Customer Reviews

My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is one of those books that you will not be able to get out of your thoughts. The book beautifully written. It is almost impossible to put down. What I enjoyed most about My Guantanamo Diary, is that it it transcends the story of Guantanamo. It is a human story about relationships, love and betrayal that I think many people will be able to relate to.

Mahvish Khan is a brilliant writer. The book is joyous, and smart and at the same time distressing. She has a pleasingly cynical sense of humor, one that cuts right through the material. This is such good material that is well considered and presented.

A MUST read book - An insightful, heartrendering, and beautiful piece of literture. I laughed, shed tears, vacilated between the shock of the governments torture methods and pride of the author's courage and determination to uphold the tenable principles of the United States Constitution.

The author allows readers to experience events, tribulations and personalities through her eyes, cultural knowledge and objectivity. I vicariously journeyed the route - Florida - Guantanamo -Afghanistan with Mavish talking to me.

In this book My Guantánamo Diary the author shows why in an election year, we citizens have to know what our government is doing. Mahvish Khan is an American born lawyer, which I hope people remember.

She is not an enemy of the United States, but such a lover of the United States Constitution, which I wish more supporters of the Bush administration were. She even notes that when she first went to Guantánamo even she assumed she would be meeting terrorists.

The author also is a very positive person so please don't assume the book is all gloom and doom. As an American I found the book to be a wonderful insight into how far we have come since Washington was President, to a place I personally don't like.

The book will or should make you ask yourself if you were arrested, how long do you think you should be held without contact with a lawyer or visits from family? And the author also shares that those men who have been freed after six or more years of arrest, because they were not guilty, do not have hatred toward the American citizen. Would you be as gracious if you were in their shoes?

The book also reminded me that George Washington wrote in a March 24, 1784, letter to his aide Tench Tilghman, saying that Muslims should be hired. Thomas Jefferson owned and read the Quran. Muslims have been in America since the early 1700's.

This well-written expose of Guantanamo Bay puts a human face on the prisoners that are incarcerated there. The shameful detention of 'enemy combatants' in miserable conditions by the US government, in some cases for years without a trial, needs to be better known.

The author is an American born of Afghan immigrants. Her Father became a successful cardiologist and her Mother became the director of neonatology. Mahvish grew up caught in between the realities of two worlds... her parent's restrictive, conservative, old world disciplines, and her longing for a bit more of the looser American way. She graduated from the University Of Michigan and then attended law school at the University Of Miami. In 2005 while in law school, "she was studying the federal torture statues and how policy makers had cleverly circumvented legal principles in creating the military detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where prisoners in the "war on terror" could be held indefinitely without being charged with any crime." Mahvish felt the pain of September 11th as an American... "But also understood the need to invade Afghanistan and destroy the Taliban and al-Qaeda. But I also felt the suffering of the Afghans, when hundreds of Afghan men were rounded up and thrust into the black hole of detention at Guantanamo." This led her to volunteer to become an interpreter between volunteer lawyers and the detainees. And this leads to the core of this heart-breaking... heart-warming... educational odyssey... into what is really going on in Guantanamo, and the horrifying abuse in route to there .

In an attempt to convey to potential readers, the "delicate" power in the words and meaning communicated by the author in this book... I feel it would be helpful to share with you how it affected me. I am an honorably discharged Viet Nam era Veteran, who has always felt very strongly that America was losing a lot more of our precious American lives in battle, because we seem to be the only country that adheres to true "RULES OF ENGAGEMENT". While other countries entire military plans are built around suicide bombers blowing up and murdering innocent civilians, women and children... our soldiers literally have to call lawyers from the battlefield before they make their next move! But here is where this wonderful young woman EDUCATED ME like no newscast or newspaper was able to do. She so perfectly "straddled" both sides of the ethnic line between her heritage and her birthright.

What I learned made me both mad and disappointed in the lack of legal "equality-of-justice" to other human beings. Believe me... I know there are some pretty despicable characters at Gitmo... but there are also innocent men who were snatched out of their families... out of their jobs... out of their countries. I also know that in every jail and prison in the world everyone says they're "innocent", and as one of the volunteer lawyers at Gitmo said: regarding the "face of evil... how normal it looks, how so many of the men who perpetrated some of the worst crimes in history - Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot - had been men who appeared perfectly ordinary, who were kind to children and dogs."

But here's what I learned from this book, and feel must be done, so some of the tarnish can be cleansed from America's name: Lawyers must be assigned immediately to any "enemy combatants" arrested. There must be a time limit as to how long someone can be held without a trial or evidence. (Due to most cases involved at Gitmo being international in scope, the period does need to be much longer than a normal case in America... but no one should be allowed to be kept in such de-humanizing conditions for five years without a trial and conviction.) All sexually demeaning atrocities, such as being made to stand or lay naked for extended times should be outlawed. Rape and sexual perversion (imagine me having to state this in America!) should be outlawed and perpetrators should face heavy jail time themselves. Prisoners should be allowed to have writing supplies and receive mail on a timely basis. (Not holding up letters for a year or more.) AND HERE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT POLICY THAT SHOULD BE CHANGED IMMEDIATELY: **UNLESS IT IS A HIGH RANKING ENEMY SUCH AS BIN LADEN, ETC. STOP THE POLICY OF PAYING REWARDS FOR TURNING PEOPLE IN!

*** HERE'S WHY ** "Many of the men insisted that they they'd been sold to the United States. During the war after September 11th, the U.S. military air-dropped thousands of leaflets across Afghanistan promising between $5,000.00 and $25,000.00 to anyone who would turn in members of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Considering that the per capita income in Afghanistan in 2006 was $300.00 or 82 cents a day, that's like hitting the jackpot. The median income for each American household was $26,036.00 in 2006. If a bounty system of equal proportions were offered to Americans, it would be worth $2.17 MILLION. The average American and the average Afghan would have to work for eighty-three years to make that kind of money." Pakistani's and Afghan's who had a grudge against a neighbor were turning people in... getting the reward... and the poor soul who was "fingered" spent years and years in the hell that was constructed at Gitmo. One of these unfortunate men had gotten into an argument with a worker that was supposed to connect water to his house and didn't. They got into a fight, and the worker turned the homeowner in, and he wound up spending over three years in the bowels of Gitmo hell. "THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE (DOD) has said it was unaware of any sort of bounty being paid for the prisoners." **YET INCLUDED IN THIS BOOK ARE TWO PICTURES OF THE LEAFLETS THAT WERE DISPERSED ALL OVER PAKISTAN AND AFGHANISTAN! "Pakistani president Musharraf even bragged about it in his memoir, "In The Line Of Fire": "We have earned bounties totaling millions of dollars, he wrote, admitting that his agents had handed over 369 men to the U.S. military in exchange for CIA "prize money". According to Amnesty International reports, two-thirds of the men who landed in Guantanamo were picked up in Pakistan, where many were "groomed" in local jails to grow out their beards and look more like Taliban before being sold to the U.S. military.

It is a FACT that most of the prisoners being held in Gitmo were never on a battlefield. If this book can make such a big impression on this patriotic veteran... I can't wait to see the effect it will have on people who don't start out with as hard core beliefs as I did. One of the biggest goals of every book ever written is to educate... and this book has sure as hell educated me!

The book is so well written I couldn't put it down. Besides, how can one argue with a person who claims to have first hand knowledge of the Gitmo situation by working there as a translator?

But as I absorbed the contents of the book word by word, I couldn't erase from my mind the fate of our American soldiers fighting in two fronts, and the "tough luck" of so many innocent civilians who have been murdered by terrorists all over the globe.

Why did this writer went to Gitmo? I kept wondering. What's her agenda? Does she have hidden motives? Why didn't she go to Afghanistan also as a translator and expose that country's prison system and compare it with ours?

Then I realized that the Taliban et all do not take prisoners. They blow them up instead.

I'm sick and tired of listening to our country's media/politicians apologize to terrorists. I accept the notion that there were injustices made to Gitmo prisoners but what's done is done. Let's just make sure it doesn't happen again, and close the case.

Andrew J. Rodriguez

Award-winning author: "Adios, Havana," a Memoir

Another excellent book that tells us that yes, Americans have used methods associated with the worst empires in history. We do use torture. We hold people in jail for years without due process. This is who we are? The proof is and has been public for the last eight years. Every American taxpayer is complicit. But Khan tells us these stories gently. It is an extraordinary book and she an extraordinary individual.

There are only three books that I have on the topic of Guantanamo Bay:

For God and Country by James Yee

Enemy Combatant by Moazzam Begg

My Guantanamo Diary by Mahvish Khan.

The reason I own these informative books is because they are first hand accounts of experiences at that prison. These are not written by journalists who were only given a tour of the area. The inside information they have is what I seek. I want to know what really goes on there and these books offer that.

Khan's book offers great insight of the human toll that occurs in this prison. It's really difficult reading some of the stories. Even when some people are released, you are left with the empty feeling of knowing there are still people there that may be innocent. There is no evidence against them and those individuals are probably there so certain Afghanis could capitalize on a $25,000 reward for turning in "terrorists". This is a country where the average yearly income is three-hundred dollars.

The only problem I had with the book is something which is not the author's fault. In an interview, she stated she had to first get approval from the US government to print her material. They did not allow everything she wanted citing security reasons. The book is great as it stands now, but who knows, except the author, how much more detailed this book could be. I wish authors, like Khan, would be allowed to give the full story without someone on their back.

I give the book five stars without hesitation. It was well worth my time.

Let me start by saying that I did enjoy this book. It is well-written, emotion-provoking, and has the ring of truth. It lines up with all of the other books that I have read about atrocities at Guantanamo Bay. The author seems like someone with whom I would like to have a cup of coffee and a conversation.

However, I do find it a little hard to believe that all of these men she writes about are completely innocent. She seems to view the world with rose-colored glasses. Of course, the prisoners are going to tell their lawyers that they are innocent. You judge a man by his actions, not by his words. It is not funny when prisoners throw feces at guards, whether the prisoners are innocent or the guards are evil. It does nothing but make the situation worse.

Also, the picture of the supposedly "deformed" baby from the effects of depleted uranium poisoning clearly suffers from the genetic disorder Harlequin's Ichthyosis. I am not denying that depleted uranium causes birth defects; it does, and the effects are horrible. However, ichthyosis has been around since the 1700s, and it is a congenital, genetic disorder. It is not caused by environmental teratogens. Genetic disorders become more common in families in which people marry close relatives, such as the man she described who married his first cousin. Why not use a picture of a baby who actually had a deformation from depleted uranium? In my opinion, the picture hurts her case because it is attributed falsely to depleted uranium. Additionally, children with HI don't have to die, some have lived into their twenties. The reason this child died is probably due to the lack of adequate medical care in the region to which it was born.

As I said before, ultimately a great read, but I feel that the author's credibility is strained. She claims that many Americans are prejudiced, but she seems to have an innate bias toward those with her Middle-Eastern roots.

I thought this book was great. Some very heart-wrenching stories about some of the inmates who were clearly in the wrong place at the wrong time and hardly 'terrorists.' A very sad indictment on our ability to uphold democratic freedoms. This book was very interesting given the writer's own cultural and religious background which gave her a unique insight into the cultural difficulties and barriers faced by the detainees. I also found her discussions and observations about working at Guantanemo, those that work there and those who are working to free the detainees or have their cases heard very interesting. I have gone on to buy books by some of those people. Ms Khan - if you are reading this - congratulations on a good book and your attempt to bridge the cultural divide. Let us hear more from you!