My Guantanamo Diary

by Mahvish Khan

  Of course, offering large sums as bounty doesn’t violate any international laws. But when the result is a pattern of hundreds of men being randomly sold into captivity and then held without due process on the basis of flimsy allegations made by people who benefited financially, it’s at the very least cause for concern—and a second look.

  The Department of Defense (DOD) has said it was unaware of any sort of bounty being paid for prisoners. Here are two of the leaflets:

  Bounty leaflet 1 in English.

  Bounty leaflet 2, front and backside, in Pashto and Dari. (English translation: Up to $5 million will be awarded for providing information about the whereabouts and/or capture of Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders.)

  Then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters in late 2001 that leaflets were dropping across Afghanistan “like snowflakes in December in Chicago.”

  Afghanistan has been a country of deep-seated, relentless conflict for generations. Here, in the United States, with our rule of law and live-and-let-live traditions, we can’t understand the complex animosities, based on tribal affiliation and religious, ideological, and political differences, that might lead one Afghan to turn another in. Territorial feuds over land are common. Throw large monetary rewards into the mix, and the result could easily be a lot of false reports—and wrongful detentions.

  Afghan warlords and locals went for the bait. But they weren’t the only ones. The hefty bounties also created an extensive black market for abductions in Pakistan. That’s where many detainees’ road to Guantánamo began—specifically with Pakistan’s notoriously unscrupulous Inter-Services Intelligence.

  When the United States began bombing in late 2001, thousands of Afghans fled to neighboring Pakistan. The Pakistani police, border guards, and locals, all eager to get their hands on large sums of cash, seized hundreds of men. It was big business. Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf even bragged about it in his memoir, In the Line of Fire.

  “We have earned bounties totaling millions of dollars,” he wrote, admitting that his agents had handed over 369 men to the U.S. military in exchange for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) “prize money.” When he got a lot of flak for his published admissions, Musharraf quickly backtracked. Subsequent editions of his book have dropped this mention of the 369 men and CIA prize money.

  According to Amnesty International reports, two-thirds of the men who landed in Guantánamo were picked up in Pakistan, where many were “groomed” in local jails to grow out their beards and look more like Taliban before being sold to the U.S. military.

  Arabs in particular became a valuable commodity and an opportunity for profit. They stood out and were easily rounded up. Tom Wilner told me that none of the Kuwaitis at Guantánamo had been captured on any battlefield; they weren’t even accused of engaging in any hostilities against the United States. His clients told him that they had been sold by Pakistanis or Afghan warlords.

  Several Chinese Muslim detainees, known as Uighurs, told their attorney, Sabin Willett of Bingham and McCutchen, that they had been betrayed by Pakistanis. They had gone to Afghanistan for military training so that they could fight for independence from China. When U.S. warplanes started bombing Afghanistan, they, along with many others, fled to the Pakistani border, where locals welcomed them.

  “They killed a sheep and cooked the meat and we ate,” Adel Abdul-Hakim told Willett. Then, that night, Hakim said, they were driven to a local prison and, from there, handed over to the U.S. military.

  Theoretically, a bounty program for terrorism suspects could be effective—if there were an actual investigation to determine who was al-Qaeda and who had been swept up inadvertently. But the U.S. military conducted no investigations.

  “America is a strong, powerful country,” Haji Nusrat Khan told me. “I know that my own people turned me in for money, but the Americans can find anything out. They should have investigated these wrongly made accusations about me.”

  I don’t believe that the military arrested and detained innocent men maliciously. I know that September 11 sparked great fear and that the military is charged with protecting U.S. national security. But in pursuit of that goal, the U.S. government abandoned the most fundamental legal principles and failed to conduct the most basic inquiries. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said that the most insidious threats to liberty come from well-meaning people of zeal who act without understanding. There was a lot of zeal after September 11. In keeping Guantánamo Bay in operation, the DOD has dismissed the notion that innocent men may have been sold and brought there. Rumsfeld called the Guantánamo detainees there “the worst of the worst.” White House officials echoed his sentiments and said that the detainees had been trained to lie based on al-Qaeda manuals.

  But in response to an Associated Press lawsuit brought in March 2006 under the Freedom of Information Act, the Pentagon was forced to declassify information pertaining to the detainees. The numbers tell another story. A statistical analysis of DOD documents relating to 517 current and former Guantánamo detainees shows that only 5 percent of the detainees had been captured as a result of U.S. intelligence work. The report, by Seton Hall law professor Mark Denbeaux and his son, attorney Joshua Denbeaux, also shows that 86 percent of the prisoners at Guantánamo were captured not by American forces but by Pakistani police and Afghan warlords at a time when the U.S. military was passing out cash rewards for turning over al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects.

  Some of the detainees were accused and seized because they owned a Kalashnikov. That’s actually fairly common in Afghanistan. The report also found that detainees were commonly held because they stayed at guesthouses in Afghanistan or wore Casio watches, which were thought to be used by al-Qaeda to detonate bombs.

  Afghan detainee Abdul Matin was a science teacher who was arrested wearing a Casio watch. Matin thought someone was having a good laugh as they wrote up reasons to hold him. At his combatant status review tribunal, the military asked him to explain his “possession of the infamous Casio watch.”

  Matin admitted that he had one—just as women, children, and old men in Afghanistan and elsewhere do. But he argued that wearing an ordinary black plastic watch didn’t make him a terrorist. Many of the guards at Guantánamo wore the same watch.

  The Denbeaux study concluded that the vast majority of detainees aren’t connected to al-Qaeda, and most aren’t even accused of engaging in hostilities against the United States. When I read it, I thought about many of the men I had met. No doubt there are some terrorists at Gitmo. But it’s just as likely that there are good and innocent people. They’ve all been swept together without due process. Because there were no investigations, most of Guantánamo’s men are being held in a stateless black hole, an eerie Neverland where American laws and justice don’t exist. They’ve been presumed guilty without having a fair shot at proving their innocence. They’re numbered and kept away from journalists, while the Bush administration touts them collectively to the media as treacherous monsters and bomb makers.

  I’ve encountered a few individuals who believe that, given the political climate, this is not the time to adhere to legal principles. We’re engaged in a war on terrorism, and the United States has been threatened by an unconventional enemy. For these reasons, they say, constitutional laws shouldn’t apply to Guantánamo detainees.

  But the idea that due process and fair hearings go out the window when we are afraid of something or feel threatened erodes the essence of constitutional safeguards. Yet, such an erosion has stained U.S. history before. In times of war, threats to national security become the basis for abandoning the cornerstone principles enshrined in our constitution.

  During World War II, which generated its share of fear and hysteria, more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans suspected of espionage were taken from their homes, fired from their jobs, and detained in what President Franklin Roosevelt then called concentration camps. Not a single Japanese American was ever charged with or convicted of spying or committing
any act of hostility toward the United States.

  When Japanese American Fred Korematsu refused to relocate to one of Roosevelt’s detention centers, he was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and subsequently convicted in federal court. In Korematsu v. United States, Kore-matsu took his case challenging the legality of the president’s wartime policy to the Supreme Court. In a sharply divided 6–3 decision, the Court upheld Korematsu’s conviction in late 1944. The majority opinion, written by Justice Hugo Black, rejected Korematsu’s discrimination argument and upheld the government’s right to put Japanese American citizens in detention camps due to the wartime emergency. The Court’s reasoning echoes the rhetoric the Bush administration uses to justify its actions today: We are at war with an enemy who threatens our national security.

  Today, the Korematsu case is viewed as a sad blemish on the history of the U.S. Supreme Court. I was taught that it represented everything the high court should not do: allow pressure and fear to strip people of their legal and human rights.

  But history repeats itself. Many of the Guantánamo detainees were taken from their families and homelands, many from their own beds at night, brought halfway around the world, tortured, and held in secret, without charge or trial. The Guantánamo cases raise lasting and fundamental questions about America’s willingness to abide by its principles and adhere to the rule of law, especially when under threat. Not long before he died in March 2005, Fred Korematsu filed another brief before the U.S. Supreme Court, this time on behalf of hundreds of Muslims being held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

  I wrote about my first trip to Guantánamo, and my feelings of shame when I met a pediatrician and an eighty-year-old paraplegic who asked me why the United States hid him from the world and from journalists, in an article for the Washington Post that was reprinted in newspapers around the world. I received an outpouring of e-mails from readers. Of nine hundred messages, about twenty were hate mail. One reader suggested that I might be working for “the enemy.” Another told me that I was being duped by al-Qaeda manual-reading terrorists. But the vast majority of responses were from regu- lar Americans who felt just as deceived by our country’s actions as I did.

  Shortly after the story ran, I received an unpleasant phone call from the Pentagon telling me that I was being banned from the base. I was upset. I’d been extremely careful only to publish information that had been reviewed and declassified by the government. I’d also been careful not to violate the protective order of military base rules governing Guantánamo Bay, which I’d been required to sign. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I wasn’t sure how to handle the situation.

  I received a flurry of e-mails from various habeas attorneys advising me to do different things. Many suggested that I hire an independent attorney and file a lawsuit. I decided not to fan the flames and instead to call the Pentagon official back and ask him why I had been banned. I got a voicemail the first time and left a message asking for an explanation. Then, I decided it would be better to have a written record, so I e-mailed and called again.

  Essentially, I was told that my base privileges had been revoked because my Washington Post article had created a security and safety threat to the base, as well as to the individuals who worked and lived there. I was told that I was in violation of the protective order I had signed because I had published a photograph of the sun rising over the hills in Guantánamo and because I had printed the name and photograph of a military escort.

  I knew there was no protective order violation; several attorneys had helped me comb through the entire document. Furthermore, my photograph of the Guantánamo landscape could not have been any more of a security threat than any of the real-time Internet satellite and aerial photos of the base. I think DOD officials were just looking for a reason to ban me because of the negative publicity the article generated.

  This began a two-month-long back-and-forth of negotiations via e-mail and telephone. Once, I tried joking with the DOD guys, telling them that in the spirit of the giving season (it was Christmas), they should reconsider their position. I’m not sure what finally convinced them, but eventually, I was instructed to write and sign a statement saying that I would not photograph the base or military personnel. I also apologized profusely for creating a security threat by publishing a Gitmo soldier’s photo. And I promised never to bring a camera onto the base. I said whatever I had to get my privileges back. But I also pointed out a recent article in a scuba diving magazine that included lots of photos of some of the camp’s X-ray guards, complete with their full names in the captions.

  On June 8, 2006, base commander Adm. Harry Harris wrote me a long letter. It was on DOD letterhead, and it was harsh. It scared me. But at the same time, I felt that it was a kind of honor to have been reprimanded by the Gitmo base commander. I knew I hadn’t violated the protective order as they claimed, but I’m thankful that I hadn’t been accused of wearing a Casio watch or staying in a guesthouse.

  I had the letter framed and hung it in my bathroom, right above the toilet.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE GOATHERD

  I know it’s not good to play favorites, but I couldn’t help it. Of all the detainees we worked with, I most looked forward to the meetings with Taj Mohammad. Taj, No. 902, was a twenty-seven-year-old goatherd from Kunar, Afghanistan, who formed crushes on his female interrogators and had taught himself perfect English in his four years at Guantánamo.

  It’s not that I liked Taj better than the other detainees. They’re all different. But he was easy to talk to, and he made me laugh. I felt sorry for Haji Nusrat, who was old and sick, and for Ali Shah Mousovi because he was so polite. But Taj was my age and loaded with personality. Unlike the others, he rarely came across as vulnerable. He was highly opinionated and very sarcastic. Even his misogyny was somehow comical. I’m sure he would have gotten on my nerves if I’d spent more time listening to his sarcastic wisecracks, but in our limited contact he was pure entertainment.

  In our meetings with Paul Rashkind of the Miami Federal Defenders, Taj’s attention was always drawn to written English. He would sound out the lettering on coffee cups and napkins, and when legal papers were put on the table, he would immediately start reading under his breath.

  He asked us repeatedly to bring him a Pashto-English dictionary so that he could improve his English. Over several months, he had compiled and memorized a list of almost one thousand English words. But during a routine search, the guards had found and confiscated his neatly written glossary.

  When Paul told him it was unlikely that he’d be given permission to bring him a book, Taj looked unhappy.

  “If you can’t bring me a book, how do you plan on getting me out of here?” he said. “Even the interrogators give us magazines.”

  I asked what kind of magazines.

  “Playboy,” he said.

  I’d heard the same from guards at the Clipper Club, who said that lots of detainees made associations between American women based on what they saw in the soft-core men’s magazine Maxim.

  Sometimes the guards helped that along, it seemed.

  At the beginning of my second meeting with Taj, he pulled out a small piece of creased white paper and handed it to me. “I told the guards that the girl who speaks Pashto is coming, and I asked them to make a list of words so you could translate them for me,” he said.

  My jaw dropped as I scanned the list. “What does it say?” Taj asked. “Tell me.”

  The first word on the list was “bestiality.” The second was “pedophile,” the third was “intercourse,” and the fourth was “horny.”

  “I think those soldiers have played a little trick on you and me,” I smirked.

  “Tell me,” he persisted. “What did they write?”

  “I don’t know how to say these words in Pashto,” I responded. “I learned Pashto from my parents.”

  Taj’s eyes widened. “Okay, just tell me one of the words,” he insisted.

  “I don’t know th
em,” I said.

  “Then, tell me what it means.”

  I scanned the words again.

  “Bestiality means showing meena—affection or love—to one of those goats you tend,” I said smiling. “But it’s not a good sort of meena.”

  Taj let out a laugh. He got the picture. He grabbed a pen from the table and scribbled something in Pashto next to “bestiality.” That’s when I realized that he had probably known the nature of his vocabulary lessons all along.

  Taj’s command of English was amazing. When I later saw a May 24, 2006, letter he’d written to Paul, I thought he had to be a goat-herding genius. Or at least a highly educated goatherd. He sounded very American. His grammar and punctuation were perfect. He indented properly and started each sentence with a capital letter. He even underlined for emphasis.

  Of course, I suppose it’s also possible that one of the government interpreters helped him write the letter. Taj said he’d learned a lot of English from Abdul Salam Zaeef, an ambassador to the Taliban, when he was held in Camp 4. And he also practiced as much as he could with the guards.

  Taj sent me a letter at one point, with a drawing of flowers and a poem. I’d share it, but the DOD wouldn’t declassify any poetry or art for fear that it might contain coded messages for terrorists. The Pentagon did, however, allow one poem that Taj wrote in a letter to Paul to slip through.

  The grass is green,

  My love is clean.

  The sky is blue,

  My love is true.

  The first time Paul and I met with Taj, he was sitting behind a long table. One leg was extended, and he was dressed in white, which meant that he was being held in Camp 4. He had longer hair than the other detainees and pushed it behind his ears to keep it out of his face.

  He casually asked who paid Paul’s salary and whether he was employed by the U.S. government. This is a tricky subject for federal public defenders to address. They must truthfully convey that although they work for the government, their decisions remain independent. Naturally, many detainees have a hard time accepting that someone can act in their best interests when they’re being paid by the same government that’s imprisoning them.