My Guantanamo Diary by Mahvish Khan Page A

woke up in the morning, he heard his cousin speaking with the Americans. He quickly slipped the cuffs back on and waited, expecting to be released.
    Instead, he was taken to Bagram Air Force Base. From there, he was flown to Guantánamo. It was his first flight in an airplane.
    “It was so bumpy, I felt more like I was riding on a donkey,” he said jokingly.
    Over the years, Taj told us, even Ismael had come to feel badly about Taj’s ending up at Guantánamo. His cousin wrote to tell him that he regretted what had happened and that he wished Taj were home. Taj looked sad for a moment, telling us that.
    We asked about his interrogations. He said that he was asked the same questions over and over. He described not being allowed to sleep for long periods. “You have no idea what it feels like not to sleep for over a week,” he said, shaking his head. One soldier, though, felt badly about his sleep deprivation. “When it was her shift, she let me sleep the whole time,” Taj said.
    There was one interrogator at Guantánamo whom he particularly liked. Her name was Susie, he said, but he hadn’t seen her in a while. “She left, I think. Now it’s a girl named Mi-shal,” he said.
    “Michelle?” I asked.
    “Yes, Mi-shal. She dances well.”
    I looked at him in confusion. “The guards had some music playing, and I saw her dance,” he said. I never quite understood what that was all about.

    Personally, I never bought into the goatherd story. Taj always came across as much more sophisticated than I’d imagined a goatherd to be. That said, I didn’t think it mattered whether Taj was or wasn’t a simple goatherd. The more important fact was that there was no evidence suggesting that he was al-Qaeda.
    At a military hearing in 2003, he was accused of firing rocket-propelled grenades at the U.S. military base in Kunar in exchange for a pair of tennis shoes. Taj admitted that he owned a pair of tennis shoes, but he said he’d purchased them himself. In a separate charge, he stood accused of attackingthe military base in exchange for twenty thousand kaldars, about $400.
    The military also accused him of working with Afghan warlord Hekymatyar Gulbadin, of associating with the Taliban and alQaeda, and of being a member of Lashkar-i-Tayy-iba, an organization reportedly based in Pakistan that trains insurgents to fight against the Indian army in the disputed Kashmir territory.
    And he was further accused of being connected to the smuggling of explosives from Pakistan into Afghanistan and to attacks using improvised explosive devices on a U.S. air base.
    But Taj insisted that he was only a goatherd.
    “I am a nomad taking care of animals. That is all I do,” he told the military panel. “I come from generations of animal caretakers. My father and grandfather did the same.”
    When the accusations were exhausted, the presiding officer turned to the subject of Taj’s small skull cap—these are given to many of the detainees.
    “Most detainees wear white hats,” the officer said. “Is there some significance to your black hat? Does it mean that you are higher up in the organization?”
    “No. I look nice in it. I have darker skin, and it matches the hat,” Taj replied.
    Finally, the panel asked him what he planned to do if he were released. He replied that he had initially planned on working for the Americans as an interpreter, but over the years in detention, he had changed his mind because the Americans had caused him too much grief.
    “I will go back to my own way of living and keep my goats,” he said.
    “And stay away from your cousin,” the presiding officer admonished.

    Paul left the room briefly during our first meeting, and Taj immediately confronted me. “Why are you working with the Americans?” he asked.
    I was shocked. I had thought the meeting was going well and that we had established a decent level of trust and rapport. At the same time, the detainees often confronted me about something whenever the