Word: khans
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...Mohamed Azeem's house and delivered the letter. Azeem didn't know anyone in America. The envelope had a pretty stamp depicting Mt. McKinley, and an unusual return address: Detainee, JBC, 160 Camp X- Ray. Even more mysterious, the missive bore the name of Azeem's son, Issa Khan, given up for dead months ago by his family...
...Uzbeks didn't shoot Khan. They scored points with their American overlords by turning him over as a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist. "Issa isn't a Taliban or al-Qaeda," says his dad. "He's a doctor who maybe likes to smoke too much hashish and laze around." Like all prisoners, Khan was shorn of his beard, stripped, forced into a bright orange jumpsuit, clapped into earmuffs so he couldn't hear and black goggles that obscured his eyesight. In chains, he was led onto a plane for the longest, strangest trip of his life?to Guant?namo...
...worry about me," Khan later wrote, trying to cheer up his family. "I'm happy. I've even given up smoking." Like all Guant?namo inmates, he lives in a 2-m by 2.5-m cell with a copy of the Koran for company. For 30 minutes every week, he is allowed out of this cage to exercise with his feet shackled. He and all the other so-called "enemy combatants" were recently moved from Camp X-Ray to the larger Camp Delta several kilometers away, where the Army is busy building an extra 204 cells for future captives...
...Most of Guant?namo's 598 detainees are indeed al-Qaeda terrorists. But, as U.S. authorities are finally conceding, the lovelorn Khan?and perhaps as many as 100 other captives?simply aren't. They were grabbed by mistake in the chaos of battle. And last week U.S. officials for the first time reluctantly admitted that this was the case. As Rumsfeld said last Tuesday: "If you don't want them for intelligence, and you don't want them for law enforcement ... then let's be rid of them...
...Soon, however, a batch of mistakenly detained captives is likely to be sent home. Among the first to "come down the chute," as Rumsfeld put it, are three or four Pakistanis. Back in the village of Kotka Miralam Daud Shah, Issa Khan's family waits hopefully for his return. "We'll send a convoy of cars from the village to pick him up, with music and everything," promises his father Azeem. "Then we'll help him find his wife and baby in Afghanistan." Clutching a photo of his son, Azeem says, "No, I don't hold any grudge against...