My Guantánamo Diary

The U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, serves as a litmus test for the post–September 11 psyche: Indefinitely imprisoning people without trials seems un-American, but if these terror suspects are “the worst of the worst,” then they deserve what they get, right? Khan, an American attorney, has written a brave and disturbing book that strenuously argues otherwise. An American citizen of Afghan-Pashtun heritage, she was a law student at the University of Miami when she became involved with the so-called habeas attorneys—nearly 500 American lawyers who responded to the 2004 Supreme Court decision that these prisoners could challenge their confinement. Her fluency in the Pashto tongue made her a valuable participant, but she hadn’t anticipated how thoroughly the apparent injustice of the detainees’ plight would engage her.

Her encounters with the prisoners—a few of whom seem shady, most of whom seem traumatized—will convince most readers that our government has embraced Kafkaesque injustice in response to the national heartbreak of September 11. Khan relates the stories of detainees including a pediatrician and a journalist, who tell disturbingly similar tales of being sold for bounties, then viciously tormented en route to Gitmo, where many remain years later despite being unconnected to evident wrongdoing. While Khan clearly embodies the kind of dissenting voice that freedom fries were meant to vanquish (Dick Cheney won’t lose any sleep over her reportage), she has produced an unsettling glimpse at the unsavory results of these Machiavellian policies.