Much more of a personal impressionistic account of Guantanamo than a comprehensive look at any cases or issues involved. The author is a young idealistic law student from an immigrant Afghan family who volunteered as an interpreter for the lawyers working with Afghans imprisoned on the base. She was convinced that the prisoners she met there were innocent, good men, and she clearly felt full sympathy with them and their stories. She may well be right, and other sources will also confirm that many of the inmates held there were far from being the "worst of the worst" hardcore terrorists that the Bush administration would have had us believe. But there is also not much here to disprove those who would say the inmates were trained to lie and successfully fooled a naive young student.

An interesting book for its personal perspective and passion, not one that would probably change a lot of minds, and not one very heavy on details of the cases - which is the main drawback to it my view. ( )

er Review
4.0 out of 5 stars"The concept that freedom might be a universal, not narrowly American, right"
Bysally tarboxTOP 500 REVIEWERon 13 August 2018
Format: Kindle Edition
I'm glad I read this book to get an informed opinion on Guantanamo Bay. I've always had the feeling that the inmates deserve all they get - we think of Jihadi John et al- and wondered what innocent men were doing there anyway. Just before I started reading, an ex-inmate hit the news: released as innocent, he'd gone on to commit terrorist outrages.
So I started with a jaded viewpoint, but feel that's been softened considerably after reading. The author was a lawyer- of Afghani background, but living an American lifestyle and with a white fiance. She admits that there are men who deserve to be there, but as she narrates the stories of those with whom she dealt, one can't help feeling that there are a lot of innocents too.
Many of those captured were turned in by their countrymen, both for the bounty paid by the US government for 'terrorists' and also to exact revenge on an enemy - people who owed money or upset local officials might find themselves turned in (one thinks of similar stories in Communist regimes.)
Certainly allegations of casual torture seem pretty certain - not carefully designed sessions to extract information, but random cruelty and degradation, whether to break the subjects' morale or for the entertainment of the guards. Suicides, hunger strikes and force feeding, people declared innocent but then not released, heavy handed authoritarianism...it makes for a grim read and has certainly altered my take on the subject. ( )

Overall, this book was engaging and informative. I found Mahvish Khan to be very passionate and genuine and was deeply moved by the stories she shares, but I don't think that I'd go so far as to calling it non-fiction, I think memoir is a better term for this. ( )

Mahvish Khan was the rare combination of a law student and a fluent Pashto speaker. This made her attractive to the pro bono habeas lawyers who were attempting to represent the detainees at Guantanamo. While still in law school, she signed on with a firm to serve as its interpreter.

This book is the result of her observations and experiences in Guantanamo, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Khan is a less than artful wordsmith. She ends up coming off a bit like Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, young, at times shallow and yet at other times startlingly graphic and nuanced. Her book alternates between being painful due to her prose and painful due to her subject while also managing to work in a surprisingly personal perspective and a deep degree of empathy for the detainees with whom she deals.

Khan claims to be objective,

"Though it may appear to some readers that I give ample, and perhaps naive, credence to prisoners' points of view, I have made every effor to verify their accounts and to explore the military's contrasting perspective . . . My objective is simply to tell the stories of some of the men held captive by the United States at Guantanamo Bay, the stories they themselves have never been able to tell."

but saying it's so doesn't make it so. She is clearly charmed by all of the detainees she met, even Taj Mohammad, the suspicious "goatherd" whose story, she admits, never added up. She concludes by stating,

"I can honestly say that I don't believe any of the Afghans I met were guilty of crimes against the United States. Certainly, some of the Guantanamo detainees were, just not the men I met."

Were the men she met truly not guilty or were they simply not guilty because she met them?

And yet, that's not the point. Guilty or not, the abuses that Khan details are appalling. Members of the US military performed ghastly acts. Commander Jeffery Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, comes across as particularly ignorant, defensive and asinine.

And in the end, there is no disagreeing with Khan's central point,

"Some readers may also argue that detainees, or "enemy combatants," as the Defense Department calls them, aren't entitled to the protections of U.S. law. This is an argument I reject. While I believe that Guantanamo may hold evil men as well as innocent ones, I also believe that only a full and fair hearing can separate the good from the bad."

And that is the point. ( )

"My Guantanamo Diary" is a book that should be read by all Americans. However, the stories of the torture and humiliation to which the prisoners were subjected were very difficult to read, and ultimately I had to put this book aside, to be finished at a later time. ( )