My Guantanamo Diary

by Mahvish Khan

  Peter explained that Dechert was a private corporate law firm with no ties to the U.S. government and that he was working pro bono. There was no need to worry about legal fees.

  Nusrat had a long, straggly white beard and grayish brown eyes that drifted from Peter’s face to mine as we spoke about the legal issues and tried to explain what a habeas corpus petition was. He interrupted Peter mid-sentence to turn to me.

  “Bachai,” he said. “Why are you sitting on the edge of the chair like this? Sit back in your chair.”

  I realized that I looked tense, so I leaned back in my plastic chair. He smiled and gestured for us to drink our tea. Then, he told me that I needed to spend time in the mountains of Afghanistan to improve my dialect. I should go live with his family for a few months, he insisted. Then, he asked me whether my parents were still living and how many brothers and sisters I had.

  Every now and then during the meeting, Nusrat would catch me adjusting my shawl. I wanted to make sure that I was covered properly since I assumed that he was used to seeing only very conservatively dressed women in Afghanistan. He squinted at me.

  “You are like a daughter to me, and I want you to look at me like a father or grandfather,” he said, nodding his head. “Don’t worry so much, and relax, bachai.”

  Dera manana, Baba—Thank you very much, Father. That’s “kind of you,” I replied. While it’s typical of Afghans to familiarize with each other quickly, I also sensed that he was particularly trying to reach out to me.

  Haji Nusrat Khan was from a small mountainous village in Sarobi, forty-five miles east of Kabul. He could neither read nor write. He had ten children and didn’t know whether his wife was still alive; he hadn’t received any letters from home. During our meeting, his emotions swung erratically between frustration and fear, amusement and despair. At times, he seemed resigned to his predicament, and at others he unleashed sudden tirades against the injustice of his captivity. Sometimes he laughed, and at other times he was obviously irritated that no one would listen to his story.

  “Bachai, look at my white beard,” he said to me. “They have brought me here with a white beard. I have done nothing at all. I have not said a single word against the Americans.”

  Nusrat had insisted on his innocence from the beginning. But I could sense that his hopes for release had faded over the years. He didn’t want to die in prison, he sighed, for a crime he had not committed.

  Nusrat’s troubles began in early 2003, a few days after he went to the U.S. authorities to complain about the arrest of his son Izatullah (who was also detained at Guantánamo Bay). The Americans had accused his son of having ties to al-Qaeda and for harboring a cache of weapons. When Nusrat complained that his son had done nothing wrong and should be released, U.S. soldiers paid a visit to his home. They told him that he should come with them; they needed to speak to him, and they would bring him back home that evening.

  Instead, they tied him up, blindfolded him, and drove him to Bagram Air Force Base. There, he said, he suffered countless humiliations. He found it hard to talk about the abuse. The Americans took away his crutches and pushed him to the toilet in a cart, he said. Once, he was forced to take off all his clothes in front of a female soldier as an interpreter explained that he was to bathe while she stood guard. He hesitated before telling us about his beatings at the hands of the Americans. During one beating, he fell to the floor and injured his arm. He was frequently ordered to hold out his arms for great lengths of time. When he couldn’t hold them up any longer, his captors found other ways to bring him discomfort. U.S. soldiers tied him tightly to a wooden plank, which they used as a means of transporting him. One time, he said, two soldiers tied him to the board and left him lying on the ground for some time. One of the soldiers finally glanced down at him from a chair and asked how he was doing. When the interpreter translated, Nusrat began to laugh.

  “You must be an idiot to ask me this,” he said. “I am a paralyzed old man, and you have tied me like a dog. I’m lying on the floor, and you are sitting in a chair. Look at me. How do you think I am doing? Why are you even asking me this?”

  It was hard to keep track of time at Bagram. He was regularly blindfolded and couldn’t tell whether it was day or night.

  He thought he had spent about forty days at the airbase before he was tied up again, forced to wear special black goggles to prevent him from seeing, and flown to Guantánamo Bay.

  When Peter asked for additional details about his torture, Nusrat shook his head. It was a humiliating episode, he said. He had already said enough.

  After I met with other detainees, I realized that many are reluctant to talk about torture. Most of them believe that the military eavesdrops on attorney-client meetings, so they’re afraid to speak about their captors. But I know that many, like Haji Nusrat, are reluctant to give details because it’s uncomfortable to remember being stripped naked, beaten, and tortured. It forces the men to relive the shame and humiliation.

  One detainee, who was released in November 2006, said that U.S. soldiers at Guantánamo “put their fingers inside” him. His eyes welled when he talked about it. It wasn’t for a medical reason or to see whether he was hiding something, he said, because they did it at least fifteen or sixteen times, maybe more. “There was no purpose for this,” he said, “other than to degrade Muslim men.”

  This detainee said he endured multiple full cavity searches and was forced to strip while female soldiers watched him. Some of the lawyers told me they believed it was something that happened to all the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay but most were too ashamed to admit it.

  But Haji Nusrat said that being at Guantánamo beat Bagram by a long shot.

  “Bagram was very, very bad,” he said. “The soldiers here, maybe they have a shred of humanity.”

  Nusrat was happy to be reunited at Gitmo with his son Izatullah. For a time, father and son were together at Camp 4. But Nusrat was upset when soldiers came unexpectedly one day and took Izatullah off to Camp 5, the maximum-security prison that he says is notorious for prisoner abuse. We do not know why he was taken there. “Men go insane there—crazy,” he told us.

  Nusrat waited daily for the soldiers to bring Izatullah back, but it was ten long months before he saw his son. And when Izatullah returned, he wasn’t well. He’d been kept alone in the dark for almost a year. The old man gestured toward his head and said that his son was suffering from mental problems because of the prolonged isolation at Camp 5.

  “They gave him medicine for his brain, so he can find peace,” he said.

  The details of the U.S. case against the old man remained murky even at his 2004 combatant status review tribunal hearing. Like Dr. Ali Shah Mousovi, Haji Nusrat was pleased that he was finally going to have a trial. But unlike Mousovi, Nus-rat, an illiterate old man from the mountains of Afghanistan, didn’t try to articulate points or show respect for the officers at his hearing. As soon as he was shackled into his plastic chair and the instructions for the proceeding were read to him, he interrupted to say that he wanted to make a few comments. Then, he plunged ahead before the tribunal could object or agree.

  “We asked our Great God and finally there is a tribunal!” he boomed, looking through milky eyes at the military officers seated before him. “You are smart people. You know that I have been paralyzed for the past seventeen or eighteen years. I could not even stand up, but you brought me here as an enemy combatant. You should think to yourselves, how could I be an enemy combatant if I cannot stand up?”

  “We have some administrative issues to go through here,” the tribunal president said, cutting him off. “There will be a place in the hearing for more comments.”

  “Okay. I will not interfere again,” Nusrat grumbled, “but all I wanted to say is that we were not against the government of Afghanistan, and we were not against the government of America.”

  The panel ignored his statements and asked whether he wanted to swear an oath to tell the truth.

  “Lying is
against my religion,” he retorted. “I am very close to my grave at this age. I will not lie to you in any matter.”

  The panel accused Nusrat of supporting a terrorist organization in Afghanistan called Hezb-Islami-Gulbadin (HIG), which is alleged to have ties to Osama bin Laden. He was also accused of possessing a cache of weapons.

  Izatullah, who testified as a witness at the hearing, maintained that the weapons were in a storehouse set up by the Afghan defense ministry that he had been paid to guard and maintain. The ten-year Soviet occupation of Afghanistan had left behind large amounts of uncollected heavy armaments, Izatullah explained. Following the ouster of the Russians, tribal feuds and civil strife were rampant. After the Taliban fell, the United Nations launched the Afghanistan New Beginnings Program to help President Hamid Karzai’s defense ministry implement nationwide disarmament. Under this arms collection program, weapons were gathered from the people and placed in warehouses for storage. It was one of these storehouses that the Karzai government paid him to guard, Izatullah insisted.

  Nusrat swore by Allah and “my gray beard” that this was the truth. If anyone could prove otherwise, he said, “I will allow you to sacrifice all of my children.”

  The panel, apparently unimpressed, read off another charge: Nusrat was “a primary coordinator” for the HIG in Sarobi, and the HIG leadership had plotted to kidnap coalition force members and use them as hostages to be exchanged for Nusrat.

  Nusrat demanded to face his accusers, but the panel informed him that their names were classified and could not be revealed.

  The weapons cache was brought up again, and Nusrat went into a frustrated tirade. “Yes, I had these weapons in my possession, but I told you that they belonged to the Afghan government, and I had all the numbers,” he fumed. “To ensure the security of these weapons, the government of Afghanistan gave my son fifty men to guard the weapons, with salary and meals.”

  “How can I be a dushman jangee—an enemy combatant?” Nusrat demanded, reminding the panel of his paralysis. Finally, he insisted that it was the United States that had betrayed the Afghans.

  “While we defeated the Russians, you didn’t help us,” he asserted. “You turned your backs on us and left. The people of Afghanistan are like your children. You don’t leave your children and turn away from them. You are our leaders.”

  Nusrat insisted that all the accusations against him had probably been brought by some “shameless” Afghan enemy who had sold him to the Americans for a large bounty. He maintained that he and his family had fully supported the Americans and the Karzai administration and had hoped that the United States would bring peace and help rebuild his country.

  While he languished in Guantánamo, he said, another son, Abdul Wahid, was fully embracing America’s democracy initiative in Afghanistan. The twenty-seven-year-old had been elected a parliamentary representative in the 2005 United Nations– backed National Assembly and Provincial Council elections, Afghanistan’s first democratic voting in decades.

  Not long after his hearing, Nusrat was classified an enemy combatant.

  Peter and I had brought the old man some lunch—pizza, pistachios, baklava. He was grateful, but he was tired of the bland American way of cooking. He wanted meat or fish. He asked us to bring him something with spices. I promised to make him some kabali pillau, a popular rice-and-lamb dish, and lamb chops if he was still there when we came back.

  I cracked open some pistachios and handed them to him as we discussed his case. He took a few sips of the chai and told me that he preferred his tea with crushed lachi, or cardamom.

  Every now and then, he would look at me and say, “Bachai, you should come spend time in the mountains of Afghanistan so your Pashto dialect improves.”

  This quickly became a running joke between us. Sometimes he would get frustrated with me for not knowing enough about the history of Afghanistan.

  “What kind of Pashtun girl are you? How can you not know about Bacha Khan; he was the leader of the Pash-tuns,” he snapped, raising his bushy gray eyebrows. “You need to spend time in Afghanistan with my family. We will fix you.”

  He grinned broadly when I promised to visit Afghanistan as soon as he was released.

  Some off-duty guards at the Clipper Club told me their pet name for Nusrat: they called him “Speedy” because he hobbled at such a snail’s pace with his walker.

  When Peter asked him about his health, it opened a Pandora’s box.

  Nusrat had become very ill two years earlier, while in Camp 4. His legs started deteriorating badly, and although a military doctor treated him, the elderly man was not satisfied with his medical care.

  “He gave me just six pills, and I asked for more,” he said. “They never give enough medicine to heal, only enough so I don’t die,” he said. “They diagnose your problem but never make it better.”

  He also had digestive problems and complained of constant swelling in his legs. He was given pain killers, but the medicine upset his stomach, so he only took it when he couldn’t stand the pain.

  As Peter took notes and asked questions about his hearings, the elderly man extended his trembling hands, offering us some of the pistachios and almonds we had brought for him.

  As the meeting wound down, Nusrat seemed tired. We couldn’t engage him on legal issues. He asked why no journalists had been allowed to come to Guantánamo. He wanted the world to know his story. Then, he asked me what I was studying in school. When I said I was in my last year of law school, he smiled and nodded. “Inshallah—God willing—you will be a lawyer,” he said.

  Then, he asked about my marital status. When I told him I was single, he seemed to find it incomprehensible. “Bachai, why aren’t you married? Don’t ruin yourself,” he said. I smiled when he said that. While my parents rarely pushed the issue, it was something I was familiar with. There’s a preoccupation with marriage in the East, particularly in rural areas and particularly for girls, whose social and economic well-being is linked to finding a husband. Most Afghan women don’t work, and marriage is their only ticket to a life outside of their father’s home. They marry very young too—sometimes in their mid-teens. So, as I was in my late twenties, Haji Nusrat likely thought I was an old maid and worried that I was destined for a childless life of celibacy.

  Peter turned the subject to filing petitions and the length of time court proceedings might take. Nusrat’s mood changed again, this time to one of despair. He stopped eating pistachios and gazed at Peter’s face as he spoke.

  “Allah has made you a very handsome man,” he said to Peter. “You are also a great man. May Allah make you even greater.” Then, he promised he’d make Peter a famous lawyer and bring him endless business if he helped him get home. “Everyone in Afghanistan will know your name,” he pleaded. As I translated, I felt a lump growing in my throat. Suddenly, I couldn’t speak. Peter and Nusrat watched as the tears dripped onto my shawl.

  The old man looked at me. “You are a daughter to me,” he said. “Think of me as a father and pray for me, bachai.” I nodded, aligning and realigning pistachio shells on the table as I translated.

  As the meeting ended, it was obvious that the old man was in pain. His legs hurt, and he tried to stand and stretch them. He pushed hard against the tabletop with his palms, trying to lift his weight. I leapt to his side and helped him stand. He gripped the edge of the table for balance and exhaled deeply.

  A few moments later, I helped him sit back down. As we started collecting our things to go, I turned back to Nusrat, who was watching us gather up the pizza boxes and pistachio shells and unfinished baklava. The military didn’t allow any food to be left with the detainee, so we had to take any leftovers with us.

  “Bachai, tell your mother and your father that an old man with a white beard sends his salaams,” he said.

  I responded with the customary reply: “Walaikum as-salaam—And may peace also be upon you.”

  I adjusted my shawl one last time and glanced at him. He was quiet for a mo
ment. Then, he opened his heavy arms to me, and I embraced him. He pushed my head into his white prison uniform and for several moments prayed for me as Peter watched: “Inshallah—God willing—you will find a home that makes you happy. Inshallah, you will be a mother one day. Inshallah, you will always have a family that will protect you. Inshallah, you will finish law school and continue to help us. Inshallah, you will make the world proud.”

  Then, he patted my back. “You are a great woman, and may Allah make you greater,” he said.

  Finally, he let me go and asked me to say du’a—prayers— for him.

  “Of course,” I promised. “Every day.”

  And until the next time I saw him, I did.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BIG BOUNTIES

  Before I got involved with Guantánamo, I had no opinion about whether the detainees there were guilty or innocent; I just thought they all deserved a fair hearing and due process. But after I met some and talked to them, and after I read their files, I came to believe that many, perhaps even most, were, as Tom Wilner had put it, innocent men who’d been swept up by mistake.

  I really became convinced when I found out about the bounties.

  Many of the men I met insisted that they’d been sold to the United States. During the war after September 11, the U.S. military air-dropped thousands of leaflets across Afghanistan, promising between $5,000 and $25,000 to anyone who would turn in members of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Considering that the per capita income in Afghanistan in 2006 was $300, or 82 cents a day, that’s like hitting the jackpot. The median income for each American household was $26,036 in 2006.1 If a bounty system of equal proportions were offered to Americans, it would be worth $2.17 million. The average American and the average Afghan would have to work for eighty-three years to make that kind of money. One particularly disingenuous leaflet offered Afghan locals up to a whopping $5 million.