My Guantanamo Diary (10 page)

Taj remembered the book he’d asked for. Paul told him that he had in fact found one, but it had to stay in his bag.

“If you can’t give me the book, what good is it to me?” Taj demanded.

“I just wanted to show you that I brought this book for you, but I can’t give it to you.”

Taj was not amused. “How can you possibly help me get out of Guantánamo if you can’t even give me a book?”

“You can read the book in Afghanistan,” Paul said calmly. “I’ll send it to you when you go home.”

“I don’t need your book when I go home. When I go home, I can buy my own book.”

Taj seemed resentful, so to appease him, we spent the afternoon helping him with his English vocabulary. We asked him about the Gitmo “library” we’d heard rumors of.

“The library is a goddamn woman with a cardboard box of books on her head,” he said dismissively. He said he’d looked the books over a long time ago, but recently he’d gotten into an argument with the book lady, so his privileges had been suspended.

“Who needs her books anyway,” he said. “They are filled with pictures of dumb dogs.”

Taj surprised me with a question out of nowhere. He wanted to know whether I was Muslim.

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you eat pork?”

“No.”

“Do you pray?”

“Yes.”

“Five times daily?” he asked.

“No, but I pray sometimes,” I said.

Taj wasn’t convinced that I could be Muslim, having grown up in the United States, so he demanded that I recite a sura from the Qu’ran.

I started reciting Sura Fatiha, an easy one. It’s the first sura they teach you in Sunday school at the mosque, and you can’t pray without knowing it. I started zipping through it in Arabic.

“
Al-Hamdu lillahi Rabbil-Allah amin
—Praise be to God, lord of the worlds. The beneficent, the merciful.”

“No, stop. Even a child knows that one,” Taj interrupted. “Pick one that’s not in the daily prayers at all.”

That was hard. I’d had to memorize a lot in Sunday school, but that was more than ten years ago. I tried a short one and surprised myself by making it through a few verses. Taj nodded and corrected me as I went.

Then, he asked about my relationship with Paul.

“You’re here with this man. Where do you sleep at night? In the same room, right?”

“No, no. I have my own room,” I said.

He seemed mollified.

Paul brought along another attorney to our third meeting, and it seemed to unsettle Taj. He sized the newcomer up and summed up his feelings to me in Pashto under his breath.

Da yo harami dhey,
” he said. “

The new lawyer asked what he’d said.

“He said, ‘This one is a bastard,’” I translated, smiling.

The new attorney decided to see whether the goatherd story held water. He began to cross-examine Taj, who didn’t like it one bit. How many goats did he have? What colors were they? What did they eat? Who watched them at night?

Taj responded but protested that he was being interrogated. The lawyer ignored him and continued. Did he have any other animals?

“Yes, two dogs. And chickens.”

“Chickens? Well, who watched the chickens while you were watching the goats?” the lawyer demanded.

“Who do you think watched the chickens?” Taj retorted, annoyed. “The women! Men don’t watch chickens. What kind of questions are these?”

Paul and I just watched in astonishment as Taj turned the questioning on the lawyer.

“Are you married?” he demanded.

“Yes,” the lawyer replied.

“How many children do you have?”

“We don’t have any.”

“Why not?”

The lawyer shifted in his seat. “Well, we tried, but we don’t have any,” he finally said.

“What do you do every night, just go straight to sleep? Your poor wife.”

“I’m up working on your case,” the lawyer said.

“No, you just started on my case. What have you been doing for the past fifteen years?”

There was no response.

“If I wasn’t in here, I’d have twelve kids by now!” Taj exclaimed.

I don’t think the two men really liked each other after that.

I met as many lawyers as detainees at Guantánamo in similar rainbow assortment. The detainees all wore white, or if they were “noncompliant,” tan or orange, but the attorneys sported even more colorful wardrobes, especially when the female lawyers donned headscarves.

Even in the 85-degree Caribbean sun, some of the male lawyers wore suits and ties to meet with their bearded Afghan or Arab clients. That’s what they wore for all their other clients, these attorneys said; they believed that the Guantánamo detainees should be offered the same respect. The detainees knew what suits and ties signified; even the farmers and shopkeepers knew that those formal outfits were the uniform of important men who work in offices.

But most of the lawyers weren’t so formal. Some wore T-shirts and zippered cargo pants. Most dressed business-casual in khakis and polo shirts. I developed my own uniform: a long
skirt or pants with a white cotton wife-beater, all covered with a big shawl. The shawl was really just symbolic modesty because you could still see locks of hair that slipped out when I’d be balancing baklava,
kabali pillau
, and Pepsi in my arms.

There were more than five hundred habeas attorneys from assorted law practices representing Guantánamo Bay prisoners pro bono. They came from all over the United States and even a few from England. Almost 80 percent were with large firms such as Shearman and Sterling, Wilmer Hale, and Covington and Burling. When lawyers from these firms weren’t at Gitmo, they were busy representing people and companies like Giorgio Armani, Morgan Stanley, Harley Davidson, Halliburton, IBM, and Microsoft, as well as tobacco and pharmacy giants.

When Pentagon official Cully Stimson publicly suggested in January 2007 that corporate clients sever their business ties with these top firms because they were representing terrorists, the lawyers, American Bar Association leaders, and legal scholars all denounced his comments, and as far as we know, no major corporate clients defected from any of the firms.

In addition to corporate lawyers, there were about fifty to sixty U.S. federal public defenders working on behalf of Gitmo prisoners, as well as several law professors from Northwestern, Georgetown, Fordham, and other universities.

A small number of solo practitioners paid out of their own pockets to represent Gitmo detainees. Richard “Dicky” Grigg was a tall, sixty-year-old personal injury lawyer from Austin, Texas, and a great favorite among the lawyers and interpreters on the base.

“I was tired of bitchin’ and moanin’ about George W,” he told me in his Southern drawl, explaining his reasons for get-
ting involved at Gitmo. “This was a chance to put my money where my mouth was.”

Dicky was never shy about telling you what he thought. When I told him once that I had brought roses for Afghan prisoner Chaman Gul, he did a double take and said, “What in the shit would a man want with roses?”

During some of the intense meetings with prisoners, Dicky would moderate, making sure to throw in a few laughs. All of the prisoners wanted to know what was going on in the world because it helped distract them for a little while and gave them something to talk about. Dicky’s client was pressing for news too. So, Dicky asked me with a straight face, “Now, do you think we ought to tell him about Paris Hilton? She’s been big in the news.” I started laughing, and the prisoner naturally wanted to know what was so funny. I explained, “There’s this American woman called Paris Hilton. She comes from a wealthy family and became famous by getting caught on tape having sex with her boyfriend. She is a high school dropout, and no one knows why she’s famous, but America is fascinated with her because she’s rich and hot. So, lately, she’s been in the news because she was drinking and driving and ended up in jail for a month.”

The detainee gave me a confused look, as if to say, “
That’s
big news in America?”

Many of the detainees would vent and unload onto their lawyers because they had no one else to talk to. Sometimes it would go on for several intense hours and often ended in a series of unanswerable questions: Why I am still here? It’s unfair. Why this injustice? Why?

Dicky had tried to placate his client many times during one meeting, then decided to tell him what he really believed.

“It’s because George Bush is an asshole.”

I turned to the young Afghan detainee, who didn’t look at me much, and said, “He says it’s because George Bush is a son of a bitch.”

The detainee tried to control his laughter.

Dicky turned to me. “How’d that one translate?” he asked. “George Bush is a son of bitch,” I said.

“Asshole. Son of a bitch. Close enough.” Dicky grinned.

Over the years, the lawyers formed various kinds of relationships with the prisoners. A few were fired early on because their clients didn’t trust them or didn’t have faith that they had any ability to influence a release. But others were greeted with bear hugs and ongoing gratitude. A few formed such a rapport with the prisoners that once the legal issues were dealt with, they spent the rest of the time talking about cricket or sharing photos of their wives and children. Some attorneys and clients told jokes, played cards, or took turns quizzing each other about their respective cultures.

Some of the American lawyers were fascinated by their Afghan clients’ multiple wives. One federal defender formed a particularly close friendship with his Afghan client, a tall, gray-eyed former mujahideen commander with two wives.

The lawyer barraged the Afghan with questions: Did the two women have their own rooms? How did he decide whom to go to on which night? Didn’t they get jealous? Did he like one more than the other? Was his first wife upset when he decided to marry a second time?

The commander smiled, cracked a few pistachio shells, leaned across the table, and began explaining. More conservative Afghans wouldn’t even tell you their wives’ names, much less allow you to see photographs of them. But in the vacuum of the prison meeting room, away from other prisoners’ prying eyes and judgments, he answered his lawyer’s personal queries.

When the lawyer asked whether the commander had ever had both wives in bed with him at the same time, I thought the questioning had gone a bit too far and suggested that we change the subject. I knew how quickly word traveled through the camp. The men at Gitmo had nothing to do all day but think about their imprisonment, reread a letter for the seven hundredth time, or gossip with other prisoners. Even in the solitary cells of Camp 6, it was common for a prisoner to lie down next to his cell door and shout through the crack at the bottom to other prisoners, then quickly put his ear to the narrow gap waiting for a response. Word also traveled from one camp to another as prisoners caught a glimpse of each other at the hospital or when they were moved for interrogations. They shouted whatever news they’d heard at the top of their lungs. I knew it wouldn’t be good if it ever got out that I had participated in a conversation about a ménage à trois. So, we steered the conversation to something not quite so risqué.

Just as the lawyers were curious about mysterious tribal mores, the Middle Eastern men were curious about similarly baffling American customs. Some of the detainees didn’t understand why Westerners exchange simple rings during their wedding
ceremonies as opposed to the heavy gold jewelry and clothing given to an Afghan girl on her big day. Others were fascinated by certain societies’ tolerance of children born out of wedlock or with the American habit of getting drunk to the point of impaired judgment.

Some found it inexplicable that Americans sometimes meet their husbands or wives on the Internet or often wait until they are thirty-five or older to get married. They concluded that Americans would marry at sixteen, eighteen, or twenty if they too had to maintain their virginity until marriage. Some prisoners wanted to confirm the myth that American men could only marry one woman.

Aminullah, a farmer said, “I had heard this, but I didn’t believe it. Even the poorest man in Afghanistan has more than one wife. Having one wife is like wearing just one pair of clothes over and over.”

Aminullah was a kind and gracious old man who had been cleared by the Department of Defense to be transferred back to Afghanistan, but the way he compared a woman to a pair of clothes was striking. I know that men all over the world have extramarital affairs, but in the United States, men don’t marry a second wife. They sometimes divorce the first one and remarry, often a younger woman, but to hear a woman being compared to clothing that can be changed and discarded made me cringe. I silently thanked my lucky stars once again that I’d had the good fortune to grow up in a country where those kinds of views had been discredited and discarded long ago.

The attorneys all had different ways of explaining legal issues to the prisoners. Some talked a lot about case law and crammed a year of constitutional law into a thirty-minute lecture. Some dominated the meetings by discussing congressional legislation. A partner at a large New York corporate law firm attempted to explain the implications of the Detainee Treatment Act, a 2005 congressional statute, to an illiterate prisoner from rural Afghanistan. The lecture put the lawyer’s associate to sleep, and the prisoner started to doze off too.

Other times, prisoners like Taj Mohammad, Nabi Omari, or Haji Rohullah dominated the meetings. They would tell their attorneys what they thought of U.S. foreign policy and how the United States’ image as a symbol of justice had crumbled. Many of the prisoners were very sophisticated and quickly grasped cornerstone constitutional concepts such as the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the U.S. federal court system. Others passively told their attorneys that they didn’t understand anything and that the attorneys should simply act in their best interest. Some attorneys didn’t bother to explain what the Geneva Conventions were all about before going off on a convoluted tangent about Article 3’s provisions on the treatment of prisoners, which would frustrate some prisoners, while others would politely pretend to understand.