Murat Kurnaz


Murat Kurnaz is a Turkish citizen and legal resident of Germany who was held in extrajudicial detention by the United States at its military base in Kandahar, Afghanistan and in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba beginning in December 2001. He was tortured in both places. By early 2002, intelligence officials of the United States and Germany had concluded that accusations against Kurnaz were groundless.
According to the BBC, Germany refused to accept him at that time, although the US offered to release him. Kurnaz was detained and abused at Guantanamo for nearly five more years. He published a memoir of his experience, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo in German in 2007; translations to other European languages and English followed. In 2008 he testified in US Congressional hearings about treatment of detainees at the camp. He and his family live in Germany.

Arrest in Pakistan

Murat Kurnaz was born in Bremen, Germany, and grew up there. He was considered a Turkish citizen because his parents were immigrants, but they had lived and worked in Germany for years. He was a legal German resident and married a Turkish woman in Germany. In October 2001 Kurnaz at age 19 traveled from Germany to Pakistan, hoping to study at the Mansura Center ; he spent the next two months as a tablighi, a Muslim pilgrim sojourning from mosque to mosque. In December 2001, while Kurnaz was on a bus to the airport to return to Germany, Pakistani police at a checkpoint detained him. After questioning him for a few days, they turned him over to American soldiers. Later, Kurnaz learned that after its invasion of Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks, the United States had distributed fliers there and in Pakistan promising "enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life" as a bounty for suspected terrorists. Kurnaz says "a great number of men wound up in Guantánamo as a result." One of Kurnaz's interrogators at Guantanamo confirmed that he had been "sold" for a $3,000 bounty.

Torture at Kandahar, Afghanistan

After finally being released, Kurnaz wrote a memoir of his years at Guantanamo, which was published in German in 2007 and in English the following year. The following sections contain mostly material from his account. He said that he was chained to the floor of an aircraft with other prisoners and kicked and beaten by US soldiers during a flight from Pakistan to Kandahar. Upon his arrival, although his head was covered with a sack, he could make out soldiers filming and photographing them. Later the US released such photos to the media as "evidence" of his capture in the Afghanistan war zone, although Kurnaz and all the prisoners had just been flown in from Pakistan.
US soldiers stripped Kurnaz naked, and threw him into an outdoor barbed wire pen with about twenty other prisoners. The prisoners were left exposed to freezing cold, rain and snow. The soldiers threw over the fence some MREs that had been opened and stripped of most of their contents. Kurnaz estimated they received less than 600 calories per day; human beings need more than 1,500 calories to survive.
During interrogations, US soldiers would ask him a question such as "where is Osama?" and punch him in the face when he said he didn't know. "Hour upon hour, they repeated the same questions accompanied by punches and kicks," Kurnaz recalled in his memoirs. The interrogators refused to believe his protestations of innocence. He saw seven soldiers using rifle butts to beat another prisoner to death. The abuse of Kurnaz escalated to include electric shock prods applied to the soles of his feet, until the pain caused him to pass out. His head was repeatedly pushed into a bucket of water until he blacked out from lack of oxygen.
He was taken to a building where he was attached to a pulley from the ceiling, suspended by handcuffs on his wrists and hoisted off his feet, left there to dangle hour after hour. Each time he was let down, a uniformed officer with a patch on his chest that said "doctor" examined him and took his pulse, said "okay," and the soldiers hoisted him back up again. They also hung him up backwards, with his hands bound behind his back. Kurnaz is not sure how long he was suspended by his arms, but other prisoners informed him it was five days. Later he learned that this hanging treatment had killed prisoners at the Bagram base; he believes a prisoner in the room next to his died from being hung up by his arms.
Soldiers with uniforms showing the German flag, who identified themselves as German KSK, special forces, came to interrogate him. Kurnaz hoped they would have to make a report, which would let German authorities and eventually his family know that he was being held at Kandahar.

Torture in Guantanamo, Cuba

Early one morning Kurnaz was given new orange overalls, and his head was bound in a gas mask, his ears covered with soundproof headphones, and his eyes with thick black diving goggles. His hands were put in mittens. Blindfolded and so tightly handcuffed that circulation was cut off, he was punched in the face, kicked in the genitals, and left on the ground. Some hours later Kurnaz and others were chained together and herded onto a plane. During the long flight, the prisoners were not allowed to sleep: "the soldiers kept hitting us to keep us awake." The feel of bright sun and extreme heat indicated to him that he had arrived in a different country.
On the bus ride from the plane to the prison cages, soldiers continued to beat the prisoners and allowed dogs to bite them. Kurnaz was taken to a tent, where his fingerprints and DNA swabs were taken, and afterward he was put in a cage made of chain link fence. Such small metal cages were to be his home for the next five years, most spent in a cage with three and a half by three and a half feet of free space.
Kurnaz learned that the difference between Kandahar and Guantanamo was a system deliberately designed to inflict "maximum pressure around the clock," to humiliate and brutalize, but to keep prisoners alive to extract information. According to his account, six prisoners were killed: three suffocated on one night and three more were apparently poisoned with drugged food.
At Guantanamo, Kurnaz was beaten and sprayed with pepper spray and tear gas repeatedly for such supposed infractions as lying down or standing at the wrong time, touching a fence, talking or staying silent, looking at a guard or failing to look at a guard. He was also beaten during interrogations. A series of interrogators always asked the same questions, did not appear to believe his answers, and when he passed out from exhaustion, they hit him in the face and head as "they couldn't think of any better way to keep me awake." Beatings and leaving him shackled in contorted positions for days were the most common forms of abuse.
During "Operation Sandman", soldiers woke Kurnaz every one or two hours to change cages, forced him to stand or kneel 24 hours a day, and deprived him of sleep for three weeks. Toward the end, he was semi-conscious and not able to walk, and they had to drag him from cage to cage. Kurnaz was also put in solitary confinement in a windowless refrigerator and subjected to hypothermia. He was caged in a container in the Cuban sun baking in extreme heat, and in a small airtight box so that over hours and days he suffocated slowly. He was starved or force-fed; subjected to sexual humiliation; and beaten constantly.
Detainees were terrorized by the treatment of fellow detainees. A military doctor amputated both legs of a Saudi detainee named Abdul Rahman because of frostbite. Kurnaz watched from the neighboring cage as soldiers beat the legless man's fingers off the chain link fence when he tried to pull himself up to sit on his toilet-bucket. Dragged out for interrogations with his stumps dangling, he would return with his face bloodied from beatings. Another had frostbite on one finger and a military surgeon amputated all his fingers, leaving only his thumbs. A third complained of a toothache and the dentist pulled his healthy teeth. Wounds and fractured limbs, including fingers broken during interrogations, were left untreated. Kurnaz's health suffered over the years but he "tried to avoid being taken to the doctor at all costs. I wanted to keep my teeth, fingers, and legs."
American and German intelligence agencies had concluded that Kurnaz was innocent of any involvement in terrorism by early 2002. He was held at Guantanamo under these conditions and brutalized for five more years, until 2007.

Military tribunal declares him enemy combatant

After two and a half years at Guantánamo, in 2004, Kurnaz was brought before a military tribunal. The Combatant Status Review Tribunals began after the US Supreme Court decision in Rasul v. Bush that detainees had a right to due process and habeas corpus to challenge the grounds of their detention. A Summary of Evidence memo was prepared for each detainee listing the allegations that supported detention as an "enemy combatant". Tribunal rules forbade Kurnaz from seeing or challenging his file.
The evidence against Kurnaz included his association with an alleged suicide bomber named Selcuk, who in Pakistan had traveled to the airport on the same bus with Kurnaz. In fact Selcuk had never been arrested nor involved in any bombing; he is married and lives in Germany with his family. The other evidence was that Kurnaz had accepted food and hospitality from mosques in Pakistan, and some mosques may have been associated with a suspect Islamic missionary group called Jama'at al Tablighi. Based on this evidence the tribunal ruled Kurnaz a dangerous "enemy combatant," a member of Al Q'aeda.

Representation by American lawyer

In October 2004, after two years of abuse and weeks after the tribunal had classified him as an "enemy combatant", a civilian American lawyer, Professor Baher Azmy from the Center for Constitutional Rights, succeeded in getting an interview with Kurnaz. Professor Azmy brought a handwritten letter from Kurnaz's mother, proof that his family knew of his situation and was working for his release. His mother's German lawyer had heard that the US Center for Constitutional Rights represented Guantánamo detainees; they contacted the CCR, who assigned Azmy to the case. Azmy also showed Kurnaz newspaper and magazine clippings about his case. Kurnaz was one of the first three Guantanamo prisoners allowed to see an attorney.
Kurnaz shared with other prisoners the news he had learned from Azmy: a US war in Iraq; a new government in Afghanistan; and a US judge had ruled the Guantanamo military tribunals to be unconstitutional. As a punishment for speaking to the lawyer and telling others what he had learned, guards shut up Kurnaz for a month in the asphyxiating oven called Block India, "the harshest punishment there was." They accused him of "talking to the others about Jihad." But it was worth it, Kurnaz said, because "We were connected to the world again! We knew what was happening outside Guantanamo!"