My Guantanamo Diary Read Online Free

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 forty-six years—closer to sixty or seventy.
    I introduced myself and Peter as I removed the lid from the Starbucks chai I’d brought along. I handed it to No. 1154, explaining that it was the closest thing to Afghan tea that I could find on the military base. We opened boxes of baklava, cookies, and pizza, but the prisoner didn’t reach for anything. Instead, in true Afghan fashion, he nervously encouraged us toshare the food we had brought for him. I smiled to myself when he did that. It was such a familiar gesture.
    His name was Ali Shah Mousovi. He was a pediatrician and the son of a prominent Afghan family from the city of Gardez, where he’d been arrested by U.S. troops more than three years earlier. He had returned to Afghanistan in August 2003 after twelve years of exile in Iran, he told us, to help rebuild his wathan , his homeland.
    Peter had become involved in Mousovi’s case two years earlier. After reading the Supreme Court decision in Rasul v. Bush , he (like me) had called the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and asked how Dechert could do pro bono work with Gitmo detainees. Through the Afghan Embassy in Washington, D.C., he found a petition that had been signed by the family and friends of Dr. Ali Shah Mousovi in Washington and Virginia.
    Our courts recognize 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’s how many Guan-tánamo detainees got lawyers.
    Laws don’t get much more fundamental than habeas corpus. It’s an old safeguard preventing imprisonment without charge and a right embedded in the U.S. 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’d been told that the camera wasthere 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 couldn’t pick up images of the legal papers laid on the table. He also told us that the camera wasn’t recording us and didn’t have audio, so we shouldn’t worry about the military listening in on our conversations. I wondered about that.
    But I leaned across the table and, to put us all at ease, told the prisoner a little bit about myself: How I’d learned Pashto growing up from my parents and grandparents. That like him, my parents were physicians. That, also like him, they had lived briefly in Iran. I told him about Peter and his family. When I said that Peter and his wife were expecting a baby in a few months, he smiled for the second time. He told me later that I’d triggered his first smile when I’d entered the room in my headscarf because he’d mistaken me for his younger sister.
    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