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Yahoo!For the last two years, my mother has flown to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, every few months to meet with her pro bono client, a 32-year-old Algerian man named Abdul Aziz Naji. When she explains to friends and acquaintances how Aziz ended up in Guantánamo, where he has been held for nearly six years without charge, the responses often contain a note of suspicion. “What did he do again?” people will ask. Or, “How do you know he’s innocent?”
Most Americans, even those opposed to Bush administration policies, can’t help but guard themselves against the reality of Guantánamo. It is unthinkable that our government — the government of the country we love for its political, intellectual, and personal freedom — is rounding up Muslim men whose most suspicious behavior is their commitment to the Qur’an, holding them in torturous conditions, allowing them virtually no contact with the outside world, and inventing charges to justify their detentions that, in the words of one dissident military lawyer, “lack even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence.”
Perhaps the only way to grasp the severity of the human rights abuses the U.S. is committing at this moment is to connect with the detainees’ stories on a personal level. So I am deeply grateful to Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen who grew up in Germany and was released from Guantánamo in August 2006. His memoir, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo, was published in English this month and may well represent our best hope yet of preserving the truth about this depraved chapter in American history. Kurnaz’s harrowing story is consistent with those of countless other detainees who have spoken out after their release or through their American lawyers.
John Moore/Getty Images
In October 2001, Kurnaz traveled to Pakistan to study Islam. Disillusioned with the debauchery of his social life in Bremen, he had recently married a devout Muslim and had decided to learn more about his faith. “Islam, as far as I knew,” he writes, “forbids everything bad in our lives: drugs and alcohol, lying, stealing, and unfaithfulness.” The apolitical thinking that characterizes Kurnaz’s memoir — and helps demonstrate the absurdly wide net the U.S. casts in its search for terrorism suspects — is evident in his explanation for traveling to Pakistan just a month after 9/11: “I didn’t think there would be a war with Afghanistan. … They only wanted to capture Osama bin Laden and his cronies. … What did Pakistan have to do with Afghanistan?”
Unfortunately, Kurnaz did not know about the flyers, scattered throughout Pakistan and Afghanistan by order of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, promising bounty hunters “wealth and power beyond your dreams … for helping the anti-Taliban force catch Al Qaeda and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life.”
Near the end of his stay in Pakistan, Kurnaz was pulled off a bus at a security checkpoint — most likely because his lighter skin set him apart — and turned over to American forces by Pakistani police. Kurnaz writes that a Pakistani general looked him in the eye just before handing him into American custody and said, “Forgive me.” Kurnaz was held in Kandahar, Afghanistan, for two months before being transported to Guantánamo.
Kurnaz describes the varied tortures to which he was subjected for the next five years with such a level-headed lack of self-pity that they come across as neither bitter rallying cry nor unbearable litany of torment. Reading Five Years of My Life, I realized the situation at Guantánamo is both better and worse than I had feared — worse because the torture is so severe, so constant, so senseless, and so institutionalized, and better because someone who was subjected to it has survived with his soul intact.
In his gentle, understated way — a demeanor that was also apparent in Kurnaz’s recent appearance on 60 Minutes — Kurnaz describes the reality behind the euphemisms used to describe the “enhanced interrogation practices” the Bush administration has openly authorized in the “war on terror.” This, for instance, is an example of a “stress position”: “When they hung me up backward, it felt as though my shoulders were going to break. … I could remember seeing something like that in a movie once — only in the film, it was Americans being strung up by Vietnamese … until they died.” Number 53, as Kurnaz was called by the guards, was left hanging like this for five days. Every few hours, he was taken down so his interrogator could ask for a confession and a doctor could check his vital signs to make sure he could survive another round.
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered flyers distributed in Pakistan that promised bounty hunters “wealth and power beyond your dreams … for helping the anti-Taliban force catch Al Qaeda and Taliban murderers.” In 2001, Murat Kurnaz was at the end of his stay in Pakistan, where he was studying Islam, when he was pulled off a bus at a security checkpoint and subsequently turned over to American forces.
Doctors’ complicity in the torture of Guantánamo detainees makes sense, considering how deeply integral abusive interrogation is to the “war on terror.” The now infamous Bybee Memo, written primarily by then-Justice Department attorney John Yoo, redefined torture in 2002 as that which results in “serious physical injury, such as organ failure or death.” By this definition, the doctor who checked Kurnaz’s vital signs was protecting him from torture. By the same token, the Instant Reaction Force, comprising soldiers in full riot gear who frequently beat Kurnaz using billy clubs and pepper spray, was not guilty of torture.
Recently, another 81-page memo written by Yoo was released, thanks to Freedom of Information Act legislation brought by the ACLU. Most chillingly, the memo includes a convoluted legal rationale outlining how Americans who commit torture can escape future litigation, in part by arguing that the president’s wartime powers trump United States and international law.
Although it is clear that the abuse of prisoners in the “war on terror” was planned and ordered from the highest levels, the question remains: How do ordinary people, regardless of nationality, bring themselves to treat their fellow human beings the way Kurnaz was treated? This question is raised throughout Five Years of My Life. Kurnaz writes, for instance, of watching guards beat up an old man, while his son, shackled in a nearby cage, was forced to watch helplessly. “Who can stand to watch his own father being beaten up?” Kurnaz wonders. “How can people be so awful, so repulsive?”
It is not disparaging our troops to ask this, perhaps the most important question about the Guantánamo tragedy. Rather, it is a matter of empathy for the torturers as well as the tortured. Describing a three-week period of near total sleep deprivation, Kurnaz writes that the guards had to hit him constantly and carry him from cage to cage to keep him awake. “Over time,” he writes, “it was as if they were the ones getting punished.” The young men and women who have been ordered to serve at Guantánamo have been placed in a situation that calls to mind the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, which showed that within just a few days of simulated prison life, the participants who had been randomly assigned the role of “guard” became so sadistic that the experiment had to be cut short. It is far past time that the U.S. government’s own experiment in sadism be cut short, not least because of the irreparable psychological damage it causes enlisted men and women.
Throughout Kurnaz’s numerous torments, he never lost faith that his innocence would be proven. The more his interrogators knew about him, the more hopeful he became, believing that if the U.S. was conducting an investigation into his past, it would soon be clear he had committed no crime. In fact, as early as September 2002, American and German intelligence agencies concluded that Kurnaz had no terrorist ties, but he was held at Guantánamo for another three-and-a-half years, presumably to avoid bad press. Only after sympathetic German Chancellor Angela Merkel took office and personally intervened on his behalf was Kurnaz freed.
The only legal proceedings Kurnaz was permitted during his detention were Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs), which the Pentagon unveiled in 2004 as its response to the Supreme Court’s demand for fair trials for the detainees. During these proceedings — which do not grant detainees the right to legal counsel or access to evidence used against them — Kurnaz was told he was being held in connection with a suicide bombing committed by his friend Selcuk. Kurnaz was shocked by this awful news. “My whole world suddenly didn’t make any sense,” he writes. “But these people didn’t lie. It was a court after all.” But when Kurnaz first met with the American attorney who ultimately proved instrumental in securing his freedom, he learned that Selcuk was alive and well in Germany; the charge was completely invented.
The Bush administration now hopes to rely on similarly structured “trials” by military commission to cover up the utter lawlessness of the Guantánamo experiment. Like the CSRTs, the military commissions permit evidence obtained through torture and hearsay. But unlike the CSRTs, which simply determine if detainees should continue to be imprisoned, the military commissions are empowered to hand out convictions and sentences. In preparation for these proceedings, the administration has constructed a tent city at Guantánamo called “Camp Justice” — and has paved the legal groundwork to allow executions there.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court, in a case called Boumediene v. Bush, is considering whether to allow detainees to file writs of habeas corpus — that is, to challenge their detentions in a court of law. This Constitutional right, which dates back to the Magna Carta of 1215, was overturned when Congress passed the Military Commissions Act in September 2006. Although a favorable ruling in Boumediene would be a step in the right direction, the Bush administration has managed to circumvent two previous Supreme Court rulings in favor of detainees’ rights — first by passing the Detainee Treatment Act, which strips detainees of access to U.S. courts, and then by pushing through the even more stringent Military Commissions Act. Real change in the handling of terrorism suspects is unlikely without a Congressional uprising against indefinite detention and torture.
Surely some of the nearly 800 men held at Guantánamo since 2002 have terrorist ties, but unless we prosecute them in a court of law, how can we ever know which ones? As my mother says when people ask her how she knows that her client is innocent, “Innocent of what?” Although he has never been charged with a crime and my mother’s investigations have turned up no history of criminal activity, Aziz remains in solitary confinement, praying for his release.
As for Kurnaz, he is now a free man living in his childhood home in Germany, but his life is far from restored. His wife divorced him while he was imprisoned, and he is haunted by memories. “I never forget that people are being abused in Cuba,” he writes. Nor should we: My and your tax dollars paid the bounty that cost Kurnaz five years of his life. The least we can do is read his book and discuss it. If we don’t now speak out against the horrors being committed in our name, we will perhaps never recover our reputation as a humane people committed to the rule of law.
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Contact your representatives and urge them to reinstate habeas corpus. Visit to add your support to the call for an independent investigation into the Bush administration’s violation of numerous anti-torture laws.
Hannah Tennant-Moore is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and former associate editor of The Santa Barbara Independent.
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