Disappeared: Five Years in Guantanamo-

[kpete]

Disappeared: Five Years in Guantanamo

By Lou Dubose, The Washington Spectator. Posted July 7, 2007.



In 2001, 19-year-old Murat Kurnaz was an innocent man caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Accused of being a terrorist, he spent five years in Guantanamo before being released -- now he's telling his story.

FIFTEEN AMERICAN SOLDIERS WATCHED over a man, shackled to a seat in the cargo bay of a C-17 Globemaster -- the Air Force workhorse that usually moves Abrams tanks, Chinook helicopters or infantry vehicles. Wearing goggles that shut out all light, a soundproof headset and a mask that covered his mouth so he could not speak, spit or bite, the prisoner arrived at Ramstein Air Force Base in Kaiserslautern, Germany, under the tightest security. The plane had burned through 36,000 gallons of jet fuel and had refueled in flight. During the seventeen-hour ride, the prisoner was provided with neither food nor water. Nor was he allowed to stretch his legs or relieve himself.

This was how what had been the world's greatest democracy when George W. Bush took the presidential oath in 2001 repatriated an innocent man who'd never represented a security threat to the United States. Murat Kurnaz was nineteen when he was taken off a bus in Peshawar, Pakistan. He had, as many first- or second-generation Muslims in Europe do, turned to a religion his family had abandoned when they emigrated from their native land. His religious awakening put him in proximity to Islamic fundamentalists: sufficient justification for detention by American forces, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, as a supposed member of Al Qaeda.

Kurnaz was twenty-four and had been the last European held at the American prison camp in Cuba when the Globemaster touched down in Kaiserslautern in August 2006. He didn't know he'd been returned home to Germany until an American enlisted man removed his goggles and he saw three German policemen standing outside the airplane.

MURATS STORY:
http://www.alternet.org/rights/55993/

[malaise]

1. And Murat Kurnaz is not expected to be bitter

I hope I live to see Bush and Cheney pay.

Sp.

[Frustratedlady]

2. How many died that we'll never know about?

Perhaps the courts of other countries will bring charges, as our courts won't.

I realize torture goes with the territory, but it appears that they were so hungry for terrorists to imprison, they'd pay anything for even a possibility as long as the body could be counted in their fight against terrorism.

What about those in all the secret prisons? We'll never know.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

3. Well, it's not like he had an "excessive sentence" like Scooter.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

4. K&R. Kurnaz's "legal" process was really Kafkaesque

From about the middle of http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/55993 :

"There are two Murat Kurnaz narratives. One is found in the paper trail and legal pleadings assembled by his two lawyers, Bernhard Docke in Bremen, Germany, and Baher Azmy from Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey. The other is his personal account of his five years in American custody. The legal process by which Kurnaz was freed from Guantanamo was, in a sense, irrelevant. It's not precedent-setting, because there is no effective process that provides detainees access to justice. He is one of very few whose situation was eventually considered by an American court. His case is the best example of why the military tribunals conducting trials at Guantanamo are fundamentally flawed.

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. During the trial it was also revealed that a friend of Kurnaz's who was reported to have carried out a suicide bombing in Turkey--another bit of incriminating evidence--was alive and well in

German intelligence officers traveled to Guantanamo to interview Kurnaz and concluded he had not been involved in any terrorist activity in Germany. They even tried, at one point, to recruit him to return to Bremen and work undercover for them in the mosque he attended before going to Pakistan to study Islam. They later concluded he was so unconnected--and unsophisticated--he would be of no use to them as a snitch. Yet nothing the judge did would result in his release. Judge Green ruled in his favor, devoting a number of pages in her 75-page opinion (some redacted) to the government's sloppy prosecution and lack of evidence against this man. But the heart of her ruling was that the process was basically illegal. The ruling was stayed, pending a decision at the appellate level. And after the trial, the then-Republican Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which included a controversial provision by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) that denyed all detainees the right to file habeas corpus petitions. The habeas corpus right that Judge Green had provided as an avenue out of Guantánamo was stripped away by Congress.

Kurnaz was released only because 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. The irony was evident: the Conservative chancellor who defeated Social Democrat Gerhard Schroeder, who had led a "red-green" coalition and was Europe's most strident critic of Bush's Iraq War, had delivered a German resident from Guantanamo, after Schroeder had allowed him to languish there for years. "No one gets out of Guantanamo by any legal process," Azmy said. "Because there is none."

[Toots]

5. Held for five years without being charged of any wrong doing, tortured and terrorized

How very fucking Christian of this "Christian Nation"