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| Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo by Murat Kurnaz (Part 1) |
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A Turkish citizen born and raised in Germany, Murat Kurnaz was only 19 when he was arrested without explanation in Pakistan in October 2001. Handed over to the US, he spent the next 1,600 days enduring the brutal life of a prisoner at Guantanamo and various forms of torture, before being released without explanation or apology in August 2006. Here he describes the early days in his cage in Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay GUANTANAMO BAY, CAMP X-RAY "053, GET READY FOR THE ESCORT TEAM!" It was still dark. The numbers of Erhan and Serkan and of the two Uzbeks were also called. It was our turn. We were gathered at a spot in front of the open hanger, led off one by one, and brought to a tent. There they cut off our beards and shaved our heads. At least they would no longer be able to drag me around by the hair, I thought. Article continues We received new orange-colored overalls, and they chained us back up. "We're gonna put you now into the same cave with Osama bin Laden," said the soldier who had shaved my head, "and then we're gonna shoot you." They didn't put a sack over my head this time. Instead they wrapped it up like a package with soundproof headphones, a gas mask, blinders, and watertight, thick black diving goggles. The soldier tightened the handcuffs so that they immediately began to hurt. It was hardly bearable. "Too strong," I murmured underneath the mask. I was trying to tell the soldier that the handcuffs were too tight, but I didn't know the right word. "Let me see," I heard another soldier say, who must have been standing next to the first one. I held out the cuffs in his direction, but he tightened them even more around my wrists. You bastard, I thought. He put something thick and stiff over my hands - gloves or maybe mittens. Then he hit me in the face and kicked me in the genitals. I fell. They carried me out of the tent and threw me on the ground. I was told to lie there on my side. "You guys are going to get shot," the soldier said. That I understood. And as I lay there for four, five, or maybe six hours in front of the hangar, I also understood the purpose of all of the get-up. The g loves weren't meant t o warm my hands, and the headphones and mask weren't there to protect my ears and face. They were there to ensure the soldiers' safety, so we couldn't bite, scratch, or spit at them. We couldn't cough any bacteria into their faces, spread any germs, or infect them with a disease. They didn't care whether we suffocated under the masks. I knew what awaited us: a first-class flight. They chained us together and herded us onto the plane. We were bound so tightly we couldn't move a millimeter. Again, I thought that they were taking us to an American military base in Turkey. What else was I supposed to think? Sleep would have been the only consolation in such a situation. But the soldiers kept hitting us to keep us awake. I thought about the American movies I had seen in Bremen. Action flicks and war movies. I used to admire the Americans. Now I was getting to know their true nature. I say that without anger. It's simply the truth, as I saw and experienced it. I don't want to insult anyone, and I'm not talking about all Americans. But the ones I encountered are terrified of pain. They're afraid of every little scratch, bacteria, and illness. They're like little girls, I'd say. If you examine Americans closely, you realize this - no matter how big or powerful they are. But in movies, they're always the heroes. The flight must have lasted twenty-seven hours. Somewhere we made a stopover. We weren't able to move throughout the entire flight. They never loosened the restraints, not for a moment. We didn't know where we had landed or where they were taking us. We didn't even know if we were going to arrive alive. I felt the heat immediately and could hear the barking of dogs in spite of the soundproof headphones. Through the goggles, I could perceive the bright light of the sun. On the runway, the first prisoners collapsed. They took off our face masks. The sunlight was blinding. We were told to lie on the ground. I kept my eyes closed. I heard the clicking of cameras. We were being photographed. "Don't move." I carefully opened my eyes, but all I could see were boots on the glittering concrete surface. They put our masks back on - mine was a bit loose. They herded us into a bus. It was white. It was dark inside the vehicle. There were no seats in the bus, just hooks attached to the floor. They chained us to the hooks so that we could neither sit nor stand properly. They kept hitting us, and the dogs, which had been taken onto bus, bit us. "Don't sit like that!" A blow followed. "Sit differently!" Another blow. "Sit up straight!" It was unbelievably hot on the bus. We must be in a country with warm winters, I thought. Southern Turkey? It was February or March. Maybe somewhere near the city of Adana. Adana could have been this hot. It was definitely above ninety degrees. I felt the bus drive across a bridge or an on-ramp. Then we stopped. The bus began to sway. We must be on a ship, I thought. They were kicking us constantly, and the ship listed to one side. Is there an American military base on an island off the coast of Adana, I asked myself. Or are they taking us to Cyprus? Then we rolled back down the ramp and left the ship. At some point - we couldn't have driven more than a half-hour - the bus stopped. "Get out! Out!" We had to kneel and lower our heads to our chests. There was a crunching sound. From under my mask, I could see gravel. I don't know how long exactly we knelt there. Several hours. The heat was unbearable. In Afghanistan and on the plane, it had been ice-cold. The soldiers were constantly yelling and hitting us. At last, I was allowed to stand up. The soldiers pushed me forward, and I stumbled barefoot across the gravel. The way was long, with lots of left and right turns. They yelled at me the whole time. "Terrorist!" "We'll kill you!" "Motherfucker!" Then a soldier yelled, "Stop!" Someone took the mask from my head. I was standing in a tent. I saw a name tag. It was the first time I saw a soldier with his name on his chest. I will never forget it. Two other soldiers held my arms tight. They took off the gloves. "I speak German," said the man with the name tag. "We're going to have a really great time together." A number of soldiers were busy doing things to me. They pulled out hairs from my arms, put a swab in my mouth, and took my fingerprints. Someone was always fiddling with me. The procedure took quite a while. I kept looking at the one soldier's chest, at his name tag. I was weighed, and they measured my height. "Name?" they asked. Murat Kurnaz. Spelling! K-U-R-N-A-Z. It was a wonder to me that I could still talk. I hadn't slept properly in weeks because of the noise from the planes, bombs, and electrical generators in Kandahar and because of the interrogations. But at least I was standing up. I was happy to be standing because we sat the whole time on the plane. I didn't know how I was able to stand. It was almost as though the name tag on the male soldier's chest was keeping me upright. I will call him Cecil Stewart. They put an armband on me. There was a new number on it: 061. It was green and made of plastic. "This is a nice place," said one of the soldiers who had taken hair and saliva samples. "Lots of trees." Trees? Were they making fun of me? He pointed outside the tent. The tent door was open. I couldn't see any trees. I saw hills. Hills and sand and cactus. Big cactus. There aren't any trees where cacti grow. "Do you know why you're here?" I heard the man with the nametag ask. "Do you know what the Germans did to the Jews?" he said. "That's exactly what we're going to do with you." Someone grabbed me by the shirt and pushed me out of the tent. Outside I saw a number of tightly packed rows of chain-link fence. It was like a labyrinth. I saw another prisoner in his orange overalls being led through the fencing. The soldiers immediately threw me to the ground. I landed on the gravel. "Lie there!" The man with the nametag pressed his knee into the back of my neck, pushing my face into the gravel, so that I could no longer see the other prisoner and the escort team. Only when they were out of sight did we move on. Where is the prison they're taking me to? I asked myself. We passed through a number of doors in the chain-link fence and arrived at a pen, also made of chain-link fence. These were cages. Prisoners in orange overalls were already sitting there, each in their own little cages. One beside the other, all in a row, like tigers or lions in a zoo. The labyrinth had to be pretty big if we were all going to fit in here. Surely these strange cages were only an intermediate station. But all I could see around me were hills and cactus. Maybe the prison was over the crest of one of the hills. The soldiers opened up a cage and pushed me inside. I was told to kneel. "You are Charlie-Charlie-3. Say it!" "Charlie-Charlie-3," I said. I had trouble understanding. Why was my cage called Charlie-Charlie-3? Then the soldier took off the chains and locked the door in the fence. "Sit down!" they ordered. I sat down. "Don't move!" they snarled. I didn't move. They yelled something else that I didn't understand, but I suspected it was about how they were going to kill me. But surely they could have done that a lot more easily earlier. The soldiers left. I thought they would come back in a few minutes and get me. I sat somewhat more comfortably Indian-style and collected myself. I rubbed my wrists and ankles, which were swollen and bloody. At least they had taken the cuffs off. That felt better, and I calmed down a bit, even though I felt a stinging sensation, as if being poked by a thousand needles. I need to distract myself so I looked around. In the cage, there were two plastic buckets, the color of eggshells and semitransparent. One contained some water that stank. Perhaps for washing, I thought. The other seemed to be the toilet. There was a thin foam mattress, less than an inch thick, on the ground and a blanket on top. Next to the blanket were a piece of soap, a towel, and a pair of flipflops. We'll be taking these new things with us, I thought. We're probably just waiting here while they prepare our cells. The prisoners in the other cages greeted me. Salam alaikum. Alaikum salam. One of the prisoners in a nearby cage looked like an Afghan Uzbek. He, too, greeted me. I asked him in Turkish how long he'd been here, but he didn't understand. I tried to communicate with my hands. You? Here? I counted on my fingers: one, two, three, four... The Uzbek answered in his native tongue and held up all his fingers twice: "Twenty." I took this to mean twenty minutes. He'd been in his cage twenty minutes longer than I had in mine. I waited. Someone would soon come and get us. Still seated, I measured my cage with my hand. I knew from my shipbuilder's apprenticeship how long the span between my thumb and little finger was when my fingers were stretched out. So I didn't need a measuring tape to figure out that the cage was six feet by seven. It was around six feet high. All told, it was less than fifteen square feet. In Germany, there's a law that kennels in the animal shelter have to be at least twenty square feet. I knew that because I myself had been a dog owner. I waited and looked around. Not far from me, a prisoner was being led through the chain-link fences. He was still wearing his mask and the soundproof headphones, and I heard the soldiers screaming at him. They kept walking back and forth along the same passageway. Now I understood how we had come here. I thought that we had walked a long distance, but the spot where we had been forced to kneel for hours before they took the mask off was only a few yards away from my cage. We had kneeled directly beside one another, but we didn't know that. They led us around in circles until we thought that we were in a large camp or a prison. But the whole time we had always been in the same place within the maze of chain-link fence pens. I thought, if it's March, my birthday is coming up. What a surprise. Suddenly I heard a quiet splashing. A frog was swimming in the bucket of water. I had only ever seen them on television - frogs don't live on the Weser River in Bremen. It must have been looking for water in this desert. Where had it come from? I fished him out of the stinking water. It sat on my hand and looked at me, breathing rapidly. I tried to pat it gently, but it hopped to the ground and disappeared through the fence. Hour upon hour I waited. No one came. No one was brought away and relocated. In the end, guards came with something to eat. On paper plates, as I saw from a distance, but it was something. Until now we had only ever gotten Emaries. I was looking forward to eating some real food. Maybe everything would get better. It couldn't be any worse than in Kandahar. That would prove to be a mistake...in every respect. As the guards approached my cage, all I saw on the plate were three spoonfuls of rice, a slice of dry bread, and a plastic spoon. That was it. They shoved the plates through a small square opening around knee-height within the fencing. I thought there must be some sort of mistake. Perhaps something had fallen off the plate. Then I saw the rations given to the Uzbek. It was the same miserably tiny pile of rice, or maybe even less. I would have rather had an Emarie. At least they contained crackers. I ate the rice and looked at my armband. The rice was cold and not fully cooked; the kernels were as hard as sand. But it was all I had to eat. My armband read: "Kunn, Murat, male, Turkish, 5-foot-4, 165 pounds." They had misspelled my name - after all the time they kept me in custody and despite having confiscated my travel papers. I drank some water from the bucket. I was exhausted. The difference in climate between here and Kandahar was enormous. Suddenly, within a matter of minutes, the sky grew dark. The sun was gone, and harsh bright lights were switched on. The light came from neon lamps affixed to the corrugated aluminum roof and a large number of spotlights that were mounted on sentry posts and the fences. It reminded me of the soccer stadium in Bremen. From loudspeakers that must have been hanging somewhere, there came some static and then a call to prayer. The time for evening prayers was a while ago, I thought, but then suddenly the voice was drowned out by loud music. It was the American national anthem. I heard the other prisoners start to complain, but that didn't help. At some point, I knelt, carried out the prayer ritual and said as well as I could in Arabic: "Praise be to Allah. Allah hears all who praise him." I bowed thirty-three times. Rock music was now blaring from the speakers, almost too loud to bear. The volume was louder than in any Bremen disco I'd ever experienced. I had a sneaking suspicion that the Uzbek hadn't been saying he'd been in his cage twenty minutes longer than me. He had meant twenty days. They weren't going to be taking us to prison today. That was all right by me. Despite the light and the noise, all I wanted to do was sleep. But I couldn't sleep. Every few minutes, guards came and pounded the fence with their nightsticks. Every few minutes someone, sometimes next to me and sometimes in front of me, killed something in his cage and threw it out - snakes, rats, and spiders. The guards' boots crunched on the gravel. And then there were the 1,000-watt spotlights. The guards returned. We all had to get up and "identify ourselves." We had to extend our hands through the opening in the cage where the food had been shoved through, so that they could read our armbands. Later they pounded on the fencing of my cage because I had my hands under the blanket. "Take your hands out!" Later still, they rattled the fencing because I was lying on my side. "Lie on your back!" At some point, I feel asleep from sheer exhaustion. Camp X-Ray had been built especially for us, and true to its name, it was supposed to be a prison camp in which everything was completely transparent. This was something entirely new. There were no cells where you could be alone. There was no privacy, no protection from the watching eyes of the guards or the cameras, not even for a second. The cages were so small that it drove you to desperation. At the same time, nature - and freedom - were so tantalizingly close it could make you go crazy. An animal has more space in its cage in a zoo and is given more to eat. I can hardly put into words what that actually means. The cellblocks all had a second roof of corrugated tin, but the cages were still somewhat in the wilderness. The sun beat down, and there was no refuge in the shade unless the sun was shining directly on the tin roof, which hung about a foot above the chain-link fence roof proper of the cages. The aluminium also heated up fast. We were just as exposed to the rain since it always was driven in from the side. You couldn't escape it no matter which corner of the cage you crept into. The camp contained six cell-blocks: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, and Foxtrot. The blocks were separated by narrow corridors through the chain-link fence pens. Every block had six wings, also named from Alpha to Foxtrot. A wing consisted of ten cages arranged at a right angle. Every cage had a name: Alpha-Bravo 1, Bravo-Charlie 5, Delta-Alpha 9. I was in Charlie-Charlie 3. There were high chain-link walls around the six blocks, interrupted by guard towers with sharpshooters. The initial days in Camp X-Ray weren't easy. I didn't know we were in Cuba. I had no idea what rules applied here. The rules were constantly changing anyway, and you'd get punished for breaking them. The first night I learned that I was only allowed to cover my legs, and nothing else, with the blanket, and that I wasn't allowed to sleep on my side, only on my back. In the days that followed, I learned that I wasn't allowed to get up and walk around my cage. During the day, we had to remain seated and at night we had to lie down. If you lay down during the day, you were punished. We weren't allowed to touch the fence or even lean our backs up against it. We weren't allowed to talk. We weren't to speak to or look at the guards. We weren't allowed to draw in the sand or whistle or sing or smile. Every time I unknowingly broke a rule or, because they had just invented a new one, did something I shouldn't have, the IRF team would come and beat me. IRF stood for "Immediate Reaction Force" and consisted of five to eight soldiers with plastic shields, breastplates, hard-plastic knee-,elbow-, and shoulder-protectors, helmets with plastic visors, gloves with hard-plastic knuckles, heavy boots, and billy clubs. I would say they were thugs. Thugs whose entire bodies were protected by bullet- and knife-proof gear. They didn't have weapons with them other than the billy clubs - probably because they were afraid of us getting our hands on them. I often saw fear in their eyes as they stood in front of our cages and waited to be deployed, even though we didn't have shoes on and were already cowering on the ground. They came with pepper spray in a kind of pressurized aerosol gun that they could aim precisely at a prisoner from ten feet away. It contained oleoresin capisicum, which is made from chili peppers. They sprayed the entire cage and waited until the prisoner was completely unable to resist. Then they stormed in. "Get up!" "Hurry!" "Get up!" I heard loud rock music, and I heard their commands. The pepper spray burned my nose, throat, and eyes. I had to cough. The burning was diabolical. "Get up!" they yelled. "Get to the wall!" "Hands to the wall!" "Move! Move!" happening to me. I heard them beating the fence with their billy clubs. When the cage door was opened, I heard them yelling. I felt a baton blow to my head. I huddled, and they beat me. They picked me up and threw me to the ground. They kicked and punched me. I curled up into a ball. Then I got angry and tried to defend myself. I jumped to my feet, blind, and started swinging my arms. I got hold of someone's helmet, but they forced me back down and grabbed me by the genitals. They held my arms and legs to the ground, until I was lying there like an animal about to be drawn and quartered. One of them pressed his shield on my chest, while another punched me in the face. At some point, I couldn't hear the music anymore. I heard nothing. I didn't get much sleep the night of my first visit from the IRF team. I lay on my back - shaken by throbbing pain and the pounding bass from the music - and tried not to move. I had learned that I was only allowed to cover my legs with the blanket and had to keep my hands in plain view on my stomach. I heard the IRF team many times that night. I prayed to Allah that they wouldn't return to my cage. The next morning, my whole body hurt. I sat up and looked around. It was still dark outside the fences, but breakfast had already arrived: a hardboiled egg without its shell, a slice of dry bread, and a few peas. I heard a couple of the prisoners calling to the guards. It was always the same word: "Tee-pee!" A short time later, the guards came and brought the prisoners a small piece of toilet paper. They shoved through the square hole in the cage. "TP!" I called. "TP?" I didn't get any toilet paper. I had learned that toilet paper was a matter left entirely up to the guard. If he felt like giving you some, you got some. If not, you had to improvise. A short time later, the escort team arrived. They bound me, and we walked through the corridors in the chain-link fencing. They pressed my head down so that I couldn't look around. At every door, the guard who did the unlocking read my armband and searched me for weapons. We left Block Charlie, went through the corridor between Charlie and Bravo, walked along Bravo and arrived in the corridor between Bravo and Alpha. All I could see was the gravel and the cages with other prisoners. Suddenly someone called out in Turkish. "Murat, Murat! It's me!" It was Nuri's voice. Nuri was a Turk I'd met in Kandahar. He sat next to me in front of the hangar while we were waiting to be loaded on to the plane. He had looked terrible. His eyes were swollen, his lips were split, his wrists and ankles bled from the cuffs, and some of his teeth had been knocked out. I had asked him what his name was and where he came from. He said he came from Izmir. That was the city where my father was born. Nuri was an electrician. He was married and had two children. We had heard the constant screaming of prisoners being tortured in the hangar. Nuri had said: "Now we're going back to where we came from." Allah, he said, had created us from earth, and the earth was where we would return. "Do you think," Nuri had asked, "that they'll just let us go after all they've done to us?" "In any case, it will be better than here," I had answered, "whether or not they kill us." Nuri had laughed. "You're right. But I'm still worried about my children." So Nuri was here. I heard him, but I wasn't able to turn my head enough to see him. I couldn't answer. "Try to get transferred to Block Alpha." How was I supposed to do that? "Ask the guards," he said. "Ask them to move you here." I heard him call the guards. They stopped and let my head go. Nuri glared at one of them and gestured for him to come closer. He pointed to an insect crawling on his arm. He pointed to the guard, as though saying: You are this insect. Then he squashed the bug with his hand. We came to an open space. There was an electric car like a golf cart. We drove in it past a row of long, low buildings, made of chipboard. They were arranged in blocks of four, raised on stilts about three feet off the ground. Soldiers and an African American woman in uniform waited in front of the building where we stopped. The soldiers frisked me, then the woman asked: "Do you have any weapons?" That was ridiculous. Where was I supposed to get any weapons? I said, " Yes, I have." "Where?" the woman asked and immediately took a step back. I bared my teeth. The woman ran away, calling out that I had tried to bite her. Other soldiers hurried up and threw me on the ground. "You want to bite the guards?" One spoke loudly and quickly. I could hardly understand a word. "No, no," I said. "No problem. I don't bite women." They pressed me to the ground and screamed at me. They were nervous. I hadn't been counting on that. I heard them call an IRF team. "He wants to bite," the officer said. The IRF team hit me a couple of times. Then they picked me up and brought me into one of the wooden buildings. There were two rooms, fifteen to twenty square feet, obviously for interrogations. The building had looked much bigger from the outside. There was a chair in the middle of the room. I was told to sit. There was a massive ring in the floor, and they attached the chains between my feet to it with a padlock. The chains around my feet were attached to another chain that ran around my stomach and was attached to my handcuffs. I couldn't stand up, raise my hands, or even move. In front of me was a table and another chair. That was all. There were two doors but no windows. All around me there was compressed wood. Even the table was made of compressed wood. I looked around the bare space. I didn't see a camera or a mirror. My interrogator would enter through the second door. Behind it there had to be another room, the camera room. But where were the cameras? A guard stood at my side. My interrogator came out of the second door. He was in his mid-forties. "This is a great opportunity," he said in German. "I'm looking forward to speaking German with you. I don't want to forget it." He spoke with an accent, but his German was fluent. I was surprised. At least I would have the chance to explain myself in German and prove my innocence. But before I could say a word, he told me that he went to university for a few years in Germany. I think he said in Frankfurt. I waited for him to finish. He lit a cigarette. SOURCE: The Guardian part 2 |