"My Guantanamo Diary"

The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me.
by Mahvish Rukhsana Khan

"It’s easy to mistreat something called No. 1154. It’s easy to shave its beard, to kick it around like an object, to spit on it, torture it, or make it cry. It’s harder to dole out such abuse when No. 1154 retains its identity: Dr. Ali Shah Mousovi, a pediatrician who fled the Taliban, worked for the United Nations encouraging Afghans to participate and vote in the new democracy. It’s harder to hate No. 1154 when you realize that he’s more like you than he is different. His wife, an economist by profession, waits month after month, year after year for the news that her husband is coming home; his two sons and young daughter grow up without him."

when i was in seattle i ended up at a book reading where Mahvish Rukhsana Khan was introducing her book. she is an american lawyer, born to immigrant afghan parents in michigan. being fluent in pashtun, she managed to become a translator between american attorneys and guantanamo detainees.


what she describes in the book are the personal stories of the prisoners. because, she claims, when the community start consider the prisoners as individuals, disappointment against what's going on there will grow stronger in the country and more and more people will ask for the place to be closed.

makes sense, to some extent.
although for me it's still impossible to clearly understand why you need to say that much to convince people that torture is wrong. it's still impossible for me to understand how, to some, the possibility of torturing an innocent might still be the main problem about guantanamo, and not torture itself, and non-existing trials.
but i can't pretend to understand a world i've been observing only for a couple of days.

apart from the book, which sounded interesting and i ended up buying, it was also interesting to be there at the reading. there were several questions, and you could clearly distinguish people supporting and appreciating her work, and those who were skeptical and kept repeating that the troops are doing a great job and that the possibility of capturing a true, dangerous criminal justifies everything else... tough...

more info about the book at www.mahvishkhan.com
here's the washington post article from 2006 from which the book developed and here's a podcast with a radio interview where she says most of the stuff she said at the reading, too