An Innocent In Guantanamo

Five long torturous years at Guantanamo…

Murat Kurnaz at the hapless age of 19 found himself an unfortunate detainee in Guantanamo. The route that took this young man there is a shameful one. Murat is German born of Turkish parents, and like many first and second generations of Muslims in Europe do…he embraced a religion his family had abandoned when they immigrated from their native home. His religious regeneration placed him near others of the Islamic fundamentalist persuasion. When Murat was 19 he was taken off a bus in Peshawar, Pakistan. This is a story of an innocent young man whom George Bush’s America felt needed to be repatriated though he was not a security threat to the United States.

There’s the Fifth Amendment: one is not compelled to be a witness against oneself, or deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law. Eighth Amendment: protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Fourteenth Amendment: the state cannot deprive someone of life, liberty or property without due process. The habeas corpus statute? What is that?

At 24 he is out now and has been returned to Germany. He actually was the last detainee to be removed from Gitmo. He has written a book..”Five Years of My Life: A Report from Guantanamo” and it will be released in the United States. He’s written a primer on rendition, incarceration, torture and interrogation by American forces. It’s being translated by a U.S. publisher for a January release. He wasn’t supposed to be able to get out and talk about his situation…but that is what he has done…he outlasted their torture and their inhumanity. People fought long and hard to get his release.

In January 2005, Washington, D.C., federal district Judge Joyce Hens Green ruled on Kurnaz’s case, along with the cases of ten other detainees. During his Combat Review Status Hearing in Guantanamo, Kurnaz had appeared before a panel of three military officers. He had no legal representation and was not allowed to see the classified evidence used to declare him a member of Al Qaeda. Before his hearing in Washington, some of the classified evidence used against him was inadvertently declassified and obtained by the Washington Post. It included reports that established that two years earlier, the Command Intelligence Task Force that oversees Guantanamo had concluded there was “no definite link-evidence of detainee having an association with Al Qaeda or making specific threats against the U.S.”

Judge Green reviewed the evidence and found nothing that justified holding Murat Kurnaz in prison. Among the hundreds of pages used to declare him a member of Al Qaeda, the smoking gun was a single document with vague allegations made by an unidentified officer. The judge was disturbed by the fact that Kurnaz, like other detainees, was never permitted to see or rebut the allegations that kept him in a cage in Guantanamo.

Murat was released only because (his lawyers) Behar Azmy and his colleague in Germany, Bernhard Docke, took his case to the court of public opinion in Germany. Their skillful use of the media persuaded German chancellor Angela Merkel to prevail on George Bush to release Kurnaz. Merkel raised the issue on her first visit to the White House in January 2006.

And here is some of what happened to this young mans body and mind. Murat Kurnaz was picked up in Pakistan in December 2001, on that fateful bus ride in Pashawar. “The beatings began as soon as I was turned over to the Americans,” Murat said. In the prison camp in Kandahar, Kurnaz said, he was hoisted on chains and was forced to hang by his hands while he was being interrogated. He was left hanging for “hours and days” after the interrogators left. An American physician in camouflage would come and check his vital signs to determine if he could withstand more enhanced interrogation.

The doctor’s house call must have failed Kurnaz’s neighbor in the next room. “They were hanging me and pulled me up higher than the other times. I could see the man in the other room. He was hanging, too. Maybe they lifted him higher that time, too, I don’t know. I had heard him moaning and breathing; this is the first time I saw him. He was dead. The color of his body was changed and I could see he was dead.”

Kurnaz said he was also subjected to waterboarding and electric shock. And that beatings were routine and constant. He theorizes that much of the torture was a result of the failure of the American soldiers and agents to capture any real terrorists in the initial sweeps. (He was told that he was sold to the Americans for $3,000 by Pakistani police, who identified him as a terrorist.) “They didn’t have any big fish. And they thought that by torture they could get one of us to say something. ‘I know Osama’ or something like that. Then they could say they had a big fish.” The German government is still conducting a parliamentary inquiry into its complicity in the Kurnaz case. “He was dumped on German soil like some sort of alien,” said Bernhard Docke, one of Kurnaz’s attorneys. Movie rights have been sold in the U.S. This is a book I want to read…and a movie I definitely will see. Article link

Tags Guantanamo, torture, terrorism, rendition, detainees, Bush Administration

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