Free My Guantanamo Diary by Mahvish Khan

them collectively to the media as treacherous monsters and bomb makers.

    I’ve encountered a few individuals who believe that, given the political climate, this is not the time to adhere to legal principles. We’re engaged in a war on terrorism, and the United States has been threatened by an unconventional enemy. For these reasons, they say, constitutional laws shouldn’t apply to Guantánamo detainees.
    But the idea that due process and fair hearings go out the window when we are afraid of something or feel threatened erodes the essence of constitutional safeguards. Yet, such an erosion has stained U.S. history before. In times of war, threats to national security become the basis for abandoning the cornerstone principles enshrined in our constitution.
    During World War II, which generated its share of fear and hysteria, more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans suspected of espionage were taken from their homes, fired from their jobs, and detained in what President Franklin Roosevelt then called concentration camps. Not a single Japanese American was ever charged with or convicted of spying or committing any act of hostility toward the United States.
    When Japanese American Fred Korematsu refused to relocate to one of Roosevelt’s detention centers, he was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and subsequently convicted in federal court. In Korematsu v. United States , Kore-matsu took his case challenging the legality of the president’s wartime policy to the Supreme Court. In a sharply divided 6–3 decision, the Court upheld Korematsu’s conviction in late 1944. The majority opinion, written by Justice Hugo Black, rejected Korematsu’s discrimination argument and upheld the government’s right to put Japanese American citizensin detention camps due to the wartime emergency. The Court’s reasoning echoes the rhetoric the Bush administration uses to justify its actions today: We are at war with an enemy who threatens our national security.
    Today, the Korematsu case is viewed as a sad blemish on the history of the U.S. Supreme Court. I was taught that it represented everything the high court should not do: allow pressure and fear to strip people of their legal and human rights.
    But history repeats itself. Many of the Guantánamo detainees were taken from their families and homelands, many from their own beds at night, brought halfway around the world, tortured, and held in secret, without charge or trial. The Guantánamo cases raise lasting and fundamental questions about America’s willingness to abide by its principles and adhere to the rule of law, especially when under threat. Not long before he died in March 2005, Fred Korematsu filed another brief before the U.S. Supreme Court, this time on behalf of hundreds of Muslims being held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
    I wrote about my first trip to Guantánamo, and my feelings of shame when I met a pediatrician and an eighty-year-old paraplegic who asked me why the United States hid him from the world and from journalists, in an article for the Washington Post that was reprinted in newspapers around the world. I received an outpouring of e-mails from readers. Of nine hundred messages, about twenty were hate mail. One reader suggested that I might be working for “the enemy.” Another told me that I was being duped by al-Qaeda manual-reading terrorists. But the vast majority of responses were from regu-lar Americans who felt just as deceived by our country’s actions as I did.
    Shortly after the story ran, I received an unpleasant phone call from the Pentagon telling me that I was being banned from the base. I was upset. I’d been extremely careful only to publish information that had been reviewed and declassified by the government. I’d also been careful not to violate the protective order of military base rules governing Guantánamo Bay, which I’d been required to sign. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I wasn’t sure how to