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My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me | 
 enlarge | Author: Mahvish Khan
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $11.94
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Avg. Customer Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 51669
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.6 x 1.2
ISBN: 1586484982
Dewey Decimal Number: 909.831
EAN: 9781586484989
ASIN: 1586484982
Publication Date: June 23, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: great condition brand new
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Product Description
Mahvish Khan is an American lawyer, born to immigrant Afghan parents in Michigan. Outraged that her country was illegally imprisoning people at Guantanamo, she volunteered to translate for the prisoners. She spoke their language, understood their customs, and brought them Starbucks chai, the closest available drink to the kind of tea they would drink at home. And they quickly befriended her, offering fatherly advice as well as a uniquely personal insight into their plight, and that of their families thousands of miles away. For Mahvish Khan the experience was a validation of her Afghan heritage—as well as her American freedoms, which allowed her to intervene at Guantanamo purely out of her sense that it was the right thing to do. Mahvish Khan's story is a challenging, brave, and essential test of who she is —and who we are.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 Truth must be told and Mahvish did it so elegantly and gallantly... September 11, 2008
Mahvish, bravo... your courage tells on your ancestry. It is in your blood... great story, just some comments:
1) Bismillah does not mean God protect you (Khuda hafiz or Allah hafiz are more appropriate)
2) There is no such thing as North American Treaty Organization it is NATO in Afghanistan: North Atlantic Treaty Organization (your editor should have corrected this at least, do it in next edition)
3) Taj self educated to read & write English in five years, almost perfect, his handwriting better than many high school graduates... What does it tell about the facilities they provided him in the prison?
4) Badar Zaman and Abdurrahman, poet brothers, refugees in Pakistan, one of them did master in English from Peshawar university (very generous of Pakistan- almost free education) ... worked for Pashtoonistan movement (a separatist movement)... ended up in Guantanamo, when released, did not go back to his native country, Afghanistan, why? rather preferred to go back to Peshawar where his family looked like has permanently settled and he continued venting and encouraging the separatist movement... this is what you get in return for providing shelter and education to someone? Why they did not go back and fight the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in their own country?
5) Ali's daughter wrote him a letter from Iran was not in Pashto, she addresses her father Pidarjan several times in the letter not baba Jan, what was the reason writer implied she was calling her dad, baba Jan, why?
6) Lastly, the writer's claim of Afghan roots, rather than Pakistani Pushtoon raised doubt in my mind; she had jumped back to Afghanistan skipping Pakistan connection. Is it more romantic exploiting Afghan situation than saying her parents were Pakistani Americans? Her parents graduated in 1977 from Peshawar University (KMC), her grandparents still live in Peshawar and are not Afghan refugees... what kinds of roots she has in Afghanistan? All Pushtoon living in settled areas of NWFP, I have not heard them claiming Afghanistan roots, rather wants to turn NWFP in to Pashtoonistan, a separate independent state which does not include any part of Afghanistan at all...
All in all, she was able to make me cry several times...
 Visiting Guantanamo--A Painful Wake Up Call. September 1, 2008
Thanks to the patience and persistence of the author, I was able to 'meet' the many so called 'terrorists' majority of whom, it seemed, were the victims of greed, bounties and plain mismanagement by our adminstration. The very existence of this camp has tarnished our image globally and after reading the authors first hand encounters , it seemed like all the constitutional safeguards engraved were being violated at Guantanamo. My thanks to the author and the many probono lawyers who at considerable personal risk and loss of income have helped us get a better picture of what really was happening in Guantanamo. This is an easy to read book and the personal accounts of the pediatrician,the paralyed old Afghani and the many others made me wonder if I can ever again trust or believe the 'official' version of these and other events.Thanks Mahvish for authoring this much needed book.
 Naive August 15, 2008
0 out of 11 found this review helpful
Listening to the author talk about the detainees in very flowing terms (she would even let them babysit her kids), I cannot but wonder how naive the author must be.
Of course I believe that the detainees should be tried speedily, however to speak of all of them as innocent is ridiculous and betrays a lack of understanding of the dangerous world out there.
RICK "SHAQ" GOLDSTEIN SAYS: "HOW CAN Y0U POSSIBLY HELP GET ME OUT OF GUANTANAMO IF YOU CAN'T EVEN GIVE ME A BOOK?" August 10, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The author is an American born of Afghan immigrants. Her Father became a successful cardiologist and her Mother became the director of neonatology. Mahvish grew up caught in between the realities of two worlds... her parent's restrictive, conservative, old world disciplines, and her longing for a bit more of the looser American way. She graduated from the University Of Michigan and then attended law school at the University Of Miami. In 2005 while in law school, "she was studying the federal torture statues and how policy makers had cleverly circumvented legal principles in creating the military detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where prisoners in the "war on terror" could be held indefinitely without being charged with any crime." Mahvish felt the pain of September 11th as an American... "But also understood the need to invade Afghanistan and destroy the Taliban and al-Qaeda. But I also felt the suffering of the Afghans, when hundreds of Afghan men were rounded up and thrust into the black hole of detention at Guantanamo." This led her to volunteer to become an interpreter between volunteer lawyers and the detainees. And this leads to the core of this heart-breaking... heart-warming... educational odyssey... into what is really going on in Guantanamo, and the horrifying abuse in route to there .
In an attempt to convey to potential readers, the "delicate" power in the words and meaning communicated by the author in this book... I feel it would be helpful to share with you how it affected me. I am an honorably discharged Viet Nam era Veteran, who has always felt very strongly that America was losing a lot more of our precious American lives in battle, because we seem to be the only country that adheres to true "RULES OF ENGAGEMENT". While other countries entire military plans are built around suicide bombers blowing up and murdering innocent civilians, women and children... our soldiers literally have to call lawyers from the battlefield before they make their next move! But here is where this wonderful young woman EDUCATED ME like no newscast or newspaper was able to do. She so perfectly "straddled" both sides of the ethnic line between her heritage and her birthright.
What I learned made me both mad and disappointed in the lack of legal "equality-of-justice" to other human beings. Believe me... I know there are some pretty despicable characters at Gitmo... but there are also innocent men who were snatched out of their families... out of their jobs... out of their countries. I also know that in every jail and prison in the world everyone says they're "innocent", and as one of the volunteer lawyers at Gitmo said: regarding the "face of evil... how normal it looks, how so many of the men who perpetrated some of the worst crimes in history - Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot - had been men who appeared perfectly ordinary, who were kind to children and dogs."
But here's what I learned from this book, and feel must be done, so some of the tarnish can be cleansed from America's name: Lawyers must be assigned immediately to any "enemy combatants" arrested. There must be a time limit as to how long someone can be held without a trial or evidence. (Due to most cases involved at Gitmo being international in scope, the period does need to be much longer than a normal case in America... but no one should be allowed to be kept in such de-humanizing conditions for five years without a trial and conviction.) All sexually demeaning atrocities, such as being made to stand or lay naked for extended times should be outlawed. Rape and sexual perversion (imagine me having to state this in America!) should be outlawed and perpetrators should face heavy jail time themselves. Prisoners should be allowed to have writing supplies and receive mail on a timely basis. (Not holding up letters for a year or more.) AND HERE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT POLICY THAT SHOULD BE CHANGED IMMEDIATELY: **UNLESS IT IS A HIGH RANKING ENEMY SUCH AS BIN LADEN, ETC. STOP THE POLICY OF PAYING REWARDS FOR TURNING PEOPLE IN!
*** HERE'S WHY ** "Many of the men insisted that they they'd been sold to the United States. During the war after September 11th, the U.S. military air-dropped thousands of leaflets across Afghanistan promising between $5,000.00 and $25,000.00 to anyone who would turn in members of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Considering that the per capita income in Afghanistan in 2006 was $300.00 or 82 cents a day, that's like hitting the jackpot. The median income for each American household was $26,036.00 in 2006. If a bounty system of equal proportions were offered to Americans, it would be worth $2.17 MILLION. The average American and the average Afghan would have to work for eighty-three years to make that kind of money." Pakistani's and Afghan's who had a grudge against a neighbor were turning people in... getting the reward... and the poor soul who was "fingered" spent years and years in the hell that was constructed at Gitmo. One of these unfortunate men had gotten into an argument with a worker that was supposed to connect water to his house and didn't. They got into a fight, and the worker turned the homeowner in, and he wound up spending over three years in the bowels of Gitmo hell. "THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE (DOD) has said it was unaware of any sort of bounty being paid for the prisoners." **YET INCLUDED IN THIS BOOK ARE TWO PICTURES OF THE LEAFLETS THAT WERE DISPERSED ALL OVER PAKISTAN AND AFGHANISTAN! "Pakistani president Musharraf even bragged about it in his memoir, "In The Line Of Fire": "We have earned bounties totaling millions of dollars, he wrote, admitting that his agents had handed over 369 men to the U.S. military in exchange for CIA "prize money". According to Amnesty International reports, two-thirds of the men who landed in Guantanamo were picked up in Pakistan, where many were "groomed" in local jails to grow out their beards and look more like Taliban before being sold to the U.S. military.
It is a FACT that most of the prisoners being held in Gitmo were never on a battlefield. If this book can make such a big impression on this patriotic veteran... I can't wait to see the effect it will have on people who don't start out with as hard core beliefs as I did. One of the biggest goals of every book ever written is to educate... and this book has sure as hell educated me!
Now I know July 29, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I am very much enjoying reading this book. Mahvish Khan gives the forbidding nature of Gitmo a human face, portraying the human sides of these faceless detainees and those working on their cases.
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