Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo

by Murat Kurnaz

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0230603742
• ISBN13: 9780230603745
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
• Length: 255 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Read it and Weep!

I consider myself well-read but had no idea of the scale of abuse at Guantanamo until I read this excellent but harrowing account by former detainee Murat Kurnaz. Kurnaz manages to maintain a sense of humor despite five years without a decent night's sleep, regular beatings, casual racism and indifferent interrogators. A copy should be sent to Cheney home, for he was the prime motivation behind this grotesque gulag.

American disgrace

In this book, translated from German, Murat Kurnaz, a German Turk, tells his tragic story. When only nineteen and an apprentice shipbuilder, while taking time off in Pakistan for religious study, he was hauled off a bus and imprisoned for a short time before being `sold' to the US Administration for $3,000. This was a bargain - the Americans were offering $5,000 - $25,000 to locals for anyone suspected of being Taliban or Al Qaeda. With such tempting offerings, many innocent men - usually foreigners - were gladly exchanged for the money which converted into huge amounts in the local currency. Murat was sent first to a prison camp in Kandahar, Afghanistan and then later to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In both places he was repeatedly and relentlessly tortured. Among other things he was constantly beaten, often for no reason, he was water boarded, he was electrically shocked on the soles of his feet, he was hung from the ceiling by his arms tied behind him for hours on end, he was deprived of sleep for weeks at a time, he was forced to stand for days, he was starved, he was force fed, he was put in an air-tight metal container and subjected to extreme heat and cold and of course there were the months of solitary confinement. In Guantanamo he came across prisoners as young as 14 and a few even in their 80s and 90s. Like all the books on Guantanamo, there is almost a shock a page. Besides the main tortures listed above, what I found almost as deplorable was how vindictive, sadistic and cruel the soldiers were to the detainees in little ways, all the time and always there were endless lies. Also appalling were Murat's descriptions of female soldiers in one of the camps, watching while naked male prisoners defecated in a communal bucket in the open pen. And in Guantanamo, scantily dressed young women rubbed themselves against him and made sexual suggestions. One wonders if their male superiors ordered them to do this or if they thought up these little torments themselves. But it should also be said that a few guards treated the detainees with basic decency. At the end of the book we learn that the Administration knew 6 months into Murat's capture that he was innocent, but kept him on, continued the torture and even made wild accusations against him - presumably to save face. After 5 years when he was finally to be sent back to Germany, on the way out they made a last ditch effort to make him sign a statement saying he was either Taliban or Al Qaeda or he must stay in Cuba. He refused. How do we know all this is true? Having read so many similar accounts from so many prisoners of many different nationalities and languages, from different cell blocks, who could not have collaborated, I am convinced that what is described is essentially what happened. The Epilogue, written by his American attorney, Baher Azmy, a law professor in New Jersey, is excellent. Murat was robbed of part of his youth with no explanation or apology so it is hardly surprising

Amazing first hand account

The book will shock the hell out of you. This is not some second-hand account, but day-by-day details from an actual victim. No longer can we excuse those like Andrew Sullivan who were cheerleaders for the Iraq War and enamored of Rumsfeld. This book is a devastating blow to those writers like Sullivan who called the war detractors "elite, fifth-column" traitors. My God what a horrible precedent we've set by this authorized torture.

A powerfully told tale that will keep you reading to the end

I shared the experience of another reviewer of this book. I was so insensed by what I was reading, I read late into the night until I couldn't remain awake (3 a.m.) and then got up the next morning and read thoughout the morning and afternoon again to finish this story. There are lots of reasons to read this book: To learn the truth and be enraged at the audacity of powerful people out of control. To not quite believe what you've heard and want to hear for yourself what someone experienced firsthand. To be a non-believer and to see what falsehoods are being spread against our democracy. But beware -- once you read this, you will be insensed at what is happening in our name and to our name, and the only way it will keep happening is if we simply refuse to listen when someone tells us about it. This tale is powerfully told. It will surely keep you reading to the end, too.

Inside Gitmo

It's rare (at my age, anyway!) for a book to keep me up all night. But Murat Kurnaz's memoir of his five years in the Guantanamo prison camp did just that. I spent most of the night hours reading it, alternately grateful that we finally have an insider's view of Gitmo and horrified at Kurnaz's descriptions of what he and the other prisoners endured. The rest of the night I spent pacing, too agitated by what I'd read to sleep. If even a small part of what Kurnaz says is true--and we have independent evidence that suggests his tale is accurate--the treatment of prisoners at Gitmo is indecent and, by any reasonable person's standard, illegal. Kurnaz, a German-born (in 1982) Turk, traveled to Pakistan in late 2001 to study at a madrassa. Shortly thereafter, through a combination of false evidence, police corruption, alleged guilt by association, and bureaucratic incompetence, he was arrested and handed over to American military authorities. After a three-month imprisonment in Afghanistan, he was transferred to Gitmo, where he would stay until his exoneration and release in August 2006. (This despite the fact that the U.S. authorities quickly realized, as Kurnaz's lawyer, Baher Azmy, compellingly argues in the book's epilogue, that Kurnaz was innocent.) Kurnaz's first three months in Gitmo were spent in Camp X-Ray, so called because the prisoners where in open air cages where everything was "completely transparent" to the scrutiny of the guards. The cages were 15 square feet (smaller than German requirements for caging animals), open to the weather as well as spiders, snakes, and scorpions. prisoners were irregularly fed, denied medical treatment, and given bad water to drink. They were also forbidden to stand, lie down during the day, or touch the sides of the cages. Breaking any rule brought swift retribution from the IRF, Immediate Reaction Force, whose members would quickly pepper-spray the offending prisoner and then beat him senseless. But spraying and beating could also come out of the blue. The point, Kurnaz quickly concluded, was to break prisoners and humiliate them--but also, at least in some cases, to provide guards an opportunity to vent (p. 147). Transferred from open cages to cages within buildings--a new prison called Camp Delta--Kurnaz underwent regular and harsh interrogation, endured often uneatable food, participated in a couple of hunger strikes when the Koran was trampled by American guards, and suffered under a new policy of "maximum discomfort" initiated by a change of camp commanders. The new CO, General Geoffrey Miller, began Operation Sandman, intended to deprive prisoners of sleep by subjecting them to continuous cell rotations and loud heavy metal music. Rebelling against the physical abuse and the psych-ops mistreatments, Kurnaz was repeatedly thrown into solitary confinement--basically a "ship container with a door" whose temperature could be manipulated to be either frigid or suffocatingly hot (p. 161)