As many other people in a world largely influenced by medias, I have too many times heard of ‘Guantánamo’ detention camp. Despite that, my vision of what this word incorporates of frustrations, horror and injustice has revealed to be absolutely erroneous and abstract. This is at least what Mahvish Rukhsana Khan, an American Law student at University of Miami with an Afghan Pashtun background tends to demonstrate in her very first work, My Guantánamo Diary, when relating the non common stories of some detainees she met during her no less than three dozen sojourns at Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba. Indeed, Khan was not expecting to be in close contact with what fairly contrasts with the Basic American Principles of the American Constitution when she first volunteered as an interpreter for pashto speaking detainees. However, her fight for giving identities to what are no more than serial numbers in Guantánamo, seems to suggest a new definition for what is called ‘American Democracy’.
Thus, Khan offers the readers an introspective vision at the heart of a fortress where no law nor right pervade, and where innumerable breaches to Human Rights end up ‘Classified’. By such testimonies, she demonstrates that even the most powerful country in this world can return to processes we thought were totally revoked in democratic states. She denounces an almost systematic imprisonment of people for whom there is no evidence suggesting that they are Taliban or Al-Qaeda members. Some of them, like Abdul Matin, a respectable Afghan Science teacher, were ‘arrested wearing a Casio watch’, for the only reason Casio is the kind of watch terrorists generally use to detonate bombs.
In other words, Khan here insists on a crucial point of her reasoning, according to which, safety regulations that should apply to protect American citizens are clearly different out of the United States borders, from what they are within the territory. Moreover, the story of Abdul Matin as many other Afghans,