Detainee dilemma —Mahvish Khan

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. 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 46 years — closer to 60 or 70.

His name was Ali Shah Mousovi. He was a paediatrician and the son of a prominent Afghan family from the city of Gardez, where he had been arrested by US troops more than three years earlier. He had returned to Afghanistan in August 2003 after 12 years of exile in Iran, he told us, to help rebuild his homeland.

Our courts recognise 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 is how many Guantánamo detainees got lawyers.

Laws do not get much more fundamental than habeas corpus. It is an old safeguard preventing imprisonment without charge and a right embedded in the US 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 had 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 could not pick up images of the legal papers laid on the table. He also told us that the camera was not recording us and did not have audio, so we should not worry about the military listening in on our conversations. I wondered about that.

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 funnelling money to anti-coalition insurgents.

After his arrest, he spent 22 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 would 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 could not remember how many times this happened.

In rotating shifts, US 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.

(This extract is taken from My Guantanamo Diary by Mahvish Khan)

Mahvish Khan is an American lawyer and writer. She is now providing supervised legal council for Afghan detainees at Guantanamo