My Guantanamo Diary (12 page)

We asked Mohammad about hunger strikes, and it was then that he told us that some of the prisoners had found a way to get a little revenge for what they had endured. While he had never gone on hunger strike himself, he told us how many of the prisoners on strike were dragged away and force fed. “They wait sometimes twenty days, until the prisoner has lost a lot of weight and withers away, and then they take you away,” he said. “They treat the hunger strikers with no dignity. They throw them in isolation as soon as they start refusing their meals.”

Some of the Camp 6 prisoners protested the treatment handed out to the hunger strikers.

“Some of the guys gave the guards a gift,” Mohammad said with a mischievous smile.

“A gift?” I asked.

“What sort of gift?” Peter asked, glancing up from his notes, a puzzled look on his face.

Mohammad laughed out loud, and the corners of his eyes crinkled.

“Number two,” he said finally.

Peter looked confused.

“Some of the prisoners gave the guards number two.”

Peter and I looked at each other.

“Well, the problem is that there is no gift shop at Guantánamo, and so we give the very bad guards a nice gift,” Mohammad said. “The ones who are particularly cruel.”

“Ooohh,” Peter said with a smile, finally getting it. The guards had told us that sometimes prisoners threw urine or excrement out of paper cups at them, so they’d had to start wearing plastic protective shields over their faces.

“Once a guard got twelve gifts,” Mohammad said, cracking up again. “Everyone in the block was counting, and this Afghan who was transferred out of Camp 6 told us about it,” he said, explaining that the incidents had occurred several months prior to his transfer to Camp 6.

Peter and I were amused by his animated laughter.

“Twelve nice gifts,” he said, squealing. “We ended up giving her a name.”

“Wait, it was a woman?” I asked, horrified. “They did that to a female guard?”

“No, no, no! It wasn’t a woman, but those guys gave the guard a woman’s name,” Mohammad said.

“What name?”

“Who was that lady who ruined her reputation by having an affair with Clinton?” he asked, racking his brain.

“Monica Lewinsky?” I offered.

“Yes!” He laughed again. “That’s what they named him. But everyone pronounced it Moonica, and that’s what they called him.”

After the laughter, Mohammad grew serious, and his tone softened. He told me that he’d had a dream about his first wife. “Maybe the dream means I will see her soon.”

He asked me to call her—or even better to see her in Peshawar and tell her that she was in all his prayers. When we left the meeting, he reminded us to remember him in our prayers and repeated once again that he would like photos of his daughters.

“I’ll do my best,” I told him.

I’d always wanted to go to Afghanistan, but as it played host to the Soviets, the Taliban, the war lords, and instability over the past several decades, there was never a good time. My family warned against traveling there. “It’s not the place it used to be,” Baba-jaan, my father, would say. “You could be killed.” My grandmother and aunts in Peshawar concurred.

Instead, I romanticized the country of my ancestry, wondering when it would once again be celebrated for its poetry, philosophy, and art. The repeated destruction of Afghanistan has made it a land of Shakespearean tragedy. The Afghans are passionate, charming, and incredibly hospitable people—and perpetually devastated by conflict and calamity.

Afghanistan lies at a crossroads between the East and West, a centuries-old hub for commerce and migration. It’s also a strategic link between the Middle East and southern and central Asia. Controlling Afghanistan is pivotal to controlling the
rest of the region and its natural resources. This is why Afghans have been caught in so many power struggles and fought numerous invaders and conquerors over its long history.

This land was invaded in 330 BC by Alexander the Great. Later, the Mongols took a stab at ruling the Afghans, and then in the nineteenth century, the British invaded, twice, and were defeated both times. In 1979, the Soviet Red Army marched in to Afghanistan hoping for an easy takeover. Instead, the invasion kicked off the mujahideen resistance, a U.S.-backed and -financed movement made up of Islamic freedom fighters. When the Russians finally retreated in 1989, 1 million Afghans were dead, 5.5 million had been displaced, and Afghanistan was littered with an estimated 10 million land mines. From this sprung another deadly wave of civil war between various tribes and warlords. And then came the oppressive Taliban movement. Finally, in 2001, Afghanistan cycled around and was again at odds with the West, America.

The summer after my first year in law school, Afghanistan, cleansed of the Taliban, was preparing for its 2004 presidential elections, the first democratic vote in decades. I wanted to be a part of it, so I got a job with Human Rights Watch in New York to research election security and voter intimidation by warlords. The data was to be presented at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Istanbul Summit to push for more election peacekeepers and for basic things, such as money for ballot boxes and guards.

It was hard to get a real grasp of the situation from an office in New York City, so after some discussion, I made plans to go to Afghanistan to investigate what the rural warlords were really up to. On my itinerary were Jalalabad, Kandahar, and
Ghazni, places where locals had reportedly been killed for possessing voter registration cards.

When I told my family about the trip, they thought I’d lost my mind. My aunts and grandmother were up in arms.

“
Sama laywanai yeh
—You’re insane,” my maternal grandmother, Amiji, said to me angrily. “What is this going-to-Afghanistan business? Does your life mean nothing to you?”

She told me that I had an obligation to obey her. “If you go to Afghanistan, you’re not my granddaughter anymore,” she threatened.

It was impossible to argue with Amiji. She wouldn’t listen to my reasoning, and anytime I mentioned Afghanistan, she’d start to pray. She and my aunt pressed my parents to forbid me to go. But my parents knew my stubborn side. Their dissuasion technique was to frighten me into changing my plans by e-mailing me statistics about violence against international workers.

Those stats did make me uneasy, but I tried to ignore them. Then, a few weeks before my scheduled trip, five Doctors without Borders aid workers were ambushed and shot in northwestern Afghanistan. The incident gave me cold feet, and I wondered how to tell the people I worked with at Human Rights Watch that I was scared. Fortunately, when I brought it up, it turned out that my coworkers felt the same way. The trip was canceled. I was relieved and disappointed at the same time.

I didn’t think much about Afghanistan again until I went to Guantánamo Bay. Having met some detainees, I knew they’d
be helped if evidence in their cases could be gathered in Afghanistan. I urged some of the attorneys to plan a trip. Most wanted to go, but their firms considered travel to Afghanistan still too dangerous.

I decided to go alone and collect evidence for the clients of two lawyers in Dechert’s Washington, D.C., office. I made arrangements to meet with the prisoners’ families, to locate employment records showing where they had worked, to collect affidavits and photographs of their former places of employment—anything to corroborate their stories.

I planned a winter trip to Kabul, trying to ignore my family’s vehement pleas. Even some of the habeas lawyers were concerned because of a spike in suicide bombings. I tried to calm my nerves by asking some of the prisoners what they thought about my solo trip.

Abdullah Wazir Zadran, a young Afghan from Khost, told me that I’d be kidnapped if I ventured outside Kabul.

“Do you think I could be killed?” I asked.

“No. Kidnappers just want money; they’ll make you call your family for ransom,” he said.

I began to have second thoughts and called my friend Rahman, a journalist in Kabul. He dismissed my fears and said that the media had a tendency to exaggerate everything.

“It’s peaceful here. There’s nothing to worry about,” he told me. “You’ll have a great time.” Some foreigners based in Kabul whom I knew echoed Rahman’s sentiment.

So, I called my travel agent and booked flights, scheduling a stopover in Peshawar to see my relatives and have some traditional clothes made before flying into Kabul. Once I’d ordered my tickets, my grandmother began to pray nonstop, and
Baba-jaan started giving me tips. He even told me what to do if I were taken hostage.

“Say your prayers out loud,” he advised. “Maybe they’ll feel badly about killing a Muslim girl.”

He told me to call every older man
kaka
or
kaka-jaan
, a term that translates roughly as “uncle,” as a way of showing respect and indicating that I viewed the individual I was addressing as family. My family insisted that I leave my jeans and other Western garb behind. They instructed me to wear traditional clothes, to cover myself properly, and never to leave Kabul. My father told me not to wear big sunglasses—or any sunglasses, for that matter.

“Sunglasses are very Western,” he said. “You want to blend in as much as you can.”

When Mumma suggested that I wear a burka, I cringed at the thought. At a minimum, I should veil my face, she told me. I decided to take my cues from the local women and dress accordingly.

As the day of my trip approached, my father’s torrent of tips continued: Don’t go out after dark. Never spend the night at anyone’s house. Trust no one. If they can sell each other to the U.S. military for bounty money, what makes you any different? Don’t travel alone. Don’t take a taxi anywhere by yourself. Get a cell phone immediately. Give me the numbers for everyone you’re meeting and call me every day from every location.

“Okay, okay,” I said, wishing they had a little more faith in my judgment. But the only one who did was my younger brother Hassan. When he heard about my family’s concerns that I might get killed, he called me, laughing.

“Take out a big life insurance policy and put it in my name,” he quipped. He reassured me that I’d be fine.

On my way to the airport in mid-November 2006, I stopped at a Best Buy to pick up a Sony camcorder. I wanted to make video affidavits and home videos of the prisoners’ families and bring them back to Gitmo.

I tore the camera out of the box and shoved it into my carry-on along with my laptop and my Dictaphone. A few hours later, I was on a long British Airways flight, excitedly watching the LCD display as we got closer to Peshawar, an ethnically Pashtun city teeming with Afghan refugees, exiled warlords, and smugglers.

After twenty-two hours of flying, I was excited to be there at last, but my relatives still weren’t happy about my impending trip into Afghanistan. I spent three days with them, and each day I got an earful about what not to wear in Kabul.

One afternoon, I came home from Peshawar’s Saddar bazaar and changed into a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt. My grandmother took one wide-eyed look at me and started cursing at my clothing.

“
Ya Allah
—
towba
!” she said, eyeing me. There’s no direct equivalent in English, but it roughly means, “Oh God—repentance!” The pants were too low-rise for her liking.

“I’m just sitting around the house, Amiji,” I said, defending myself.

“
Jamai dhey rookshee
—May your clothes get lost,” she retorted. She’s deeply conservative; it even irks her when I walk out of the bathroom wearing a towel.

“
Bay-sharamay
—without shame!” she muttered as she sat down to read the Qu’ran, as she did every afternoon. I started unloading my shopping bags. I’d spent the morning buying handembroidered pashminas and mirrored throw pillows. I showed them to my grandmother while she recited the Arabic verses out loud. I’ve always liked the sound of the Qu’ran; it’s like rhythmic singing. She glanced over the top of her reading glasses briefly to see what I’d bought and then went back to the Arabic.

I never bother to read the Qu’ran in Arabic because I don’t understand Arabic—and neither does my grandmother. I’ve read portions of interest in English, but I’ve always been skeptical because many translations are written by Arab men. I have a Lebanese friend who, like me, has a very feminist spin on Islam, and I like hearing her translate the Arabic for me. All the nonsense about women covering their heads isn’t in the Qu’ran. Neither is the notion that women mustn’t work or drive a car—as is the law in Saudi Arabia—but somehow men have transposed their culture onto the religion. At least that’s her take on it.

I tried to tell my grandmother that there was nothing to repent for about my clothing.

“All the Qu’ran stresses is modesty, for both men and women,” I said. “And modesty is interpreted differently in different times and places.”

“There is nothing modest about your clothing,” she insisted. “You should cover yourself properly.”

And she started reciting verses again. I just smiled to myself. I was used to the clashing cultures by now.

When I’d arrived in Peshawar, I’d called Wali Mohammad’s son Ismail and went to his house the following afternoon. Unlike many of the mud houses described by Gitmo prisoners,
Mohammad owned a spacious two-story house with sprawling wraparound balconies, a gated driveway, and marble inlay. The yard was surrounded by a six-foot wall.