father and brother had died; Omar Amin’s father had died; Nasser al- Mutairi’s father had died; Saad al-Azmi’s father had died; Khaled al-Mutairi’s father had died; Fawzi al-Odah’s grandmother had died.

  “I can’t describe how difficult it is to convey that news,” he said. “The way they’ve been treated and what they’ve had to suffer makes me ashamed. It brings shame on our country.”

  The attorneys took their frustration out on the iguanas on the base—those “bastard” lizards. The U.S. government claimed that because Guantánamo detainees were foreigners outside of U.S. jurisdiction, they could be denied rights under U.S. law. But the lawyers quickly discovered that even the iguanas in Guantánamo were protected by a U.S. law, the Endangered Species Act. An iguana that wandered off the base into Cuba was soon eaten, but the iguanas at Guantánamo were protected. Anyone, including any federal official, who hurts an iguana can be prosecuted. The prisoners at Guantánamo are entitled to fewer protections than an iguana. This annoyed the lawyers so much that Tom brought it to the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court, and at oral argument, Justice David Souter pointed it out in response to the government’s arguments.

  That first night I was in Guantánamo, Tom was impassioned, going on about the face of evil, how normal it looks, how so many of the men who perpetrated some of the worst crimes in history—Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot—had been men who appeared perfectly ordinary, who were kind to children and dogs.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE OLD MAN

  Haji Nusrat Khan, detainee No. 1009, is Guantánamo Bay’s oldest prisoner. Except he’s not sure exactly how old he is: no one recorded births back when he was born. “I do not know the year,” he told me. “But I am eighty. Or perhaps I am seventy-eight.” Who knows?

  When I first met him at Camp Echo, I found it hard to imagine how this old man could be a threat to U.S. national security or a global terrorist. A stroke fifteen years earlier had left him paralyzed and bedridden; he was still unable to stand up without assistance. When he needed to go to the bathroom, he hobbled slowly, leaning heavily on a walker.

  His hugely swollen legs and feet were tightly cuffed and shackled to the floor. He told me that his shoes were too tight, and he needed new ones. He couldn’t see well either, but the eyeglasses he’d been given didn’t really help much; they were the wrong prescription. He’d asked for medical attention for the inflammation in his legs, as well as a list of other ailments, but he had yet to be taken to a hospital.

  In our first meeting with him, as I tried to introduce myself and Peter, he interrupted me often, like a grumpy old uncle. He craned his neck and peered at me. “Bachai,” he said. “My child. I can’t hear you over this fan.” I jumped up and turned it off.

  As I sat back down, I took the lids off the cups we’d brought and handed him one. “It’s chai,” I said.

/>   “Does it have milk in it?” he asked. “My stomach isn’t good with milk.”

  “I think it’s soy milk,” I replied.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “It means it’s not milk from a cow; it’s made from beans, a plant,” I said. “So, it should be okay on your stomach.” I found myself talking louder and louder.

  “I cannot hear you, bachai,” he said, suddenly deaf again. “Turn off this machine, this air-conditioning. It’s making too much noise.” He waved his hand in the air.

  I turned the air off, and we went back to the chai issue. He seemed confused by the concept of soy milk.

  “Well, I’ll drink it since you brought it,” he said, looking into the cup and taking a sip. The chai seemed to pass muster.

  I introduced Peter and explained that he was a lawyer who had come to help him. Nusrat interrupted to ask whether Peter worked for the U.S. government. Before Peter could respond, he added that he couldn’t afford a lawyer.

  “I am a poor man,” Nusrat said. “We Afghans, we are not like the Arabs here who have money.”

  Peter Ryan was the first lawyer to visit an Afghan detainee. The attorneys for Arab detainees at Guantánamo had been visiting their clients for an entire year before any of the Afghans got representation. This was partly because the families of wealthy Arab prisoners immediately sought out American lawyers when their sons and brothers went missing. A lot of the Afghan detainees had also learned that the families of Kuwaiti prisoners had been paying Shearman and Sterling’s hefty legal bills instead of accepting pro bono representation. While the Kuwaiti families insisted on paying so that they could feel more in control of legal decisions, it created confusion among the Afghans. Many of the prisoners who came from less affluent families speculated that lawyers only helped the rich.

  “I don’t want my family to go into debt paying for a fancy American lawyer because of me,” Nusrat grumbled. “I thought only Arabs got lawyers because they have money, and the ghareeb—poor prisoners—don’t get lawyers.”