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

By Mahvish Rukhsana Khan

Publisher: Scribe Publications

Reviewed by Susan Anderson

Ms Khan was a law student born of Afghani parents in the United States.  She became involved with the Guantanamo detainees as an interpreter for their English speaking lawyers. She began that work in 2004 when she was still a student and recently finished her law degree at the University of Miami. 

One US reviewer said Ms Khan is naive to believe the stories of the detainees.¹ This attitude misses the nearly unavoidable point of this book. It really does not matter so much whether the stories of the detainees are true or not. The question is not whether these men are guilty of offences. The only relevant question silently posed in this book is whether the detainees ought to have been charged with offences or released so that they can be tried.

This book is well written.  The author sets out the stories told to her by Guantanamo Bay detainees and essays, poems and diaries kept by some of those detainees.  In addition, Ms Khan tells the stories of these men which she, or the lawyers with whom she worked, discovered through their own investigations.  Most of the men she describes in the book were eventually released without charge. 

A Sudanese journalist, Sami al-Haj, was covering the war in Afghanistan when he was detained by US armed forces.²  Ms Khan describes Mr al-Haj in some detail. She includes excerpts of his diary and writings wherein he describes being tortured, physically abused and force fed during his long hunger strike. 

The chapter on Mr al-Haj is confronting. Mr al-Haj was fluent in English. He was never charged or even accused of having committed an offence.  Mr al-Haj was held from December 2001 until May 2008.³ Although a worldwide media campaign aimed at securing his freedom maintained interest in his cause, the Sudanese government takes credit for his release citing their negotiations with the Americans over their release of equipment needed for the construction of the USA’s embassy building in Sudan.⁴ There does not seem to be an official explanation of why this man was detained, why he was not charged, or why he was released.

US sources⁵ claim that terrorists are “taught to lie” about torture in western prisons citing the “Manchester Manual”.⁶ The manual was discovered by British police in Manchester and translated into English. It was tendered in evidence in the embassy bombing trial in New York. It seems clear that this manual did contain that advice.

The argument that detainees tell lies about the way they were treated in western prisons would be more credible if it were the case that no detainees in any US facility had been mistreated. The US Military’s investigation of Abu Graib indicates that abuse amounting to torture did take place there.⁷ The findings contained in the military report include using dogs to terrorise detainees, use of nudity and photography to humiliate prisoners, beatings, forcing detainees to stand for long periods and forcing the detainees to strip and go out in cold weather. Similar claims of abuse were made by some of the detainees Ms Khan writes about in her book.

This book is important, not for finding the truth of what is occurring in Guantanamo Bay, but to raise the question whether it is possible that these things are happening in a facility owned and controlled by a western democracy.  It is of particular interest for common law lawyers because the United States purports to provide protections to all those within its borders and, in particular, protections which provide for natural justice.

Susan Anderson

Footnotes

1. New York Post, 29 June 2008, Gordon Cucullu — “My Guantanamo Diary — All About Naïve.”
2. Page 179.   
3. 13 April 2008 — “Sami al’Haj -The Banned Torture Pictures of a Journalist in Guantanamo Bay”: www.andyworthington.co.uk
4. http://www.sudan-embassy.co.uk/en/content/view/134/40/
5. http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=3187
6. http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/manualpart1_1.pdf
7. http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Aug2004/d20040825fay.pdf