The United States reportedly paid Pakistani police some $3,000 for
Murat Kurnaz before they locked him away for nearly five years without
charges in Guantanamo. The German-Turkish man has written a book about
his plight in the world's most famous prison.
"I understood a long time ago what this prison was about,"
Kurnaz writes in "Five Years of My Life," his memoir that hit the
shelves of Germany's book stores earlier this week. "They could do with
us whatever they wanted."
Kurnaz, a 24-year-old Turkish national born and raised
in Germany, was arrested in Pakistan shortly after the terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; the Americans parked him in a secret prison
in Kandahar, where Kurnaz -- prisoner No. 53 -- says he saw and
experienced horrific things.
One night, screams woke Kurnaz. He said he saw two soldiers beat a man on the ground.
"I could see that he had a blanket wrapped around his
head. They beat his head with a butt, and kicked him in the stomach.
Other guards and soldiers joined in beating the man. It was seven
soldiers," he wrote.
The next morning, the man was dead.
Kurnaz himself was repeatedly electrocuted when
interrogated, he said, and he was left for days at a time to hang by
his hands, which were tied to his back. In one incident, Kurnaz caught
a glimpse of another detainee hanging across the room.
"I don't know him ... His body is swollen and blue.
Only in a few spots, it is white," Kurnaz writes. "I think the man is
dead. He looks like someone who has frozen to death in the snow."
In another terrible interrogation, Kurnaz's said, his
head was pushed under water, a practice dubbed waterboarding. Kurnaz
feared for his life.
"I would have told them everything," he remembers. "But what should I tell them?"
Kurnaz has been at the center of a diplomatic affair
involving Germany and the United States; at the age of 19, only a few
weeks after Sept. 11, Kurnaz had left Bremen, northern Germany, for
Pakistan, where he claims he wanted to study Islam and work for an
Islamic group helping the homeless. He didn't tell his family about his
trip because "my mother wouldn't have let me go."
His friend who wanted to travel with him was held back
at the airport because of a fine he hadn't paid. Kurnaz went by
himself. On the day he wanted to fly back home, Dec. 1, 2001, Kurnaz
was hauled off a bus by Pakistani police, who handed him over to the
Americans. After he was parked in Kandahar, Kurnaz was transported to
the U.S. military Guantanamo prison in Cuba.
There, he recounts, the suffering continued. Kurnaz
remembers how he was put in a tiny cage and repeatedly beaten. Kurnaz
said he spent roughly a year in solitary confinement, suffering from
sleep deprivation, extreme cold and heat, and oxygen deprivation.
Kurnaz has several harrowing tales to tell about the
military prison. One involves Abdul Rahman, a young man from Saudi
Arabia who guards continued to beat to the ground after U.S. military
doctors had amputated both his legs and left the wounds festering in
the sun, he claims.
Kurnaz said Abdul Rahman was a freshly married man who
liked soccer. When he was beaten, "he never cried," Kurnaz writes. "But
when he heard or saw how other prisoners were beaten in their cages, he
loudly cried. Although he was treated so inhumanely, he had empathy for
other people."
Abdul Rahman is still in Guantanamo, Kurnaz writes.
The former detainee has made more harsh allegations.
Broken bones were never treated, and when one inmate agreed to have one
of his fingers amputated because it was frozen dead, U.S. doctors
simply amputated all of them -- except for his two thumbs.
The case of Kurnaz has also troubled Berlin: When the
Pentagon in September 2002 offered to release the seemingly harmless
inmate to Germany, the government in Berlin refused because it deemed
Kurnaz a security risk. Moreover, Germans were directly involved with
his plight: German elite soldiers, Kurnaz claims, beat his head to the
ground in Kandahar (he has identified one German soldier, who denies
having abused Kurnaz), and a team of German intelligence officials
visited him in Guantanamo. After initial denials, Berlin admitted that
the Germans interrogated Kurnaz in Cuba.
A high-profile parliamentary inquiry is currently
probing whether the former German government could be held responsible
for prolonging the man's stay in Guantanamo.
Kurnaz's graphic and -- according to several sources
-- accurate account of his plight as a terror suspect in Guantanamo may
elevate the pressure on Berlin and Washington. It wasn't until last
summer, when freshly elected Chancellor Angela Merkel intervened with
U.S. President George W. Bush, that Kurnaz was released.
Observers say Kurnaz simply was in the wrong place at
the wrong time. Yet even if the man, who now wears a long beard that
grew during his imprisonment, was indeed a security threat (U.S. and
German courts have ruled he isn't), it doesn't justify the repeated
acts of abuse and torture he and his fellow inmates allegedly had to
endure.
Several governments have urged Washington to close
Guantanamo; classified as enemy combatants, the detainees are held
without charges and without a trial. Although the treatment of
detainees in Guantanamo has reportedly improved since the early months,
the detainment camp itself remains a subject of fierce debate.
The question that remains is: Will the officials
responsible for the abuse allegedly committed at Guantanamo be held
accountable?
Shortly before Kurnaz was flown to freedom at
Ramstein Air Base in Germany, a U.S. officer gave him a piece of paper,
telling him to sign it, to admit "that you were detained in Guantanamo
Bay because you are linked to al-Qaida and the Taliban. Or you are
never going home."
Kurnaz didn't sign it. Today, he lives in Bremen. He says he is happy.
Source: UPI
UK & Europe 
