My Guantanamo Diary

by Mahvish Khan

  Carolyn wouldn’t get offended. She knew he was just being stubborn and trying to do things his own way. It was the kind of thing that reminded her of her younger brothers. “Although,” she said, “they both know better than to boss me around.”

  The first prisoner Carolyn had met, therefore the one who left the strongest mental impression, was Abdul Haq Wasiq.

  “He was the first I ever saw chained to the floor,” she recalled. “He was the first to thank me for being a humanitarian. He was the first to refuse to meet with me when I visited again. He was the first to then change his mind again—and meet with me on another trip. He was also the first to use the word ‘torture’ in reference to how he was treated. He was the first to indicate how badly Guantánamo was affecting him psychologically.”

  The words of Dr. Hafizullah Shabaz Khail, a sixty-one-year-old Afghan pharmacist from Gardez, haunted her. “If you free one Afghan, it will be like you are bringing someone back from the dead,” he said.

  Meanwhile, Mohammad Zahir, a fifty-four-year-old Afghan schoolteacher from Ghazni who was badly in need of dentures, impressed her with his dry sense of humor. “Mohammad Zahir is as lonely, depressed, angry, hurt, and devastated as our other clients,” Carolyn said. “He is very worried about his family. But we also have ended up laughing at least once in each of our meetings, and I think it said a lot about him that he still tries to laugh—even if most of the time he is laughing at me. Every time I meet with him, I worry that his spark will have gone out, but so far he has managed to hold onto it.”

  “All of the men I have met here,” she told Abdullah Mujahid, “have treated me with respect and kindness.”

  “Religious freedom was something I always believed in,” she said, “but now when I hear people speaking critically of Muslim men and Islam, I have a point of reference for disagreeing. I can now say that it is not consistent with my friend Abdullah Mujahid or Abdullah Wazir Zadran or Mohammad Zahir. I know these men, and I know they are good people with good hearts.”

  Mujahid listened. “I think the problem is that Americans are very removed in many ways from the Muslim world,” he said finally. “There is a perception that Muslim men will gobble people up—that we are all terrorists. The West fears the Muslim world because of the actions of a few bad people, and those bad people are considered just as evil in the Muslim world as they are in America.”

  Really, we are more alike than different, Mujahid said. “If Americans could sit down with Muslims and get to know them, they would see how similar we are. We are just like you. We love our families. We want the best for our children. We want peace in our country. We want a future to look toward.”

  Again, he emphasized that most men in Afghanistan love the women in their lives and treat them well. “Men in my country give women a huge amount of respect, but the only image that is left in the minds of Americans is the Taliban’s mistreatment of women,” he said. “This was a single horrible regime in our history, and most Afghans hated them.”

  He told us about things I’d experienced myself in Afghanistan: women go straight to the front of lines, they are waved past checkpoints, they’re never searched, and their cars are never stopped.

  Carolyn looked at him intently. “Americans have done something very wrong to you, something you’ll never forget,” she said. “I’m asking whether it would be possible for you to try to understand that not all Americans are like the ones who have kept you here for so long.”

  I don’t know whether I could have been as forgiving as Mujahid was in his reply. “I know that even every soldier here is not bad. Most have nothing to do with my arrest or lack of investigation,” he said. “I know this. And I do not hold a negative judgment of individual Americans.”

  Mujahid was brought to Guantánamo Bay in mid-2003. A provincial police chief working to improve public safety, he was a strong supporter of Afghan democracy. He had welcomed U.S. soldiers to his neighborhood and maintained close contact with U.S. military officials. He had also helped orchestrate the removal of Taliban insurgents from Gardez.

  When Hamid Karzai became president, Mujahid was promoted to a more senior position in Kabul. Like many others, he thought that this time peace would last in Afghanistan. He didn’t realize that he wouldn’t be a part of the new peace process. In July 2003, he was arrested in his father’s home for mysterious reasons and taken to Bagram, then eventually to Gitmo.

  The murkiness surrounding his arrest has never been cleared up, and the reasons for his continued detention are equally mysterious. The military said he had been colluding with al-Qaeda and had attacked U.S. forces in Gardez. His attorney has knocked down the allegations as hearsay one by one. But as her client was cleared of one set of accusations, the military would come up with new ones. In 2005, the Department of Defense (DOD) decided to accuse him of something fairly far-fetched. It alleged that he had played a pivotal role in a separatist group called Lashkar-i-Tayiba, which operated cells in Indian-occupied Kashmir.

  The allegation seemed absurd. Mujahid had had nothing to do with the struggle between India and Pakistan over the disputed Kashmiri territory. But when Carolyn did an Internet search on Mujahid, she found that there was in fact a man named Abdullah Mujahid who was intricately tied to the Kashmiri separatist group. It just wasn’t her client. According to press reports, the Abdullah Mujahid of Lashkar-i-Tayiba died in November 2006, while her client was still at Gitmo. It was a bad case of mistaken identity, and Carolyn quickly pointed it out to the military.

  “The ability to disprove these allegations rather easily calls into question the credibility of other allegations,” she said.

  But that was just one of many obstacles Mujahid faced. During his combatant status review tribunal, he requested that eight witnesses be allowed to submit testimony on his behalf. Four of them were Gitmo detainees, including Ali Shah Mousovi, and the other four were high-profile officials in the Karzai cabinet. But the military almost never gave detainees access to the witnesses they believed might help their cases. Instead, the presiding officer routinely said that attempts had been made to find the requested witnesses but they could not be contacted. Mujahid got the same song and dance.

  “The Afghan government was contacted on or about November 26, 2004. As of this date, the Afghanistan government has not responded to our request. . . . Without the cooperation of that government, we are unable to contact those witnesses and obtain the testimony that you requested,” the tribunal president announced.

  The Boston Globe, however, investigated and found three of the four requested witnesses within three days. Two were found immediately in Afghanistan; the third was a professor at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. The fourth witness had reportedly died.

  On February 22, 2007, the military abruptly announced that it had decided to clear Mujahid to be released and returned to Afghanistan. The DOD sent Carolyn an e-mail that said, in part, “Your client has been approved to leave Guantánamo, subject to the process for making appropriate diplomatic arrangements for his departure.”

  Carolyn was ecstatic and thought it would be only a matter of weeks before Mujahid was heading home. I delivered the good news to Mujahid’s brother, Farid Ahmad, in Gardez. He was overjoyed; the family thought their prayers had been answered. When we gave Mujahid himself the news, a meek smile spread across his face.

  “Thank you for all your efforts,” he said. He told us he didn’t dare to hope that he might go home and be reunited with his family until it happened, until he was on that eastbound flight back to Afghanistan. He asked us please not to raise his family’s hopes either. He knew how his arrest had broken their lives.

  “I don’t want them to be disappointed,” he said. “I’ve been lied to so many times.”

  All the while, though, his eyes were saying something different. They shone. I thought that for the first time, Mujahid had hope. He believed the good news about going home.

  I didn’t think much about the rationale fo
r his fears, but over time, I understood. As the weeks turned into a month, and a month became three, then four, then six, then eight, I was bombarded by calls from Mujahid’s anxious brother. Every time I answered the phone, he had just one question: when?

  “When is my brother coming home? Have you heard anything?” Farid would ask impatiently. “Is there any news?”

  I would have to apologize and tell him that we had no idea. “The military has not disclosed dates, only that he’s cleared for release,” I’d say.

  Slowly, as the months dragged on, Farid grew sullen. He was disappointed and upset that he had allowed himself to believe that his brother was coming back. Mujahid’s hope gradually dissipated too. One grim morning, he was particularly depressed. He didn’t understand why he was still being held when it had already been decided that he would be released.

  I brought him a selection of Odwalla fresh juices on the last trip in June 2007 and told him to drink the carrot juice—it was good for him.

  “The doctors in Afghanistan tell us that carrots are good for your eyes,” he said. “I never knew whether I should believe them or if it was a strange myth. What do our doctors know?” “The doctors in America say the same thing,” I said, pushing the bottle toward him. “It is good for your eyes.”

  He took a hesitant sip.

  “You don’t like it?” I asked.

  “It’s not that. But why should I care about my eyes?” he replied. “All I see are the walls of my cell all day long. You go ahead and have it. Your eyes see the sky and the ocean.”

  I wished I knew how to distract him from his sadness.

  “Okay, then have some Pepsi!” I said, handing him a plastic bottle.

  He chuckled.

  Mujahid had another reason to feel despondent. Right after the military declared that he had been “approved to leave,” they moved him into Camp 6, where he was held in solitary confinement for twenty-two hours a day. When they took him outside for recreation, he was put in a small outdoor cage by himself.

  Otherwise, he was held in a concrete box fifty-six feet square. In that small space, his steel toilet was positioned strategically in front of the small window in the door through which guards regularly peered in at him. Next to the toilet was a concrete slab that served as a bed. If he was “cooperative,” he got a thin foam mattress to lay on the concrete. When he longed to speak to another human being, he crouched on the ground and put his mouth to the crack beneath the door and shouted someone’s name to get his attention, then quickly put his ear to the crack and listened for any response.

  But other prisoners were also trying to shout to one another, and it was often hard to communicate. When Mujahid gave up on that, he’d go to sleep. That was how he passed days: Sleeping, then sleeping some more. Thinking about when he would be released. Shouting to others in the adjacent cells— Abdullah Wazir Zadran, Chaman Gul, Wali Mohammad.

  If he was given permission to have his box of personal correspondence, he would reread letters from his family. Then, he would sleep again.

  “That’s what I do all day,” he murmured.

  “Telling him that he has been approved to leave, but then moving him to solitary confinement and doing nothing, is a new, cruel form of torture for him,” Carolyn said to me. “It is unconscionable that Mujahid has not been returned to Afghanistan. Our government has claimed that it does not want to hold prisoners any longer than is necessary. Yet, more than several months later, he remains in Guantánamo and in solitary confinement.”

  It was always hard to leave Abdullah Mujahid, as it was to leave so many of the prisoners. Sometimes I wished he were more hostile or angry, more doubtful of a lawyer’s ability. I wished that he would turn us away once in a while. But he never did. He was always gentle, almost to the point of submissiveness. The last time I saw him, he was peering through the Camp 6 meeting room window as we were ushered out by guards. I got close and gave him a smile. He grinned back, the biggest smile I’d seen so far.

  Meanwhile, Carolyn accepted a new job. Once she left Dechert, she wouldn’t be able to work on the prisoners’ cases or visit them any longer. She fretted about how to tell Mujahid and other clients that she wouldn’t be coming back. I knew it would be hard because it had taken them so long to trust her and to believe that she was on their side. She worked tirelessly for them and wrote them long, detailed letters to help them pass the time. She didn’t like to think about leaving the men she had grown to care so deeply about, and she hoped that they’d be released before she left. She especially hoped that Mujahid would remember their conversations.

  “I hope they’ve helped support his belief that there are good people in the United States,” she said. “We’ve had many discussions about the differences between Afghanistan and America, although I think Abdullah Mujahid would say that we have actually discussed the similarities. Because it is his constant argument that we are all not so different.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE POETS

  By the time I first arrived at Guantánamo, they had become something of a legend—two brothers who had found a unique way of surviving three years of imprisonment: writing poetry.1 Poetry was a lifeline to sanity for many detainees; it allowed them to express the suffering and confusion they felt. But Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost and his brother Badr Zaman were a phenomenon. They had written tens of thousands of lines of verse—on Styrofoam cups, on bits of paper—and circulated them through the prison or written them down in the margins of Red Cross stationery, hoping to slip them past the military censors to their families in Afghanistan.2

  Both Pakistani and American government officials refused to discuss the brothers’ case, so I searched public sources, from newspaper reports to public records and Web site accounts, for anything on them. They had been released before lawyers obtained access to Guantánamo in 2004, so I asked friends, acquaintances, and released prisoners in Afghanistan and Pakistan about them. Gradually, I was able to piece together some of the remarkable stories of their creativity. I never met them, but I heard so many speak of them with fondness and admiration that in the end, I felt that I, too, had come to know them and their remarkable gift.

  Just as the heart beats in the darkness of the body,

  so I, despite this cage, continue to beat with life.

  Those who have no courage or honor

  consider themselves free,

  I am flying on the wings of thought,

  and so, even in this cage,

  I know a greater freedom.

  —Abdul Rahim3

  No one knows exactly what got the two brothers into the most trouble: internal Pakistani politics, their advocacy for an independent Pashtunistan, or a joke about President Bill Clinton. During the three years they spent at Guantánamo, their U.S. interrogators focused laserlike on the last: what had they said about Clinton?4

  It was, admittedly, a bad joke. It popped up in one of the dozens of articles the two had written as journalists in Peshawar. In 1998, during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Abdul Rahim wrote a short parody that was published in a Peshawar newspaper. Clinton had offered a $5 million reward for the capture of Osama bin Laden, who had been identified as a threat to the United States for the terrorist training camps he ran in Afghanistan.5 What, Abdul Rahim asked, could the Afghans offer in return as a reward for the capture of the man dallying with Miss Monica Lewinsky? They could offer as much as five million afghanis, the joke being that Afghanistan was so poor that five million pieces of its currency were worth the vast amount of $113. 6

  “It was a lampoon . . . of the poor Afghan economy” under the Taliban, Badr Zaman said in an interview after his release. The article told Afghans how to identify Clinton if they spotted him. “It said he was clean shaven, had light-colored eyes, and had been seen involved in a scandal with Monica Lewin-sky,” Badr said.7 For three years, more than 100 interrogators, including some from Washington, D.C., didn’t get the joke.8 “Again and again, they were asking questions about this article.
We had to explain that this was a satire,” Badr Zaman said in an interview with Newsday in October 2005. “It was really pathetic.”

  U.S. interrogators may have focused on the joke about Clinton, but the real reason the two brothers were turned over to the United States seems to have had more to do with internal Pakistani politics. Few Americans know that Pakistan has manipulated the United States into taking care of members of the Pakistani opposition who have nothing to do with Osama bin Laden or the so-called war on terror. But this is most likely what happened to the Dost brothers.

  As was true for many Afghans of their generation, their lives were heavily bound up in political events in their country. They had fled Afghanistan for Peshawar during the Soviet occupation and joined an anti-Soviet political group called Jamiat-i- Dawatul Qur’an wa Sunna. Abdul Rahim became editor of its magazine, according to an account by Newsday reporter James Rupert. Even then, “we were not fighters,” Badr told Rupert. “We took part in the war only as writers.”

  The two became popular figures in Peshawar literary and political circles and were known for their writings. Badr Za-man, who had gone to graduate school at the University of Peshawar and earned a master’s degree in English literature, was a fan of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.9 He later became an English professor. Abdul Rahim was a magazine editor, a religious scholar, and an avid writer; by one account, he authored more than thirty books.10 Even at Guantánamo, according to newspaper reports, Abdul Rahim was able to write a book on Islamic law, translate an anthology of Arabic poetry into Pashto,11 and with the help of Arab prisoners, translate the entire Qu’ran into his native tongue.

  In 1989, the Soviet army withdrew from Afghanistan, and the two brothers broke with their group, which had become involved with the Wahhabite interpretation of Islam. Abdul Rahim began writing lampoons of the group’s leader, a cleric named Sami Ullah, portraying him as a corrupt pawn of the Pakistani government, working against Afghan interests. In November 2001, as U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan, the mullah’s brother, Roh Ullah, “called us and said if we didn’t stop criticizing the party he would have us put in jail,” Badr told Newsday. On November 17, only six weeks after the September 11 attacks, agents from Pakistan’s feared Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) raided the brothers’ family home and arrested them.12