My Guantanamo Diary (28 page)

No. 977, Izatullah Nusrat, son of eighty-year-old Haji Nusrat, also stands out in my mind. He was a younger, softer-spoken version of his father, but he had Haji’s sleepy eyes, tall, hefty build, and smile. He warmed up to me right away and reached for my hand.

“My father was very happy with you,” he said.

He warmed up quickly to Peter too. After we’d gone over his case, he said softly, “My innocence is as evident as it is that a black cow will give white milk. It’s as clear as that.” The military thought so too. They issued a notice clearing him for release, but they continued to hold him. It frustrated Izatullah, but he never lost faith in Peter. “I have a path back home, and you are at the head of my path. I trust you,” he told him.

I remember one meeting in particular, and I know that Izatullah will also remember it for the rest of his life. The military granted us permission to show him a home video of his family in Sarobi, Afghanistan. He was overwhelmed when he saw his children on the tape and began laughing and crying at once. It was strange. I had never seen two such intense emotions expressed at the same time.

When the video was over, the six-foot Afghan looked up at us with watery eyes. For a moment, he was at a loss for words. He held up his thumbs and glanced at us in silence. Finally, he spoke. “
Manana
—Thank you. What you have done for me today is something I will never forget. For the rest of my life, until I die, I will remember this act of kindness,” he said. “I had not seen my children in five years. Today, you have allowed me to see them, to hear them. For that, I will always be grateful.” to see them, to hear them. For that, I will always be grateful.”

“This was something very small,” Peter said to him modestly. “We would like to put you on a plane and send you home to be with them again.”

Still image of Izatullah’s children from the video
we showed him.
Video by Idries Khattak.

Izatullah shook his head. “For me, as a prisoner, far away for so many years, this is not small. This is huge. I am indebted to you for the rest of my days.” He asked to watch the video again.

“We can watch it all day,” Peter said.

And every time it got to the part with his children lined up to face the camera, Izatullah inched closer to the portable DVD player’s small screen, listening intently to every word, exclaiming over the children’s shy gestures. They fidgeted with their clothing. Their eyes darted about. Their high voices and small movements made him laugh even as tears streamed down his face.

When the guards came to bring some requested documents to the door, Izatullah’s eyes never moved from the video. The tears kept rolling, and the tissues he clenched became a wet ball.

At the end, he looked up again. “Did you see their teeth?” he asked. “Their little teeth fell out.” He told us that he no longer recognized the younger ones, who were just infants when he was arrested.

“What’s the cute redhead’s name?” I asked.

Izatullah told me that the little boy was Ashmat. “He followed me everywhere,” he said. “He was always with me.” The last time he saw Ashmat, he said, “I was sitting with guests, and Ashmat was in my lap. He was two at the time. He never left my side. My brother, Abdul Wahid, came in to tell me there were some American soldiers who wanted to see me, so I got up to see them. Ashmat was close behind me, and so was Abid, who is three. When I was talking to the soldiers through an interpreter, Ashmat sensed that something wasn’t right. Abid took a few steps back in fear, but Ashmat
winced, then held his hands up and asked me to pick him up. I lifted him in my arms while I spoke. But when they led me away, I had to put him down. I looked back once. He was standing alone. This was my last memory of them. Today was the first time in five years that I have heard my children’s voices.”

When we asked Izatullah how he coped and whether he was depressed, his answer was surprising. “We are very unfortunate people, but it would only add to our misfortune if we allowed ourselves to get depressed,” he said. “We have families— wives, children, and parents—waiting at home for us. We don’t want to ruin ourselves with unhappiness and depression. We ask Allah for
sabr
—patience—and we try to keep one another in good spirits.”

Izatullah also told us about the first time he had heard that a group of reported al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners had been sent to Gitmo. “I remember feeling glad that Americans were capturing them. People who terrorize humanity should be sent to prison,” he said.

Father and son had a change of heart when they were arrested and brought to Cuba. “We saw that there were so many others like us. With that, the whole system quickly lost credibility in our eyes. Maybe there are some al-Qaeda, but America, with all of its intelligence, can certainly in five years do an investigation to find out if the reports against people are true or false.”

The guards signaled that time was up, and Peter and I began to pack up. “The next time I speak to you, I hope to be speaking to you on the telephone from Afghanistan, inshallah,” Peter said.

I also think often of another Afghan, whose first name was Mohammad. When months went by with no progress on his case, he lost hope of a legal solution and decided that he didn’t want a lawyer. “Guantánamo is not a place of law,” he reasoned. “It is a jungle.”

The thirty-eight-year-old was different from many of the prisoners in a fundamental way. He wasn’t a pediatrician, a schoolteacher, a businessman, or even a goatherd. He admitted that at the time of his arrest, he was working for the Taliban. He also had a part-time job working on his family farm but made no bones about leaving the Taliban on his resume.

“The American government under President Bush has committed horrible atrocities, but that doesn’t mean that all people working for the U.S. government support Bush’s ideologies or support his actions,” he said. “I’m sure there are many, many good people who work for the American government right now. Similarly, the Taliban ran the government of Afghanistan for seven years. There are many people who made up that government. Some people were weak minded and led to do things that were not right. There were others who disagreed with the policies of their government. I cannot speak for all of them, but I can say that I am not a political figure. I worked under their government as a checkpoint guard.”

I was a little shocked when I first heard about his associations, and I began to wonder whether the soft-spoken, gentle-natured man sitting across the table eating Hostess Twinkies and KFC chicken strips could in reality be a monster. The mention of Taliban instantly conjured images of bearded men caning women in the streets of Kabul.

Mohammad wore tan-colored prison garb and a black skull cap over his thinning hair. During our meeting, I found him exceptionally sharp. He tactfully suppressed his emotions and kept his tone of voice even, calm, and in control. He had a lot to say and gently steered the meeting with slight voice inflections. He was always thinking, and only his subtle body language hinted at despair or, sometimes, gave a glimmer of optimism. Even as he watched a video of his dying father telling him that “getting letters from him was like giving a thirsty man water,” he tried to remain stoic.

Most of the time, we listened to him talk as he doodled on scratch paper, drawing perfectly symmetrical flower petals and a mountainous Afghan horizon. Meanwhile, I sketched cartoon bunnies and practiced writing my name in Pashto with his help. Rebecca Dick of Dechert’s Washington, D.C., office drew cats. All the while, we talked politics. Sometimes Mohammad spoke in a Socratic, questioning style. Other times, he launched into rhetorical soliloquies along lines like these: