My Guantanamo Diary (3 page)
Read My Guantanamo Diary Online
Authors: Mahvish Khan
By my early twenties, I felt unsatisfied. Sometimes, when I came home after an absence, Baba-jaan would test me: “Have you found what you are looking for?” he would ask.
I never knew how to answer him. Gradually, I came to appreciate two things: I was not a comfortable, plain, macaroni-and- cheese American, and, more importantly, being American didn’t require me to abandon the Pashtun influences. America is uniquely generous: it finds room for all heritages and traditions, many more complicated than mine. By the time I moved to Miami and enrolled in law school, I had begun to learn how to cook traditional meals:
kabali pillau
,
sabzi
, samosas. I developed a liking for green tea and
chai
. I downloaded Pashto music and began collecting embroidered pash-minas and went on
Myspace.com
to meet Afghan Americans who were in the same boat as I was.
And now, I wanted to put the fruits of my upbringing, as well as my parents’ insistence that I hold on to where I came from, to use.
Dechert agreed to take me on as an interpreter. My intention was eventually to try to get involved with the legal end of the cases in the hopes of requesting an Afghan detainee as a client of my own once the attorneys got to know me better. This was precisely the sort of legal work I’d always been interested in.
The first step was to apply for secret-level security clearance from the Department of Defense since I would presumably be exposed to classified information. I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for. The background check took six months. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) contacted my former landlords, employers, and numerous friends and neigh-
bors going back ten years. Between high school, college, and law school, I must have moved a dozen times, so the check involved agents all over the country.
Agents contacted my former professors at the University of Michigan and my law school professors. I wondered whether my scandalous attendance record in commercial law might affect my security clearance. I don’t know what I’d been thinking when I signed up for that class. Whenever I did manage to drag myself in to the two-hour lecture, I ended up either falling asleep while the professor ranted about Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code (trust me, you don’t want to know) or checking e-mail on my laptop. Maybe I’d have made a greater effort if I’d known that one day the FBI would be pulling my transcripts and meeting my deans.
The agents asked random friends and neighbors whether I had ever been involved in any plots to overthrow the U.S. government. That was funny. I had a hard enough time remembering to feed my pet ferret and my Chihuahua Sofie, much less contriving a plan to overthrow the government.
They wanted to know whether I had an alcohol or drug problem or ties to any terrorist groups or organizations. They drove around my fiancé’s neighborhood and visited him at work. And they consistently asked everyone whether I had any financial difficulties or spending issues. The concern, apparently, was whether I could be bribed to reveal classified information. A friend in Boston called me after her FBI session and jokingly asked whether my winter-collection Chloé handbag and boots qualified as evidence of a spending problem.
I assumed that I wouldn’t get the clearance when the agents started pulling my credit history. As a freshman in college, I’d
been taken in by the credit card guys on campus who gave away random toys and T-shirts if you filled out an application. And foolishly, I’d always ended up activating the cards when they came in the mail. I maxed out three credit cards in a few months on clothes. By sophomore year, creditors had started calling my apartment. Like so many nineteen-year-olds, I still had a pretty adolescent sense of responsibility and thought of myself as quite clever, so I told the callers that this “Mahvish” person they were trying to reach had moved permanently to Egypt. Eventually, the creditors got hold of my parents, who were furious but paid off my debt.
I figured that between commercial law and my past credit indiscretions, the Department of Defense would not consider me to be in any position to handle classified information.
But in December 2005, I got a call from an FBI agent who asked me to come to the Broward County office for an interview. I lived on South Beach and rarely ventured outside Miami Beach except to go to campus, so I ended up lost and stuck in traffic on my way to the appointment. I called the agent and asked him to meet me on South Beach another day. In a rare attack of scholarly conscience, I told him that traffic was terrible and that I would never make it back in time for my commercial law class. Instead, he told me to stay where I was and that he would come to me. I pulled into the parking lot of an Einstein’s Bagels and waited.
About fifteen minutes later, a man in dark shades and a frumpy suit, looking like an
X-Files
wannabe, pulled up. I asked him for identification. I was disappointed when he didn’t pull out the kind of gold shield that I’d seen so many times on TV.
He proceeded to ask me a series of questions, never bothering to take off his sunglasses. “Is it part of your MO to wear
dark shades even when you’re not in the sun?” I asked him sweetly. He took the glasses off and glanced at me briefly. Satisfied, I gave him a grin. He asked me whether I had met any foreign nationals on my recent trip to Italy.
I managed not to be flippant about meeting Italians in Italy. “Other than shopkeepers and people who worked at the hotels, no,” I said.
I must have satisfied him in return because eventually I received my clearance. I got a phone call from the Defense Department and was briefed on the “protective order” governing classified information related to Guantánamo Bay. I was instructed that I could only discuss classified information with others on a “need-to-know basis.” Classified information could not be discussed via e-mail or over nonsecure telephone lines. If I needed to discuss classified information with anyone, it had to be with the blinds closed—to prevent lip reading. Classified documents could only be photocopied at the Defense Department’s secured facility using special photocopiers. Blank copies were to be run afterwards to clear the copier’s memory.
I felt like James Bond, and “need-to-know” quickly became the buzz phrase among my friends and me. After the briefing, I took off on my first trip to the base on January 29, 2006.
THE PEDIATRICIAN
The sailor at the entrance to Camp Echo peered through the gate as Peter Ryan and I held up our laminated brown-and-white photo ID cards. “HC,” they read, for habeas counsel. “Escort Required.” He waved us through, searched our bags for recording devices, then issued safety instructions—dial 2431 on the wall phone in the room—in case anything should happen during our meeting with prisoner No. 1154.
The gravel crunched beneath our shoes as we walked behind another young soldier toward a tall gate in a fence covered with green tarp.
1
“North side. We have traffic,” he said into a walkie-talkie before pulling out a big brass key and unlocking the gate. He ushered us in, then closed and locked the gate behind him. We walked a few more paces, and he unlocked another gate with another big brass key.
2
We were in a dusty courtyard with gravel laid out in odd patterns that our guide warned us not to step on. A series of
numbered doors lined the square, which was surrounded by a twenty-foot fence covered in the same green tarp and topped with razor and barbed wire.
3
We followed the soldier to a painted brown door. I quickly arranged the shawl I’d brought over my head and arms. I was nervous. Peter was too. I think we were both expecting a violent foreigner, even a member of the Taliban, the kind of man who’d want me stoned to death for walking around with Peter, a man I’m neither married nor related to. Peter motioned for me to enter the room first.
I turned the steel knob and walked in.
The prisoner was standing at the far end of the room behind a long table. His leg was chained to the floor beside a seven-by-eight- foot cage.
4
He looked wary as the door opened, but as our eyes met and he saw me in my traditional embroidered shawl, a smile broke across his weathered features. I smiled back and gave him the universal Islamic greeting:
“
As-salaam alaikum
—May peace be upon you.”
“
Walaikum as-salaam
—May peace also be upon you,” he responded.
With that, I shook hands with my first “terrorist.”
He was a handsome, soft-spoken man with a short, neatly groomed beard. His once-dark hair was heavily flecked with gray. He was dressed in an oversized white prison uniform. I thought he looked much older than his forty-six years—closer to sixty or seventy.
I introduced myself and Peter as I removed the lid from the Starbucks chai I’d brought along. I handed it to No. 1154, explaining that it was the closest thing to Afghan tea that I could find on the military base. We opened boxes of baklava, cookies, and pizza, but the prisoner didn’t reach for anything. Instead, in true Afghan fashion, he nervously encouraged us to
share the food we had brought for him. I smiled to myself when he did that. It was such a familiar gesture.
His name was Ali Shah Mousovi. He was a pediatrician and the son of a prominent Afghan family from the city of Gardez, where he’d been arrested by U.S. troops more than three years earlier. He had returned to Afghanistan in August 2003 after twelve years of exile in Iran, he told us, to help rebuild his
wathan
, his homeland.
Peter had become involved in Mousovi’s case two years earlier. After reading the Supreme Court decision in
Rasul v. Bush
, he (like me) had called the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and asked how Dechert could do pro bono work with Gitmo detainees. Through the Afghan Embassy in Washington, D.C., he found a petition that had been signed by the family and friends of Dr. Ali Shah Mousovi in Washington and Virginia.
Our courts recognize the difficulty of filing a habeas corpus petition from jail. Many detainees did not speak English or understand our laws. In such cases, the courts will allow a “next-friend petition,” in which a father, brother, mother, or friend may act as an agent for the prisoner. That’s how many Guan-tánamo detainees got lawyers.
Laws don’t get much more fundamental than habeas corpus. It’s an old safeguard preventing imprisonment without charge and a right embedded in the U.S. Constitution. “Habeas corpus” is a Latin phrase meaning “You have the body.” Bringing a habeas petition forces the captor to provide justification for holding his captive.
There was a ceiling camera in the cage to the right of our table, into which Mousovi was put before and after our meetings and at lunchtime. We’d been told that the camera was
there for our protection. I wondered what could happen to us in a room with a prisoner who was shackled to the floor.
Attorney-client meetings at Guantánamo are supposed to be privileged and confidential, and the base captain had told us that morning that because the camera was located inside the cage, it couldn’t pick up images of the legal papers laid on the table. He also told us that the camera wasn’t recording us and didn’t have audio, so we shouldn’t worry about the military listening in on our conversations. I wondered about that.
But I leaned across the table and, to put us all at ease, told the prisoner a little bit about myself: How I’d learned Pashto growing up from my parents and grandparents. That like him, my parents were physicians. That, also like him, they had lived briefly in Iran. I told him about Peter and his family. When I said that Peter and his wife were expecting a baby in a few months, he smiled for the second time. He told me later that I’d triggered his first smile when I’d entered the room in my headscarf because he’d mistaken me for his younger sister.
As I translated from Pashto, Mousovi hesitantly described his life since his arrest. He had gone back to Gardez in August 2003 and remembered the small crowd of well-wishers who came out to greet his car as it jostled down the rocky mountain road into town. Sixty or eighty people, maybe more, rushed to meet him. They threw their arms around him, grateful for the return of professionals to Afghanistan.
In the coming days, he, his brother Ismail, and his cousin Reza, who were also physicians, planned to open their clinic. Once it was up and running, the men would fetch their families from Iran. Instead, on his second night in Gardez, American soldiers broke down the door to Mousovi’s family guesthouse
and took him away. He was accused of associating with the Taliban and of funneling money to anticoalition insurgents.
After his arrest, he spent twenty-two days in a makeshift outdoor jail in Gardez under constant interrogation and without the opportunity to shower or bathe. Then, he had been transported by helicopter to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. There, he was thrown into a tiny three-and-a-half-by-seven-foot shed—face down, blindfolded, hooded, and gagged. Lying like this, he said, he was kicked in the head repeatedly.
At some point, his jailers cut the clothes off his body, and he squirmed, trying to cover himself. “This is American soil,” he was told. “This is not your soil. You will obey us.” He had become a stranger in his own land: the soil had changed beneath his feet. Twenty miles from Kabul, he was apparently no longer in Afghanistan.
Obeying, he had quickly learned, meant not resisting.
He described how he was beaten regularly by Americans in civilian clothing. More painful than the bruises and wounds that covered his body were the unbroken days and nights without sleep. Tape recordings of screeching sirens blared through the speakers that soldiers placed by his ears. His head throbbed. Whenever he managed, mercifully, to doze off, he’d be startled awake by wooden clubs striking loud blows against the wall. He recalled the sting as he was repeatedly doused with ice water. He said he was not allowed to sit down for two weeks straight. At some point his legs felt like wet noodles; when they gave out, he was beaten and forced to stand back up. He couldn’t remember how many times this happened.
In rotating shifts, U.S. soldiers periodically kicked and beat him and the other prisoners. Some yelled things about September 11. Others spat on him. Many cursed his mother, sisters,
and other family members. They cursed his nationality and religion. He wanted to stand up for his loved ones and for himself as the young soldiers swore obscenities at him, but he could only groan as the hard boots slammed into his throbbing head.
“Many of the Afghans did not understand the terrible things they were saying,” he told us, “but I understood.” He used to understand English well, he said, but years of abuse and sleep deprivation had taken a toll on his memory.
Peter scribbled notes furiously as the doctor spoke, describing how soldiers had tied a rope around him and dragged him around through dirt and gravel. He said he was subjected to extreme temperatures of heat and cold. Sometimes he was kept in complete darkness for hours and then made to stare into intense bright light. He was made to stand endless hours of the night in uncomfortable positions. He was punished if he looked to his right or to his left. Each moment, he believed, could be his last.
And with every blow, he would repeat to himself, “
La-illaha-illa-
Allah
—There is no God but God.”
These words are the first words a Muslim hears upon his birth and often the last words spoken before he dies. When a baby is born, the doctor or the father utters this prayer into the crying infant’s ear. On the threshold of death, a doctor or family member often urges the dying person to speak these final parting words. And afterward, the family will echo this prayer as the deceased is laid to rest.
“
La-illaha-illa-Allah
,
Mohammad-an-rasul Allah
—There is no god but God, and Mohammad is his messenger.”
Mousovi said he didn’t sleep for an entire month. Then, a uniformed soldier made him take drugs, he said. To his consternation, the names of the pills evaded him, try as he did to
remember them. “A doctor remembers the names of medications the way he remembers the names of his sons,” he said, shaking his head in dismay.
There was one last item on his tally of torture. He shifted his eyes away from me and looked at the wooden table as he spoke of the
sharam
—the shame—he had endured at Bagram. “They made us take all our clothes off. We were naked . . . a lot of prisoners. They tied us together and herded us around like sheep,” he said as quickly as he could get the words out.
I felt a bit like a voyeur and couldn’t meet his eyes.
“Peter may not understand why this is so humiliating for our people,” Mousovi said to me. “But you are a Pashtun. You understand why.” I nodded awkwardly.
Afghan culture is much more puritanical and guarded in these matters than the West. For example, in America, men can change or shower in front of other men in a locker room—and it’s no big deal. But Afghan or Arab men would not dream of it.
Mousovi said he didn’t know why he’d been brought to Guantánamo Bay. He believed that someone had sold him to U.S. forces to collect a reward of up to $25,000 for anyone who gave up a Taliban or al-Qaeda member. Perhaps his political opponents had given false reports to the Americans to prevent him from running for parliament. He could only speculate. He insisted that he was simply a doctor who wanted to help rebuild his country.
He spent more than a year and a half in detention before he was told that he would be given a hearing before a combatant status review tribunal (CSRT). The hearing would theoretically allow him to challenge his designation as an “enemy combatant.”
At last, he had hope. A trial would be an opportunity to show his captors that his arrest had been a mistake. Asked whether he wanted to call witnesses, he drew up a list of eight names. Three of the men were in Afghanistan. Three were in Iran. Two were Guantánamo Bay detainees.
I read the transcript of the hearing later.
On January 15, 2005, guards led him from Camp Delta to a small room for the hearing. The Bush administration designed the CSRT in response to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that Guantánamo detainees should be allowed to challenge their detention before an impartial judge, who would be a military officer. The hearing is supposed to determine whether a detainee is an enemy combatant and therefore not entitled to normal legal rights. But in most cases, the CSRTs are little more than dog and pony shows. They admit hearsay and evidence obtained through torture and coercion. They don’t allow prisoners lawyers, witnesses, or even the right to see the alleged evidence against them. CSRTs are a sham, designed to confirm a decision that has already been made.
Mousovi’s hands were cuffed and his feet shackled to a thick steel bolt in the floor. A panel of three military officers sat behind a long table to his right. Also present were a court reporter to transcribe the hearing, an interpreter, and an appointed military “personal representative.”