Meet Murat Kurnaz, a German-born Turk who spent five years in our (I shudder at the implications of the first person) custody at Gitmo.
There's an interview with him in the German daily Die Welt that managed to make the horror of all this new again for me... and Kurnaz's situtation seems doubly significant because of the way it ties into debates about immigration.
As the son of Turkish 'guest-workers,' Kurnaz is not a German citiizen. So he ended up a stateless person twice over, with no government looking out for him and the US government... well, read over the fold to see what was done to him.
"What," asks the interviewer, "was the hardest thing for you over the past five years?"
Kurnaz: You can't say that being struck by a fist is worse than being stepped on. But there were situations in which I went through more pain than otherwise. For example, when they hung me from the ceiling with my arms in chains. The handcuffs cut off the circulation, your shoulders feel as if someone is continuously ripping at your arms. I hung there for hours, with interruptions only for visits from a doctor who took my pulse, and for questioning. Then I was hung back up. Five days long I was hung up like that.
I guess that doctor is there to represent what's left of the Geneva Conventions, if not of the hippocratic oath. Were there people who treated Kurnaz well at Guantanimo? At times, but they were replaced:
Interviewer: You describe the guards in your book as unbelievably sadistic. Can you explain to yourself today why they're like that?
Kurnaz: There were people without hearts. They beat up people older than my grandfather in the same way as the younger prisoners. They simply acted inhumanely. Above all the IRF-teams, Immediate Response-Force - these were guards who, when someone had to be punished or interrogated, would storm our cells in groups, wearing helmets, body-armor, faceguards. First they sprayed pepperspray in the cells, then they let loose with their clubs. There were a few guards who resisted, who didn't want to treat us like this. But they were replaced.
Kurnaz was imprisoned for a reason probably common to many others at Gitmo: someone else made a buck off of it. He had traveled to Pakistan to study Islam, and was arrested there (not in Afghanistan). The Pakistani police, he says, "sold me. It was just about money."
He has a book out in German ("Five Years of My Life: A Report from Guantanamo") - should be interesting to see if an English-language publisher picks it up. This at any rate is what ordinary Germans are reading about America. I haven't seen this in any of the major papers here.
I'm not sure this diary has a strong point... perhaps just to repeat a single person's account of a place that we see if at all in scarce pictures of an anonymous orange-suited 'they' (and a just as anonymous set of American personnel). Certainly this makes Edwards' declaration of today that he'll close Gitmo if elected seem more pressing, if that's possible. Let's hope every other candidate with a conscience makes the same promise. This must end.