My Guantanamo Diary - Prisoners and What They Told Me

In 2005, while a student at the University of Miami, Mahvish Rukhsana Khan decided to volunteer to interpret for Afghan detainees at Guantánamo Bay. Khan, an American from an Afghan immigrant family, thought it was unfair that the prisoners could not understand their lawyers, who did not speak Pashto, and believed that they had the right to prove their innocence. After his visits to Guantánamo prison in Cuba, he became convinced that some, even most, of the detainees were innocent people who had been dragged there by mistake. He realized that most of the captives he encountered had been sold to America by bounty hunters after American soldiers had been traveling throughout Afghanistan handing out fliers offering a reward of at least $25,000 to anyone who would report members of the Taliban or Al Qaeda. At first, he was hesitant about whether to trust the captives. However, in the end, he became thoroughly convinced that the vast majority of Afghan prisoners were not guilty of America; In the end, most of them were released by the American army.

The fact that hundreds of prisoners, labeled by Donald Rumsfeld as the "worst of the worst", were held for years without formal indictment or fair trial, and were eventually released by America without even an apology or compensation, compounds the suffering they suffered throughout the years of imprisonment. Here, my Guantánamo Diary, which manages to make us empathize with the prisoners, reveals one of the most shameful periods in the war on terror. Mahvish Rukhsana Khan, with the courage of a Pashtun girl, raised her voice on behalf of people condemned to silence, even at the risk of being blacklisted by the FBI. It is really difficult to read this heartbreaking book without being ashamed of our humanity and without going crazy with anger.



Number of Pages: 237

Year of Printing: 2009


Language: Turkish
Publisher: Literature Publishing

First Printing Year: 2009

Number of Pages: 237

Language Turkish