A Place Outside the Law

Last updated Nov 20, 2022

• Source book

Book by Peter Jan Honigsberg

Honigsberg conducted 158 interviews across 20 countries so that the people who lived and worked there could tell their heartbreaking and inspirational stories. In each one, we face the reality that the healing process cannot begin until we start the conversation about what was done in the name of protecting our country.

It was summer 2009, and Witness to Guantánamo was about to begin our first round of interviews in Tirana, Albania. We had flown Abbas from her home in the Washington, DC, area to meet us. We were in Albania to interview four Uighurs and one Uzbek. She met us in our hotel for breakfast.

After Guantánamo opened, in January 2002, an American contractor contacted Abbas and asked her to become an interpreter at the prison. The military needed someone to interpret for the twenty-two Uighurs who had been captured. Abbas was the only American citizen who spoke English, Mandarin, and Uighur, the military believed.

Initially, Abbas declined the request to serve as a military interpreter. She was afraid of “these jihadists,” she told us. Her husband then reminded her that when she became a citizen, she had pledged to serve her country. She changed her mind and has never looked back. She arrived in Guantánamo in late April 2002 and lived on the base until December of that year. In one of the interrogations, one of the Uighurs recognized her voice as the voice of Radio Free Asia.

“You’re Rushan Abbas,” he said.

The interrogator became unnerved and asked Abbas how the Uighur detainee knew her. Would that compromise the interrogation? he wondered. Could the detainee’s knowledge cause harm to her in the future? The detainees were not told the names of the interpreters.

Rushan Abbas continued with her story. After working for one year as a government interpreter in Guantánamo and realizing that the Uighurs were not enemies of the United States, she resigned and returned to California. At the urging of the military, she agreed to work in Guantánamo for two additional months in early 2003. But she was determined not to continue working for the government after that, because “all the interrogators already made the decision that the Uighurs were innocent and they were at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Over time, Abbas became a surrogate mother to the Uighurs in Guantánamo. When she traveled to the naval base, she brought home-cooked meals with her because “they will never see their mothers again.”

In her 2010 interview with Witness to Guantánamo, Abbas expressed disappointment in how the US had failed the Uighurs.

Abbas continued: “And in my twenty years in United States, I always want to see the great side of the United States. But the last eight years, what I have endured, what I have experienced in Guantánamo, was not the side that I want to see of my country.”