San Diego and Guantanamo Bay are both by the ocean, but that's about where the similarities end. One is known for wealth and luxury, the other for deprivation.

Mahvish Rukhsana Khan straddles both worlds. She lives in San Diego, and for the past two years she's traveled regularly to "Gitmo," working as a translator for lawyers representing terrorism suspects housed there.

She's written a book about the experience, "My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me," published in July. It's a rare look behind the barbed wire.

And a scathing one.

"I realized the detention center at Gitmo was built in Cuba to weasel around the cornerstone constitutional principles that America was founded upon," she said. "It was really nothing more than a lawless black hole where prisoners were hidden away from the world — without a voice, without being charged, without an impartial hearing."

Her book gives them voice. We meet people like Ali Shah Mousovi, a 43-year-old pediatrician and father of three, snatched from his home by American soldiers and accused of aiding the Taliban.

Mousovi shared tales of being beaten and humiliated by his captors. A military tribunal declared him an "enemy combatant," but refused to share the evidence, saying it was classified. Never formally tried, he spent more than three years imprisoned before he was released.

The Guantanamo Bay detention center, opened in 2002, housed almost 800 terrorism suspects at its peak. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called them "the worst of the worst."

As Khan documents in her book, most were arrested after the U.S. military dropped leaflets in Afghanistan offering bounties of up to $25,000 for information on Taliban and al-Qaeda supporters.

In a country "riddled with political, ethnic, tribal, geographic and religious feuds that date back generations," and where the average person makes $300 a year, the leaflets "created a black market" of accusations, Khan said.

The Bush Administration has defended Guantanamo as a "clean, safe and humane" operation that helps safeguard America from terrorist attacks. But it has drawn a string of judicial rebukes, critical government audits and international protests.

About 260 detainees are housed there now, and the government has begun taking some of them to trial.

In August, a military jury found Osama bin Laden's former driver guilty of supporting terrorism while acquitting him of conspiracy. Sentenced to 5 1/2 years in prison, he could be released later this year, although the administration has characterized him as a "continuing threat" and may try to hold him indefinitely.

Khan, 29, is the American-born daughter of Afghan immigrants, both doctors. She grew up in Michigan, struggling to figure out where she fit in culturally. In fourth grade, her mother made her wear traditional Afghan clothes, which she found embarrassing, especially after one classmate asked, "Why are you wearing pajamas?" She would change as soon as she got to school.

Eventually, she came to terms with her hybrid existence, and by the time she enrolled at the University of Miami to study law, she was cooking kabali pillau and meeting other Afghan-Americans on MySpace.com.

She first heard about the detainees while taking an international law class. "I didn't know if the men at Gitmo were good or bad — simply that they shouldn't be stripped of basic civil and human rights," she said. "Only a fair trial could separate the good from the bad."

Khan contacted lawyers representing some of the men and volunteered her skills — she is fluent in Pashto and a practicing Muslim. Six months later, after authorities checked her background and gave her security clearance, she went to the base for the first time in January 2006.

She said she was nervous and scared, fully expecting to encounter "America-hating bomb makers."

Instead, she met Mousovi and then Haji Nusrat, 80, partially paralyzed and illiterate. The father of 10 was arrested for allegedly hoarding weapons and being a battlefield commander.

The meeting with Nusrat, shackled and in obvious pain, reduced Khan to tears. The prisoner wound up comforting the visitor.

"I know there are terrorists at Guantanamo, people who deserve to be called evil," Khan said. "But I haven't met them." She said the detainees she worked with are "charitable, upstanding citizens who Americans would be outraged to know were wrongly imprisoned."

In April 2006, Khan wrote a first-person account of her trips to the detention center for the Washington Post. That led to the book deal. She said she wrote it as a diary so readers can "see what Guantanamo looks, smells and feels like."

It includes stories about bringing Starbucks chai, pizza and ice cream to the detainees, and about traveling to Afghanistan to collect evidence: witness affidavits, employment records, photographs. She took strands of hair the men plucked from their beards to their families, and brought back photos and videos to detainees who had not seen their children in five years.

"The entire Guantanamo experience is very intense," she said. "Emotions run on overdrive. Whether it's anger, suspicion, comfort, desperation or love, it's hard to hide much of anything."

The book has garnered national media attention, including an interview on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" and a review in the New York Times, which called it "a valuable account of what we can now recognize as one of the most shameful episodes in the war on terror. It is hard to read this book without a growing sense of embarrassment and indignation."

During the NPR interview, a listener told Khan he has no sympathy for the "terrorists" and doesn't understand why they should receive court hearings. Khan said she's had a few similar reactions during book signings.

"I too went to Gitmo assuming that the prisoners must have done something to have been arrested because I heard nothing to the contrary in the media," she said. "I empathize with Americans who don't have any balancing information. We have not heard the full story."

To find out more about John Wilkens and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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