Books about Guantanamo from Amazon.com

Mahvish Khan is an American lawyer, born to immigrant Afghan parents in Michigan Outraged that her country was illegally imprisoning people at Guantanamo, she volunteered to translate for the prisoners. She spoke their language, understood their customs, and 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.

For Mahvish Khan the experience was a validation of her Afghan heritage—as well as her American freedoms, which allowed her to intervene at Guantanamo purely out of her sense that it was the right thing to do. Mahvish Khan's story is a challenging, brave, and essential test of who she is —and who we are.

Since 2002, at least 775 men have been held in the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. According to Department of Defense data, fewer than half of them are accused of committing any hostile act against the United States or its allies. In hundreds of cases, even the circumstances of their initial detainment are questionable.

This collection gives voice to the men held at Guantánamo. Available only because of the tireless efforts of pro bono attorneys who submitted each line to Pentagon scrutiny, Poems from Guantánamo brings together twenty-two poems by seventeen detainees, most still at Guantánamo, in legal limbo.

If, in the words of Audre Lorde, poetry “forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change,” these verses—some originally written in toothpaste, others scratched onto foam drinking cups with pebbles and furtively handed to attorneys—are the most basic form of the art.

Death Poem by Jumah al Dossari
Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.

Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.

And let them bear the guilty burden before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the "protectors or peace."

Jumah al Dossari is a thirty-three-year old Bahraini who has been held at Guantanamo Bay for more than five years. He has been in solitary confinement since the end of 2003 and, according to the U.S. military, has tried to kill himself twelve times while in custody.

At a July 17, 2003 press conference held jointly with Prime Minister Tony Blair, President George W. Bush described the prisoners held in Guantanamo: "The only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people." They are, supposedly, the worst of the worst of the world's terrorists. Human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith is one of the few people in the world who has had independent access to the prisoners at Guantanamo, representing more than fifty. Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side is his remarkable account of his descent into the darkly comic world of Guantanamo, a legal black hole in which the bleakness of the surroundings are punctuated by moments of humor and absurdity. From the absence of security at the airport, to the army protecting iguanas on the roads, Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side goes beyond the headlines to tell the true story of life at Guantanamo. By bearing witness to the prisoner's stories, Smith also asks what is done to our understanding of American democracy when the rule of law is jettisoned in the name of combating terrorism.