GUANTANAMO BAY (Cuba): The sailor at the entrance to Camp Echo peers through the gate as Peter and I hold up our laminated blue cards. “HC,” for habeas counsel, they read. “Escort Required.” He waves us through, searches our bags for recording devices, then issues safety instructions — dial 2431 on the wall phone in the room — in case anything should happen in our meeting with prisoner No. 1154.

The gravel crunches beneath our shoes as we follow a soldier across a dusty courtyard to a painted brown door. Before we go in, I drape the shawl I’m carrying over my head and arms. This is my first meeting with a Guantanamo Bay detainee, and I’m feeling nervous about sitting down with a man who may be a terrorist.

Ali Shah Mousovi is standing at attention at the far end of the room, his leg chained to the floor. His expression is wary, but when he sees me in my traditional embroidered shawl from Peshawar, he breaks into a smile. Later, he’ll tell me that I resemble his younger sister, and that for a split second he mistook me for her.

I introduce myself and Peter Ryan, a Philadelphia lawyer for whom I’m interpreting. I hand Mousovi a Starbucks chai, the closest thing to Afghan tea I’ve been able to find on the base. Then I open up boxes of pizza, cookies and baklava, but he doesn’t reach for anything. Instead, in true Afghan fashion, he urges us to share the food we have brought for him. Mousovi is a physician from the Afghan city of Gardez, where he was arrested by US troops 2-1/2 years ago. He tells us that he had returned to Afghanistan in August 2003, after 12 years of exile in Iran, to help rebuild his watan, his homeland. He believes that someone turned him in to US forces just to collect up to $25,000 being offered to anyone who gave up a Talib or Al Qaeda member.

As I translate from Pashto, Mousovi hesitantly describes life since his arrest. Transported to Bagram air base near Kabul in eastern Afghanistan, he was thrown — blindfolded, hooded and gagged — into a three-and-half-by-seven-foot shed. He says he was beaten regularly by Americans in civilian clothing, deprived of sleep by tape-recordings of sirens that blared day and night. He describes being dragged around by a rope, subjected to extremes of heat and cold. He says he barely slept for an entire month.

He doesn’t know why he was brought to Guantanamo Bay. He had hoped he would be freed at his military hearing in December 2004. Instead, he was accused of associating with the Taliban and of funnelling money to anti-coalition insurgents. When he asked for evidence, he was told it was classified. And so he sits in prison, far from his wife and three children. More than anyone, he misses his 11-year-old daughter, Hajar. When he talks about her, his eyes fill with tears and his head droops.

I don’t know exactly what I had expected coming to Guantanamo Bay, but it wasn’t this weary, sorrowful man. The government says he is a terrorist and a monster, but when I look at him, I see simply what he says he is — a physician who wanted to build a clinic in his native land.

A guard knocks at the door, signalling time’s up. Mousovi signs a document agreeing to have Peter represent him in filing a petition for habeas corpus before US civilian courts. “I pray to Allah,” he says, holding his palms together, “for sabar.” Patience. He stands up as Peter and I say goodbye. When I glance back after we walk out, he is still standing, gazing after us.

My interest in the US military base in Cuba was sparked by an international law class I took last year at the University of Miami. I decided I wanted to become involved in what is going on there. So I Googled the names of the attorneys on the landmark 2004 Supreme Court case Rasul v. Bush, which held that the US court system had authority to decide whether non-US citizens held at Guantanamo Bay were being rightfully imprisoned. Then I started bombarding them with calls and e-mails expressing my desire as a law student, a journalist and a Pukhtun to help, both on the legal end and as an interpreter.

The very existence of the military detention camp at Guantanamo Bay seemed an affront to what the United States stands for. How could our government deny the prisoners there the right to a fair hearing? I didn’t know whether they were innocent or guilty — but I figured they should be entitled to the same protections as any alleged rapist or murderer.

Maybe part of my interest had to do with my heritage. My Pukhtun parents are doctors who met in medical school in Peshawar. They came to the United States to continue their medical educations. I was born in America in 1978, but I grew up speaking Pashto at home, and am a practicing Muslim. I’ve always felt the pull of my heritage, and the tragedy of the Afghan people, whose country has been overrun so many times throughout history.

As an American, I felt the pain of September 11, and I understood the need to invade Afghanistan and destroy the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But I also felt the suffering of the Afghans as their country was bombed. And when hundreds of men were rounded up and thrust into a black hole of detention, many with seemingly no proof that they had any terrorist connections, I felt that my own country had taken a wrong turn.

The attorneys I e-mailed eventually put me in touch with Peter Ryan at Dechert LLP, which represents 15 Afghan detainees. After a rigorous six-month background check for a security clearance, off I went in January on my first trip to the base.

I’ve now been down a total of nine times. And each time, I’m struck by the ordinariness of Guantanamo Bay, the startling disconnect between the beauty of the surroundings and the evil they mask.

I expected a stern, forbidding place. Instead I found sunshine and smiling young soldiers, boozy nighttime barbecues and beaches that call to you for a midnight swim. I’ve also found loss and tears. Over three months, I’ve interpreted at dozens of meetings with detainees and heard many stories — of betrayal and mistaken identity, of beatings and torture, of loneliness and hopelessness.

I’ve listened to Wali Mohammed protest that he was just a businessman trying to get along in Taliban-run Afghanistan. I’ve watched Chaman Gul, crouched in his seven-by-eight-foot cage, weep for fear that his family will forget him. I’ve marvelled at the pluck and wit of Taj Mohammad, a 27-year-old uneducated goat herder who has taught himself fluent English while in Cuba.

No matter the age or background of the detainee, our meetings always leave me feeling helpless. These men show me the human face of the war on terrorism. They’ve been systematically dehumanized, cast as mere numbers in prison-camp fashion. But to me, they’ve become almost like friends, or brothers or fathers. I can honestly say that I don’t believe any of our clients are guilty of crimes against the United States. No doubt some men here are, but not the men I’ve met. I wish we could just hand our clients the freedom they desperately crave, but so far, we haven’t been able to, though three of Dechert’s clients were released at the military’s discretion before any of us ever even went to the prison. Still, our work with those who remain seems to give them what they need to persevere — a thread of hope.

At 80, Haji Nusrat — detainee No. 1009 — is Guantanamo Bay’s oldest prisoner. A stroke 15 years ago left him partly paralyzed. He cannot stand up without assistance and hobbles to the bathroom behind a walker. Despite his paralysis, his swollen legs and feet are tightly cuffed and shackled to the floor. He says that his shoes are too tight and that he needs new ones. He has asked for medical attention for the inflammation in his legs, but has not been taken to a hospital.

“They wait until you are almost dead,” he says.

He has a long white beard and grayish-brown eyes that drift from Peter’s face to mine as we explain his legal issues to him. In the middle of our meeting, he says to me: “Bachay.” My child. “Look at my white beard. They have brought me here with a white beard. I have done nothing at all. I have not said a single word against the Americans.”

He comes from a small mountain village in Afghanistan and cannot read or write. He has 10 children and does not know if his wife is still alive — he hasn’t received any letters.

US troops arrested Nusrat in 2003, a few days after he went to complain about the arrest of his son Izat, who is also detained at Guantanamo Bay. Nusrat is charged with being a commander of a terrorist organisation in Afghanistan with ties to Osama Bin Laden, and with possession of a cache of weapons. Izat, who appeared as a witness at his father’s military hearing, maintained that the weapons in question were in a storehouse set up by the Afghan defence ministry, which he was paid to guard and maintain.

During our meeting, Nusrat’s emotions range from anger to despair. In his desperation, he begins to promise Peter that he will make him famous if he helps him get home. “Everyone in Afghanistan will know your name,” he says. “You will be a great, famous lawyer.”

As I interpret, I feel a lump growing in my throat. Suddenly, I can’t speak. Peter and Nusrat pause as the tears flood down my face and drip onto my shawl. The old man looks at me. “You are a daughter to me,” he says. “Think of me as a father.” I nod, aligning and realigning pistachio shells on the table as I interpret.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service

—Mahvish Khan will graduate next month from the University of Miami School of Law. She works for the Miami public defender’s office