My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me

Mahvish Rukhsana Khan is an American lawyer, born to immigrant Afghan parents in Michigan. While pursuing a law degree at the University of Miami, she became enraged by the illegal detainment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. With her fluency in Pashto and a familiarity with Afghan cultures and customs that no other "habeas" lawyer with security clearance had, she was quickly taken on as an interpreter for Afghan detainees. Six months later, in January 2006, Khan was on her way to Guantanamo Bay. Her role with the detainees quickly developed. She began providing supervised legal counsel and traveled to Afghanistan to find exonerating evidence for prisoners.
During more than thirty trips to Guantanamo, Khan unexpectedly connected with the very men that Donald Rumsfeld called "the worst of the worst." She 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. As time went by, Khan began to question whether Guantanamo truly held America's most dangerous enemies. But regardless of each prisoner's innocence or guilt, she was determined to preserve their most fundamental right: the right to a fair trial.