| Funding the War |
| STRATCOM |
| Iraq |
| Palestine |
| Guantanamo |
| Nonviolent Philosophy |
|
Dovetail newsletter |
| About |
|
|
| Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo by Murat Kurnaz (Part 2) |
|
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 with its 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 Continued from Part 1 He didn't ask me any questions. Instead, he just talked. He had shared a house with other American students, and they had regularly smoked hashish. A woman from the authorities regularly came to their house with a dog trained to sniff out drugs. But they knew when she was coming so they would break the hashish into little pieces and spread it all over the carpet with a toothbrush. The dog went crazy because he smelled the scent of hashish everywhere, and the woman was happy because she seemed to have discovered the drugs. But she couldn't find them, and every time she left disappointed. Article continues Why was he telling me this silly story? He was excitable. A lot of the time, he was laughing. There was a file with some papers and a pen on his desk. He told me some more stories, which bored me. He was talking as if I were hardly even there. I think all he wanted was to hear himself speaking German. Or was he trying to win me over? Whatever, I thought. At least, I was sitting in a chair and no one was beating me. Suddenly he asked: "Do you know what we have in store for you?" I smiled and held the smile long enough so he was sure to see it. "Yes," I said. His expression changed. He had probably been expecting a different reaction. He continued to smoke. I had hoped I would finally be allowed to explain. But I soon realized that this man wasn't at all interested in whether or not I was innocent. "Tell me your life story," he said. I started telling him about my apprenticeship as a shipbuilder. "No, start with your childhood," he said. "Tell me about your childhood." I told him about going to school in Hemelingen, but he kept interrupting me, he wanted to know names. The names of the friends I had mentioned. He wanted to know if I had any girlfriends - their names interested him, too. He wanted to know when and where I had spent my time and which discotheques I had worked for. Names, names, names. He said it was obvious that as a terrorist I had only tried to hide in the discos, that I was using them for cover. "I know you terrorists," he said. Why should I have tried to hide in a disco? "You didn't use to wear a beard," he said. "A disguise. You only used your girlfriends." He was always interrupting me. Did he really think I was a major terrorist? "I know all your stories. You might as well start with the truth." He kept smoking. I told him about my interest in kung-fu. "Typical for terrorists," he said. "You've all had training in martial arts. Of course, you have. But you're probably the only one who admits it." He wanted to know which fitness and karate studios I'd worked out in. He said he himself went to a fitness studio. "Mohammed Atta had a fitness studio in Germany, but behind the scenes he planned his attacks. Just like you." "I only worked out in my studio in Bremen, nothing else," I said. "I don't know what Mohammed Atta did. I only know him from television." He wrote down everything I said. I noticed that he used a different pen than the one he had put on the table at the beginning of the interrogation, which he had handled so strangely. It dawned on me that there had to be a hidden camera in that pen. He had placed it on the desk with the cover pointing directly at me so that the camera could film me head on. He never used it for writing, and he handled it so carefully that I knew it had to contain a miniature camera. That much I knew about electronics. The interrogation lasted for several hours. I told him everything up to the day of my arrest in Peshawar. A few times he stood up and left the room briefly. Perhaps he went to get a bite to eat or something to drink. He packed up his files and carefully put the camera-pen into his breast pocket. "That's enough for today," he said. "I know you're lying. From the beginning to the end. That's only going to make your situation worse. Bad luck, boy. You shouldn't lie." "I'm not lying. Why should I be lying?" "We know exactly who you are. But we wanted to hear it from you in your own words. You blew your chance!" Then he left, and the escort team brought me back to my cage. They searched me for weapons and then left me alone. In the meantime, my sneaking suspicion had become a certainty. The Uzbek had indeed meant twenty days and not twenty minutes. The cages weren't temporary pens. They were the prison, wherever it was we were. There wasn't going to be anything else. These cages were my future. I realized that now. But for how long? Chayr Insha Allah. With Allah's will, good things should happen. But how could any good things happen here? The guards came and said: "Get ready for a shower!" I remembered those words from Kandahar. I stripped down to the boxer shorts they had given us, put the towel, soap, and flip-flops under my arm and waited. They came back with the IRF team and a German shepherd. What had I done wrong now? I only learned later that some prisoners were always accompanied by the IRF team when they were taken to showers or interrogations. They were the ones who were especially strong or had trained in martial arts. Others were just escorted by normal guards. "Turn around and get on your knees! Hands on your head!" I turned around, knelt, and put my hands on my head. They entered the cage and put me in handcuffs and foot shackles. Then we walked through the chain-link fences until we got to the showers. They were ordinary cages like the ones in which we were imprisoned, but they were divided in two and there was a hose hanging from the fence. A guard outside the cage turned on the water. They put me in the cage and took off the handcuffs. A thin stream of water came out of the hose. I stepped under it, and as I took the soap and lathered myself up, a quick countdown began. Three-two-one-over. There was no more water. My body was still covered in soap suds, but the soldier operating the tap said: "Your time is up." That was what they called taking a shower. On the way back to my cage, one of the soldiers asked me if I worked out and, if so, in what form. "Hey, you got big arms," he said. "What do you do?" I said nothing. When I arrived back at my cage, I could hardly believe my eyes. There was a new prisoner in Charlie-Charlie 1, which had previously been unoccupied. He was young, around my age, maybe nineteen or twenty. He lay on the ground, making soft noises. He wasn't crying. Instead I thought I could make out something of a melody, a sad song in Arabic. He didn't have any legs. His wounds were still fresh. I sat in my cage, hardly daring to look, but every once in a while I had to glance in his direction. The stumps of his legs were full of pus. The bandages wrapped around them had turned red and yellow. Everything was bloody and moist. He had frostbite marks on his hands. He seemed hardly able to move his fingers. I watched as he tried to get up. He crawled over to the bucket in his cage and tried to sit on it. He had to go to the toilet. He tried to raise himself up with his hands on the chain-link fence, but he didn't make it. He couldn't hold on with his swollen fingers. Still he tried, until a guard came and hit his hands with his billy-club. The young man fell to the ground. Every time he tried to hoist himself onto the bucket, the guards came and hit him on the hands. No one was allowed to touch the fence - that was an iron law. But a young man with no legs? They told him he wasn't allowed to stand up. But how could he have done that without any legs? He wasn't even allowed to lean on the fence or to crawl onto the bucket. Over the next few days, I talked to him a bit. I could hardly understand him. His name was Abdul Rahman, and he came from Saudi Arabia. I think he said he had been at Bagram, where he had been exposed to extreme cold, just as we had at Kandahar. That's why he had frostbite in his fingers and legs. American doctors had amputated his legs at a military field hospital. I felt incredibly sorry for Abdul. He must have been in unbelievable pain, and he looked half-starved to death. Nonetheless, they just threw him in a cage and left him lying there instead of treating his injuries. How was he supposed to survive? What kind of doctors were they? And the guards that hit his hands.. what kind of people were they? The bandages wrapped around Abdul's stumps were never changed. When he took them off himself, they were full of blood and pus. He showed the bandage to the guards and pointed to his open wounds. The guards ignored him. Later I saw how he tried to wash the bandages in his bucket of drinking water. But he could hardly move his hands, so he wasn't able to. And even if he had, where would he have hung them up to dry? He wasn't allowed to touch the fence. He wrapped his stumps back up in the dirty bandages. When the guards came to take him to be interrogated, they ordered him to sit with his back to the door and put his hands on his head. When they opened the door, they stormed in as they did with every other prisoner. They hit him on the back and pushed him on the ground. Then they handcuffed and bound him so he could no longer move. Abdul howled in pain. Why did they do this? He had no legs and only weighed around a hundred pounds. What could he do to them? Abdul was carried to interrogation. The guards put their arms under his armpits, pressing his shoulders, neck, and head down. They lifted him and carried him through the corridor, his stumps dangling in the air. Abdul cried out horribly. When he was brought back hours later, his face always looked like he had been beaten. We spent a few weeks together in Charlie-Charlie. Abdul was always friendly and pleasant, a real nice guy. It took a while for us to communicate, but in the end we managed. I learned that, like myself, he was newly married. His wedding had been a couple of months ago. I asked him if his wife knew he had lost his legs. Of course she didn't - I should have known better. No one knew anything about us. We talked about sports a lot. Abdul said he liked playing soccer. The strange thing was how calm he remained, even though he was in terrible pain. He was a person who never lost interest in others despite his own atrocious situation. When the IRF team beat him, he never cried. But when he heard or saw them beating prisoners in the other cages, he did cry. He cried in a loud voice. He still felt sympathy for others, even though he himself had been treated so inhumanely. Then he was moved, and I never saw him again. Today I know that Abdul survived his injuries. His wounds healed, and he can use his hands again. He's gained weight, and he tries to keep himself in shape. I've heard from another prisoner that he can even do push-ups. Abdul had told the other inmate to say hi to me. As of 2007, he's still being held captive at Guantanamo. Abdul wasn't the only prisoner who had parts of his body amputated. I saw other such cases in Guantanamo. I know of a prisoner who complained of a toothache. He was brought to a dentist, who pulled out his healthy teeth as well as the rotten one. I knew a man from Morocco who used to be a ship captain. He couldn't move one of his little fingers because of frostbite. The rest of his fingers were all right. They told him they would amputate the little finger. They brought him to the doctor, and when he came back, he had no fingers left. They had amputated everything but his thumbs. A lot of Afghans had been injured or maimed in the fighting. Some of them were missing an arm or a leg. I saw open wounds that weren't treated. A lot of people had been beaten so often they had broken legs, arms, and feet. The fractures, too, remained untreated. In Camp X-Ray I saw a man taken away to interrogation. When he returned, his arm was dangling as though it was only attached to the rest of his body by skin and tissue. The bone in his arm must have been completely severed, but he was simply thrown back into his cage. How was it supposed to heal? I never saw anyone in a cast. That will heal by itself, the guards always said. Shortly before my release, I met another prisoner who had had two of his fingers broken by the IRF team. The swelling got worse over the days and weeks. I saw some of the people who suffered these injuries again. Others simply disappeared. Or perhaps I didn't recognize them. In the initial days in Camp X-Ray, we all had shaved heads and faces. Later most of us had long beards and hair. There were always prisoners whose arms, legs, and fingers had healed crookedly. They couldn't use their fingers or their limbs. Some of them only had one arm. Over the years, I had a lot of toothaches and other health problems. But I tried to avoid being taken to the doctor at all costs. I wanted to keep my teeth, fingers, and legs. I saw an elderly man who was blind. He was interrogated, beaten, and tortured the same way the rest of us were. The Americans didn't distinguish among us. The man, I was told, was over ninety. He was an Afghan. His hair and his beard were as white as snow. A prisoner in a cage next to mine at Camp X-Ray told me his father was also being held at Guantanamo. He had asked the guards a number of times to be allowed to see him. They refused. It was not a unique case. There were lots of fathers and sons in Guantanamo. I knew an eighteen-year- old whose fifty-year-old father was also being kept prisoner. There were also lots of brothers. The fathers had to watch as their sons were beaten, and vice versa. Who can stand to watch his own father being beaten up? In Camp Delta, I saw the IRF team mistreat a prisoner in the cage facing mine. His son was imprisoned next to me. He was forced to watch everything. Once in Camp X-Ray, I spit at a guard who had hit the old man. They came and said, You're going to be punished! I answered, What are you going to do, lock me up? I'm already in this cage. They beat me up. I'm not proud of what I did, but with some people all you can do is spit on them. This particular guard was maybe twenty or twenty-five years old. The old man was blind. I'd never experienced anything like it. How can people be so awful, so repulsive? The first time I saw Abdul, I thanked my God that he had spared me that fate. I thanked Allah that I was doing a lot better than Abdul, although I was being tortured and kept locked up in a cage. Sometimes, when I heard the IRF team coming to Charlie-Charlie, I prayed they would come and beat me up and not Abdul. During one of my interrogations, the American who spoke German showed me some newspaper clippings. They'd been printed out from a computer, and you could see the logo of the newspaper. The New York Times, the Washington Post. There was a whole pile of them. He translated the headlines. "German Taliban Captured by Special Forces in Afghanistan Fighting." Had they written those articles themselves? They sounded genuine. My interrogator read a couple of paragraphs out loud in English, then he translated: "Units of American special forces succeeded in capturing a German Taliban during fighting in the mountains of Afghanistan. The man who was trained in marital arts put up biettr resistance ... " An American newspaper had written such lies about me? "But you know that I was captured in Pakistan," I said. "Yes, we know it," the man answered. "But the people on the outside don't know it. It's none of our business. Journalists write whatever they want." The American laughed. At night the creatures came. Perhaps they came down from the hills I could see during the day. Our cages were full of spiders, black widows, and small tarantulas. The tarantulas were black and covered in thick fur. We became good friends. The guards had no objection to us being visited by spiders. Family visits weren't allowed, but spiders were. I didn't care. Tarantulas don't kill people. If they bite you, all you get is a headache. The guards used to crush them into the gravel under their boots. There was another type of spider the guards were afraid of. They called it the "brown la cruz" or something like that. The spider was reddish-brown, very small, and, with the exception of its backside, hairless. It was supposedly far more poisonous than a tarantula. Its bite could be fatal if not treated immediately. The spiders were able to jump. I always caught them and threw them as far away as I could. I didn't kill them. They hadn't done anything to me. You shouldn't kill any animal you don't intend to eat. The same goes for plants. Snakes also came at night. They were attracted by the warmth of the gravel and concrete. Charlie-Charlie was one of the outer rows of cages so we were the nearest to the surrounding natural environment. I never got as many visitors as I did there. One time a boa constrictor came. It was very long and thin, and I thought - it still has a lot of growing to do. There were various kinds of snakes, brown ones, green, gray. But they did us no harm. I remembered the snakes in my grandfather's yard and in the hazelnut grove. I thought about the yellow one I had tried to kill with a branch and which Ibrahim had taken care of with a hazelnut twig. Now I felt sorry for it. One night, I had just fallen asleep despite the din from the loudspeakers, when I felt something crawling on my hand. It felt like someone was trying to tickle me. I thought in my half-sleep that I was at home and my mother was trying to wake me up. She often used to wake me up by tickling me. I opened my eyes and saw that there was a scorpion on my hand. A little black scorpion. I threw it to the ground and crushed it under my foot. I knew that if I did this quickly he wouldn't have time to sting my foot. Frogs often slipped through the chain-link fence. They looked nice. I don't know how they got into my cage, but suddenly they'd be sitting there. They were in search of water and would leap into the bucket. Sometimes I only saw them when I was drinking. They would be crouching at the bottom of the bucket. That always cheered me up. The animals I liked best were the iguanas. I always kept some of my slice of bread to feed them. I rolled up the bread into tiny balls and scattered it in front of them on the ground. The iguanas had various colors, green, greenish yellow, or gray. They looked like tiny dragons. Some of them were too big to slip into the cage. But they came anyway. I would flick breadcrumbs through the chain link. They got used to it. Iguanas? Where were we? Hummingbirds also visited me in my cage. I had read a lot about hummingbirds. Weren't they native to the Caribbean? Some time later I heard another prisoner say he thought we might be in Cuba. One of them said the Americans had a military base in Cuba. So I asked one of the interrogators, We're in Cuba, aren't we? Yes, he said, we're in Cuba. The cage next to me had become vacant. There was a relatively small but powerfully built man in the one behind it. At first I never saw the IRF team in that cage. Perhaps they were afraid of him. One evening I spoke to him in Turkish. He talked a lot, but I could only understand a little bit. He was Chechen but came from Dagestan. I tried to imagine what it looked like there. I think he said he was a wrestler. But it must have been some unusual form of wrestling. Using his hands, he explained that you weren't allowed to touch your opponent's legs. I liked the man. I don't want to reveal too many personal details about him. Today I know that he's back in prison. After being released from Guantanamo and sent home, the Russians arrested him at the airport. They trumped up some accusation against him and threw him in jail. I've been told he was sentenced to fourteen years. He is named after an Arab prophet. It's a common name. I'll call him Isa - the Arab name for the prophet Jesus. In Christianity, Jesus is the messiah. In Islam, he's a major prophet, whose return we are still awaiting. I hope that the Chechen will return some day, too, after he's been freed. Isa was a funny guy. He was always smiling and making faces, although that was forbidden. He didn't give a damn about the guards or the IRF team. He stood up and exercised when he felt like it. He was unbelievably strong. He could do standing backflips. Once he showed me just how powerful he was. "Psst," I heard him whisper. Isa was sitting Indian-style and motioned for me to edge over toward him. "Psst ... " "Evet?" I asked in Turkish. Yes? Isa grinned. "Ha?" Isa raised his arms and bent his upper body over sideways toward the cage door. He grabbed a vertical iron bar. I could hardly believe my eyes. Bracing himself on one elbow, his legs walked through the air in slow motion, as if suspended by an invisible rope. Then he straightened both of his arms so that his entire body was suspended off the ground horizontally. I wouldn't have thought that was possible. I'd never witnessed such strength and body control. Isa held this position for a couple of seconds, then carried out the same slow-motion movements in reverse, until he was once again sitting Indian-style on the ground. I was thrilled. "Eh?" said Isa, grinning with joy like a child. He slapped his thighs. I applauded, as though I'd just witnessed a magic trick. The IRF team came and beat him up terribly. Shortly thereafter they sprayed my cage with pepper spray, the door opened, and it was my turn. I rolled up into a ball as best I could on the ground. At least, I thought, the beating was worth it. Another time Isa gave me a present. It was after dark and the guards were doing their rounds, so no one was talking. "Psst," I heard Isa whispering again. I looked over. He wasn't asleep yet. "Hediye," he whispered. That's Turkish for gift. In his hand I saw a ball of rolled up paper. I was curious. Was there something to eat inside? "What's in it?" I asked. "Hediye," he said. He waited until the guards had passed by his cage. He flicked the paper through the empty cage toward me. It bounced off the fence and landed on the ground, but I succeeded in getting it through the chain link. I opened it and was startled to see to a giant, disgusting, exotic-looking worm. It was neon green, yellow and red, with legs like a millipede and pincers like a scorpion. The worm looked really dangerous. Its colors were like a pretty piece of graffiti art. It quickly crawled from the paper and onto my hand. I let it drop. It writhed on the ground, and I grabbed a flipflop and tried to crush it. Isa laughed himself sick. He was lying on his back holding his stomach in his hands. Then the IRF team came. Isa was full of such stunts. When the guards yelled at him, when they threatened and tried to scare him, he would roll up on the ground and laugh. That got the guards really mad. But Isa would just point at them and laugh. As if to say, "Look at how their faces get red when they're yelling." At Camp X-Ray, there were also female guards - just as there had been in Afghanistan, serving in many capacities except on the IRF teams. There were whites, blacks, and Latinas. The guards were frequently rotated, but I soon came to know most of them. I often saw Cecil Stewart, but he never talked to me. I had the feeling some of the guards would have liked to talk with some of the prisoners. "Sorry," those guards would say. "I can't talk to you. They're watching me." They were under surveillance. It was an iron law that guards weren't to talk to the prisoners. They weren't allowed to treat us like human beings. I learned the names of two other guards. I will call him Johnson. His specialty was kicking on the cage doors while we prayed. He did this over a course of months. He was known for it. Once I called him by his name. "Mr. Johnson, please TP." That made him mad. Instead of giving me some toilet paper, he sent in the IRF team. The guards patrolled around the clock in twelve-hour shifts. Their boots were always crunching somewhere on the gravel. The only time you didn't hear the sound was at night - because of the loud music. In Charlie, they patrolled the corridors between the cages in pairs, while the others sat somewhere and drank coffee. The sharpshooters watched us from the guard towers. There were signs in Arabic, English, and Persian on the chain-link fence. "Escape is pointless. Sniper surveillance round the clock." But there was no way we could get out of the cages. The fence was made of thick chain link, with the links welded together. One evening, however, I witnessed a scene that made me think. It was already dark by the time our guard shoved our paper plates through the opening in the cage doors. Cold gruel and a slice of bread. His mind must have been elsewhere because he also shoved a plate into the empty cage between me and Isa. Maybe he thought its occupant was away being interrogated. Isa ate his food. Then he turned in my direction. I saw him tear the fence in a certain spot. He bent the wire and loosened, bit by bit, the solder. It sounded like a seam of thread popping. The hole was maybe ten or fifteen inches in diameter so that his arm and half his shoulder fit through the opening. Isa grabbed the plate of gruel from the neighboring cage. He replaced it with his empty plate and sealed up the hole in the chain link so that no one would notice a thing. The chain link fences were full of dents from the batons and prisoners wrestling with the IRF teams. Isa laughed and ate his second helping of gruel. Then the guards came to collect the plates. They threw them in a plastic garbage bag. I held out my plate through the opening. In the cage next door, the guard retrieved the empty plate and moved on to Isa, who also handed his plate through. Suddenly the guard stopped. He turned around and looked at the empty cage. He looked at his garbage bag, at Isa, and then at me. He scratched his head. "I saw who ate that plate of food," I said. The guard approached my cage. "Who?" "You know Lee [not his real name]?" "Yeah . . ." "Lee was here. He ate the plate of food and then left it." "I know Lee is crazy," said the guard. "But he's not that crazy." "Then you tell me who ate it," I said. He shrugged. Then he moved on to collect plates form the other prisoners. Lee was the third guard whose name I knew. He was Asian, and the other guards used to make jokes at his expense. Lee treated us just as badly as his colleagues, and so we often made fun of him, too. Isa was grinning from ear to ear. Until that point, I'd never thought about trying to escape. But after I saw how Isa had torn a hole in the chain-link fence - it got me to thinking. If he'd made it bigger, he could have slipped through. There was a possibility to escape. You had to be very strong. But if Isa could do it, couldn't I as well? Then I would have to climb over the next fence. It was maybe twelve feet high. There was barbed wire on top that you'd have to get through. But what was the story with the perimeter fence? That night I dreamt of Faruk, a friend of mine from Bremen. I dreamt of how he was consumed by the drugs he took, how he tried to prove how tough he was by beating people up. And I then I dreamt of him looking me in the eye as if to say: Help me! You're my friend! It was dark when I woke up. I heard the noises of the animals, and I thought about Faruk. I had failed him as a friend. I thought about Bremen. I asked myself how I had come to be sitting in this cage. Actually, I thought, everything started with a joke Selcuk had made about my beard. Extracted from Five Years of My Life. An Innocent Man in Guantanamo by Murat Kurnaz. Published by Palgrave Macmillan at £14.99. Murat Kurnaz will be speaking at a panel event for Amnesty International on April 28 in London and May 8 in Belfast. Please visit www.amnesty.org for further details. SOURCE: The Guardian |