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German-Born Turk Released From Guantanamo Calls Camp 'Place Without Laws'
By MELISSA EDDY
Associated Press
October 4, 2006
BERLIN (AP) - A German-born Turk released from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay described it as a "place without laws" where prisoners were beaten, humiliated and banished to isolation for feeding lizards.
In a lengthy interview published Thursday in the Stern weekly -- his first since his Aug. 24 release -- Murat Kurnaz recounted his odyssey from Pakistan, where he said he went in October 2001 to study at a Koranic school, to his arrest and eventual deportation in January 2002 to the U.S. military base on the southeastern tip of Cuba.
There, he said, prisoners were subject to punishments that ranged from minimum 10-day terms in isolation cells to beatings and kicking by teams of eight guards. He also described an instance of sexual harassment, for which he said authorities later tried to make amends.
All along, Kurnaz said he protested his innocence.
"Once I was in isolation for three months and five days, because my interrogators were not happy with my testimony," said the 24-year-old Kurnaz, now back in his hometown of Bremen. "Often there were punishments for no noticeable reason. Guantanamo is a place without laws -- that's what it was created for."
Other times, he and other prisoners were sent into isolation for 10 days for feeding the geckos and iguanas that inevitably showed up at dinner time.
Once, he said, he was accused of failing to return his plastic spoon after a meal and, although he offered his hands to be bound and invited guards to search his cell, eight guards instead stormed in after dousing it with pepper spray.
"They wait five to 10 minutes, until you can't see anymore, then they come in, jump you, throw you to the ground, punch and kick you, your feet bound, your hands tied behind your back," Kurnaz said. "And then you get 30 days in isolation."
He said that in isolation prisoners were subjected to extreme cold or heat. Asked what he thought about while in isolation, Kurnaz said, "One thinks a lot about life, about things that one previously had but never paid attention to. Socks, for example. Warm socks and how wonderful they are in the cold."
He also described a series of sleep deprivation tactics, from being kept under fluorescent lights for 24 hours, to being moved from cell to cell about every seven hours, just when guards said it was apparent one was falling asleep.
During one interrogation, Kurnaz said, two scantily clad women were present and tried to make sexual advances at him from behind, which he responded to by snapping back his head and succeeding in striking the woman in the nose. Although he was sent into isolation and denied food, a high-ranking guard later told him the interrogators "shouldn't have done that," he said.
Kurnaz said he was at school in Germany in 2001 when the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington D.C. took place. Nevertheless, he said, he decided to travel to Pakistan the following month to study Islam.
But the school he wanted to attend there refused to take him, so he said he instead traveled around the country, before deciding to return to Germany.
As he was en route to the airport, Kurnaz said he was pulled from a bus, arrested and eventually handed over to U.S. forces.
Kurnaz said he was first held at an open-air camp near Kandahar, Afghanistan, where he and other prisoners were left sitting in the cold with almost no clothing.
It was there the first interrogations began, he said, adding that his interrogators said they suspected he was a friend of Mohamed Atta.
"They said, 'You are from al-Qaida,' and when I said 'no' they punched me in the face around my head and kicked me in the back," Kurnaz said.
At that time, he said, two Germans came to interrogate him and slammed his head into the ground. Germany's Defense Ministry said Wednesday it had no information about the interrogation or the alleged abuse, but said the matter would be investigated.
It was not until earlier this year, two years after an attorney took up his case, that Kurnaz said he was moved to a part of the camp where conditions were better, then brought before what he called a group of high-ranking military officers who insisted he sign papers saying he would not cooperate with the Taliban or al-Qaida again.
Kurnaz said he refused to sign, although they threatened he would be kept five more years.
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