Die Zeit has published an account written by Baher Azmy, the American lawyer for Murat Kurnaz. Kurnaz is a young Turkish-German Muslim, who has been held in captivity at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba since January 2002. Here is the entire piece in the orginal English (with thanks to Joerg):
I first saw him on a TV screen. Before my initial meeting with Murat Kurnaz eighteen months ago, the U.S. military police escorted me – the third civilian lawyer to enter the inner sanctum of Guantanamo’s Camp Echo – through several 15 foot high locked gates, and into the guard booth of the notorious military prison. On my way to the booth, walking across gravel made bright white by the blazing Caribbean sun, my status as a civilian – clean shaven, dressed in a tie and formal shoes – was punctuated by the loud sounds of practice machine gun fire in the distance.
The military showed me the surveillance they would employ during my otherwise private meeting with my client: he was on a video screen, waiting for me. The image was blurry, like the grainy picture on a store security camera, but unsettling – a man with a beard and hair befitting of a prehistoric warrior. George Bush had claimed that everyone in Guantanamo was the “worst of the worst,” so this image was not comforting to me. The military then told me Murat would be chained to the floor, so if he attacked me, I could jump away. “Why were they telling me this?” I thought. “Hopefully, just a precaution; hopefully.” The military also told me that he didn’t want the German translator I had flown down with me in our meeting. “He speaks English,” the guard said. “He does? Since when?” The guard didn’t know, and neither did his family who hadn’t been allowed to communicate with him in three years since his detention began.
I sent the translator home and prepared to meet him alone. When the door to our meeting room in Camp Echo opened, he was seated, squinting at the incoming sunlight. Dressed in a short, tan shirt and cotton pants, with a flowing beard and red-brown mane of hair, he looked like someone who had been shipwrecked on a desert island, which, in a sense, he was. He shook my hand and motioned for me to sit across from him on the flimsy plastic chair, as if he were welcoming me to tea in his home. I tried to sound confident. “Murat, my name is Baher Azmy. I am a lawyer. I do not work for the U.S government. Your family in Germany asked me to help you.” I handed him a hand-written note from his worried mother to help convince him I was on his side. The simple honesty and loving reassurance of her message still moves me: “My dear son Murat, You will be visited by an American lawyer whom you can trust. Murat, your brothers go to school and we have been for vacation in Turkey We were shopping with [your wife] and she is loving you As I watched his pained expression while reading his first message from home – his first taste of humanity in three years – I felt as though I was delivering a crumb of bread to Robinson Crusoe.
I explained that his mother and German lawyer had been fighting for years for him, that Guantanamo had become an international embarrassment and that millions of people in the U.S were opposed to it. Because he had been held incommunicado for almost three years, he had no idea anyone even knew of Guantanamo’s existence, or his existence. I also told him I was born in Egypt, a Muslim, and a law professor with great faith in the American legal system "You have sued President Bush?” he asked. “Yes, you and I have sued him. And, I will do everything I can to help you,” I answered To my relief, he said with a heavy German accent, “This is goot.”<
In his military hearing in which he was given an opportunity to speak, he said: "I hate terrorists. I am here having lost a few years of my life because of Osama bin Laden. His beliefs show Islam in the wrong way. I am not angry with Americans. Many Americans died in the September 11 terrorist attacks. I realize the Americans are right to stop terrorism. . All countries should do the same thing. … … If any Muslim talked to me about terrorism, I would tell them to their face it was wrong. I would do everything I could to stop them. I don’t have any proof to show you, but I didn’t harm or kill anyone.”
The U.S knows he has no connection to terrorism, and logged this fact no less than five times in his classified “file.” According to his file (that I saw but which was not shown to Murat) the U.S military itself concluded that “Kurnaz has no connection to al Qaeda, the Taliban or any terrorist threat,” and “the Germans have confirmed he has no connection to al Qaeda.”
Murat sits in his tiny cell with nothing to read but the Koran. This makes him a deeply religious and spiritual young man We have had many healthy, engaged discussions about Islam, none of which merged into politics. He would prefer to discuss motorcycles or animals he tended on his grandparents’ farm in Turkey. When I told him, and expressed moral outrage, that the U.S had invaded
And so does Murat. Sometimes at the end of a long day of our interviews, he made me laugh uproariously at his stories of the incompetence of Pakistani police or U.S interrogators or the 80year old Tajik detainee down the hall from him. He has a wry grin and a sarcastic wit. My friends and colleagues, who are so heartened by Murat’s dark comedy, get frustrated waiting three or four weeks for the stories and jokes from my visits with him to be declassified by the government so I can repeat them. He once tried to swat a fly with a coffee stirrer I brought him from McDonald’s and said, “Oh no, this makes me an ‘enemy combatant’”.
During the last evening of my first visit, alone in my room, I was exhausted and disoriented by this horrific place. I actually wept thinking about the brutality of leaving someone so profoundly human and young, locked in a cage for 24 hours a day as if he was an animal. I was overwhelmed by the grotesque and barbarous injustice of the lies that keep him there
Guantanamo regularly confuses and distorts. On my fourth visit, the military told me Murat “refused” to see me. I had heard of this happening with other detainees who had lost hope, and some who had rejected the Western legal system for religious reasons. But this seemed impossible for Murat. He had already told me stories from the Koran about the importance of using one’s reason and logic, suggesting that the more radical detainees who rejected their lawyers were wrong. So, I was incredibly confused and worried. Had Murat lost his mind or his hope. I returned to Guantanamo two months later and demanded that the military commander personally deliver a note from me telling Murat I was here to see him. The next day, he was brought to Camp Echo for our visit. I greeted him nervously, but he sat there happy to see me, as usual. “What happened. Why did you refuse to see me” I asked? He smiled at me, as if to suggest I should have known better than to trust the military. “They never told me I was having a lawyer visit.” This happens all the time in Guantanamo. Games, lies, incompetence that undermine the lawyer-client relationship. I was enraged at the military but ultimately relieved – Murat was the same.Hopeful, funny and kind to me
Recent reports have confirmed what Murat’s representatives have long suspected – that the Germans took advantage of Guantanamo to interrogate Murat and, even after the U.S. offered his release, the German government chose to leave him there, knowing he had done nothing wrong. History will judge the immorality of those choices appropriately, I am sure. History will also, I hope, give the credit due to the Chancellor Merkel, who has had the courage to see past the previous hypocrisy of the German government’s approach to Guantanamo and remedy a great injustice by finally negotiating for Murat’s return home, to his family. I have given Murat this hopeful news.
During many of our more difficult conversations about his family, his torture, or his current ordeal, Murat would fall deep in thought and stroke the ends of his beard, which reach across his shoulders and down to his navel. I suppose for those who don’t know him, the sight of this massive beard will be shocking. But to me, it is ennobling – it is a growth that marks the four-and-a-half years he has been imprisoned in Guantanamo, a metaphor for his faith and a defiant symbol of his dignity in this dehumanizing place.
I have warned him that Germans might be scared to see him emerge from Guantanamo with this enormous beard, looking like some kind of mullah. “I don’t careThere are good and bad people everywhere. I do this for my religion. They will understand.” Then, with a quick smile he asks, “if they are so afraid of men with beards, why don’t they call Santa Claus a terrorist?”
Last week, I visited Guantanamo for the fifth and, I hope, the last time. During our final embrace, I told Murat that I looked forward to seeing him next time in Bremen. The thought delighted him. By the time I returned home to New York, I hadn’t shaved for a week. My wife said to me, “you look good in a beard. You should let it grow longer.I think I will.
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