My Guantanamo Diary

by Mahvish Khan

  Second, and rather more importantly, this line of underpants is very popular among the military. One article referred to the fact that “A specialty clothing maker is winning over soldiers and cashing in on war.” . . . There must be other clues as to the provenance of these underpants. Perhaps you might check the label to see whether these are “tactical” underwear, as this is apparently something Under Armour has created specially for the military.

  Under Armour has a line of apparel called Tactical that’s modified for soldiers. It features the same styles as civilian tops and bottoms. . . . But Tactical items are offered in army brown, olive drab, midnight navy, and traditional black and white. Also, the Tactical section of the Under Armour Web site features military models, not athletes. In one image, a soldier poised on one knee wears a LooseGear shirt, looking as if he’d just as soon take a hill as take off on a run. His muscular arms protrude from the tight, olive-colored fabric. He’s a picture of soldierliness. And he’s totally dry.

  I don’t know the color of the underpants sported by Messrs. Aamer and el-Gharani, but that might give you a few tips. Indeed, I feel sure your staff would be able to give you better information on this than I could (though I have done my best) as this Under Armour stuff apparently provokes rave reviews from your colleagues:

  Soldier testimonials are effusive. On Amazon.com, a convenient place to buy Under Armour online, a customer who calls himself Spc. Sublett says he’s stationed in Afghanistan. Although his identity cannot be verified, Sublett does note the Tactical line’s less apparent benefits. “Sometimes I have to go long times in hot weather without showers. Under Armour prevents some of the nasty side effects of these extreme conditions. All of my buddies out here use the same thing. They’re soldier-essential equipment. The only thing that would make them better is if the Army would issue them.”

  I don’t mean to say that it is an open-and-shut case proving that your military provided the underwear, as I understand that other people use Under Armour. One group I noticed on the Web were the amateur weight lifters . . . However, in the grand scheme of things, I would like to think we can all agree that the interrogators or military officers are more likely to have access to Messrs. Aamer and el-Gharani than the U.S. Amateur Power Lifting Association.

  On the issue of the Speedo swimming trunks, my research really does not help very much. I cannot imagine who would want to give my client Speedos, or why. Mr. Aamer is hardly in a position to go swimming, since the only available water is the toilet in his cell. . . .

  Please assure me that you are satisfied that neither I nor my colleagues had anything to do with this. In light of the fact that you felt it necessary to question whether we had violated the rules, I look forward to hearing the conclusion of your investigation.

  All the best.

  Yours sincerely,

  Clive A. Stafford Smith

  The last I heard, the military hadn’t replied to Clive’s letter.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE BUSINESSMAN

  Wali Mohammad was standing to shake our hands when his attention was drawn to my right ear. I handed him the flower I had tucked there, along with a bouquet of red hibiscus that I’d picked outside the Navy Exchange supermarket that morning. He held up the flowers and smelled them. They left yellow pollen residue on the tip of his nose, which stayed there for the rest of the meeting. “They are so red,” he said, holding the flowers and touching the petals. It was the first time he’d seen flowers in five years.

  We sat down, and I opened a box of Klondike bars. Mohammad hadn’t had much of a chance to indulge his weakness for ice cream in years either. “I like ice cream, and this is really good ice cream,” he said, laughing in between mouthfuls.

  He nudged the cardboard box toward Peter and me.

  “Eat with me,” he said. But we ended up nibbling on pistachio nuts and left the ice cream for him.

  It was our third meeting with Wali Mohammad. Over the months, he had slowly let his guard down, allowing himself to believe that Peter was not an agent for the U.S. government. He was beginning to treat us more like friends.

  During this meeting, he was also in particularly good spirits. Instead of the usual Camp Echo meeting room, we were in Camp Iguana. It was a far cry from the solitary-confinement setting of Camp 6, where Mohammad spent his days and nights. We met with Mohammad there once. Claustrophobia overtook me as we were led through a narrow passageway to a tiny soundproof meeting room. The walls in the hallway were bare cement. I felt as though I was in a dank dungeon (I was in fact) and was relieved to get out of there once the meeting was over. Mohammad didn’t complain about the conditions, but I felt badly about leaving him behind. When prisoners were held in those solitary conditions, their mental decline became apparent from visit to visit. One Afghan told Dechert lawyer Rebecca Dick that the military had shot rays into his head. Moments later, the absurdity of his statement dawned on him. He looked at her and said, “I am fighting for my sanity.”

  By contrast, Iguana was Gitmo’s version of the Four Seasons Hotel. When prisoners were escorted to the bathroom there, they could peer through the high fences and see the endless Caribbean Sea.1 Sometimes, if they were lucky, they might even spy a ship sailing in the distance.

  Prisoners meeting their lawyers in Camp Iguana sat on sofas in a large room with wood floors, instead of on white plastic lawn chairs. There were no holding cells in the meeting rooms, and we could sit close to the prisoner on an adjacent couch without the barrier of a long table between us. These small things made the meetings go better.

  When I sat next to the prisoners, they often wanted to see my rings and asked who had given them to me. They noticed when I wore a new one or when I wasn’t sporting an elastic hair tie around my wrist the way I had four months before. Once I arm-wrestled an Afghan prisoner. He won and gave me a toothy grin, as if to say, don’t be fooled by my old age and graying beard, lady.

  The camp was also teeming with wildlife. True to its name, it hosted iguana families that scurried around the camouflageclad guards or sunbathed in front of the meeting rooms. Sometimes during our meetings, woodpeckers hammered relentlessly at the walls. It made the prisoners laugh to see lawyers and interpreters beat their fists against the walls in a vain attempt to shut Mr. Woodpecker up.

  Mohammad, No. 560, as the military referred to him, was a complex man who hid his emotions behind an abundance of hearty, animated laughter. Sitting beside him, I told him that I was planning to go to Afghanistan to collect evidence on behalf of some of the detainees represented by the lawyers I was working with. He looked at me sharply, his attention distracted from his fourth Klondike bar.

  “Are you really? Will you be going to Peshawar?” he asked.

  “For a few days, yes.”

  He got very excited, and after some back-and-forth, I realized that my grandmother’s house was three blocks from his.

  “You must go to my house!” he declared. “You must tell my family that you saw me and sat with me here. Tell them I looked good, I was healthy, and not to worry. Tell them that I’ll be home soon, inshallah.”

  Finally devouring the fourth Klondike, he quipped, “Also tell them that you brought me ice cream and that I ate all of it.”

  I smiled.

  “If you go, you’ll see my twin girls Sara and Amina. They are the most beauutttiiful girls in the world,” he said. “I want to show the other prisoners here their photographs. When they see my girls, they will know that God is great!”

  He paused to unwrap Klondike bar number five. Then, he remembered something: “When you see my wives, don’t tell them that I have any white in my beard. They’ll be upset if they know I’ve grown old here. Tell them that I look young and that my hair is still black.”

  In 2002, when their father was seized by Pakistani police and turned over to the U.S. military, which accused him of having associations with the Taliban and al-Qaeda and brought him to Gitmo, Sara and Amina were only two years old. At the time of t
his meeting, they were nearly eight.

  Mohammad told us that he was a just a businessman in Taliban-run Afghanistan who was turned in by a former business partner who wanted to avoid repaying a large loan. At the time, Mohammad said, he was a currency and gold trader on the foreign exchange market. He used to travel back and forth between Peshawar, Kabul, and Dubai to exchange currencies for profit. He became well known and had developed a good relationship with the Bank of Afghanistan, which would lend him large amounts in dollars for his investments and trade. Since Islamic banking systems do not allow interest, the bank made money by keeping 75 percent of Mohammad’s profits.

  A typical transaction meant that Mohammad would take out a large dollar loan from the Bank of Afghanistan, drive across the border to Pakistan, and exchange his dollars for kaldars, the Pakistani currency. With the cash in his briefcase, he would fly Afghan-run Ariana Airlines to Dubai, where he would exchange the money for dollars at a profit since dollars sold more cheaply in Dubai than in Kabul.

  Then, he would go to the local Dubai gold dealers and buy several pounds of gold bars. Dubai’s gold markets, or souks, are notorious for their inexpensive, high-quality twenty-two-and twenty-four-karat gold, which is about as close to pure gold as you can get. He would take his gold bars and hefty profits, return to Pakistan, and sell the gold to local jewelers at much higher rates.

  This trade of turning cash into gold and gold into cash was big business, and most of the time, Mohammad lived well. He had a beautiful two-story house decorated with imported furniture and Persian rugs and bought his family whatever they needed. But then, during one of his transactions, he took out a loan in the amount of $1.5 million. He borrowed in dollars and converted to kaldars.

  The problems began when the value of the dollar suddenly skyrocketed and devalued the kaldars that Mohammad had just purchased. To make matters worse, the value of gold also dropped before he could sell. Within a short period, he lost about $500,000. And the Bank of Afghanistan, the government bank run by the Taliban regime, wasn’t happy.

  The Taliban arrested Mohammad and ordered him to pay back the sum in dollars. He agreed and borrowed from his family and friends to pay off the huge debt. His business partner, Assef, owed him a large amount of money, and Mohammad started demanding repayment. But Assef had no intention of paying. The two were about to go before a tribal court, or jirga, of village elders to settle the matter.

  But the night before the big meeting, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the Pakistani secret police, came to Mohammad’s home and tried to extort $100,000. Mohammad owned a large house, and the ISI agents suggested that he sell it and pay them off to avoid arrest. This sort of extortion is something I’ve heard many wealthy Afghans allege.

  Mohammad was furious and started shouting at the police. He cursed at them and told them to get out. Instead, they arrested him and took him away. Then, he was accused of having ties to the Taliban and turned over to the U.S. military.

  The Department of Defense accused Mohammad of taking money from the Taliban. In his combatant status review tribunal (CSRT), the presiding officers accused him of associating with al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations and of having links to Osama bin Laden. As for his gold sales to Pakistani jewelers, the presiding officer accused him of “smuggling gold for al-Qaeda.”

  Mohammad had explained his case over and over to military interrogators, to the tribunal, and to us.

  “I took loans from the Bank of Afghanistan, which happened to be controlled by the Taliban government at the time,” he said. “I didn’t take money from the Taliban, but from my country’s bank. I was a businessman taking a loan from a bank.”

  That bank, he said, had been around for decades and had been controlled by various governments: the Communistbacked Najibullah regime, the Northern Alliance, the Taliban, and now the American-backed government of Hamid Karzai.

  He maintained that he had never had anything to do with the Taliban’s politics and that he was in business long before the Taliban came to power. The allegations against him were roughly comparable to accusing an American with a Bank of America loan of taking money from the Bush administration and being in cahoots with its war policies.

  “This has no logic at all,” Mohammad told the panel at his CSRT. But like most of the other detainees, he was declared an enemy combatant.

  Each year, after his initial appearance before the CSRT panel, Mohammad went before another panel to determine whether he was an ongoing threat to the United States. And every year, the panel came up with outlandish new allegations. In 2007, he told us, the panel accused him of working with Osama bin Laden in 1996. But he was in Peshawar in 1996, he said. And while he admitted having heard the name Osama, he said it wasn’t until he got to Guantánamo Bay that he learned that Osama was an Arab. The whole military court system, he said, was a big joke.

  “It’s drama! These hearings are a big game they’re playing,” he said, bursting into laughter and shaking his head. “The lies they accuse us of are crazy! They aren’t small lies; they reach the sky!”

  He pulled out a piece of folded white paper. It was the result of his latest hearing, once again declaring him an ongoing threat to the United States. He shrugged. “These decisions are meaningless,” he said. “It’s just a stupid game they play.”

  We asked Mohammad about hunger strikes, and it was then that he told us that some of the prisoners had found a way to get a little revenge for what they had endured. While he had never gone on hunger strike himself, he told us how many of the prisoners on strike were dragged away and force fed. “They wait sometimes twenty days, until the prisoner has lost a lot of weight and withers away, and then they take you away,” he said. “They treat the hunger strikers with no dignity. They throw them in isolation as soon as they start refusing their meals.”

  Some of the Camp 6 prisoners protested the treatment handed out to the hunger strikers.

  “Some of the guys gave the guards a gift,” Mohammad said with a mischievous smile.

  “A gift?” I asked.

  “What sort of gift?” Peter asked, glancing up from his notes, a puzzled look on his face.

  Mohammad laughed out loud, and the corners of his eyes crinkled.

  “Number two,” he said finally.

  Peter looked confused.

  “Some of the prisoners gave the guards number two.”

  Peter and I looked at each other.

  “Well, the problem is that there is no gift shop at Guantánamo, and so we give the very bad guards a nice gift,” Mohammad said. “The ones who are particularly cruel.”

  “Ooohh,” Peter said with a smile, finally getting it. The guards had told us that sometimes prisoners threw urine or excrement out of paper cups at them, so they’d had to start wearing plastic protective shields over their faces.

  “Once a guard got twelve gifts,” Mohammad said, cracking up again. “Everyone in the block was counting, and this Afghan who was transferred out of Camp 6 told us about it,” he said, explaining that the incidents had occurred several months prior to his transfer to Camp 6.

  Peter and I were amused by his animated laughter.

  “Twelve nice gifts,” he said, squealing. “We ended up giving her a name.”

  “Wait, it was a woman?” I asked, horrified. “They did that to a female guard?”

  “No, no, no! It wasn’t a woman, but those guys gave the guard a woman’s name,” Mohammad said.

  “What name?”

  “Who was that lady who ruined her reputation by having an affair with Clinton?” he asked, racking his brain.

  “Monica Lewinsky?” I offered.

  “Yes!” He laughed again. “That’s what they named him. But everyone pronounced it Moonica, and that’s what they called him.”

  After the laughter, Mohammad grew serious, and his tone softened. He told me that he’d had a dream about his first wife. “Maybe the dream means I will see her soon.”

  He asked me to call her—o
r even better to see her in Peshawar and tell her that she was in all his prayers. When we left the meeting, he reminded us to remember him in our prayers and repeated once again that he would like photos of his daughters.

  “I’ll do my best,” I told him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  AFGHANISTAN

  I’d always wanted to go to Afghanistan, but as it played host to the Soviets, the Taliban, the war lords, and instability over the past several decades, there was never a good time. My family warned against traveling there. “It’s not the place it used to be,” Baba-jaan, my father, would say. “You could be killed.” My grandmother and aunts in Peshawar concurred.

  Instead, I romanticized the country of my ancestry, wondering when it would once again be celebrated for its poetry, philosophy, and art. The repeated destruction of Afghanistan has made it a land of Shakespearean tragedy. The Afghans are passionate, charming, and incredibly hospitable people—and perpetually devastated by conflict and calamity.

  Afghanistan lies at a crossroads between the East and West, a centuries-old hub for commerce and migration. It’s also a strategic link between the Middle East and southern and central Asia. Controlling Afghanistan is pivotal to controlling the rest of the region and its natural resources. This is why Afghans have been caught in so many power struggles and fought numerous invaders and conquerors over its long history.