National Public Radio's call-in program Talk of the Nation had an interview with Murat Kurnaz about his new book Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo. Kurnaz was interviewed by telephone from a studio in Bremen, since he is not permitted to travel to the country that tortured him and held him captive for five years without charges. You can listen to the interview and read an excerpt from his book here.
Kurnaz did a reasonably good job in the interview, although at times he had difficulty with English. Most of the callers were respectful, and some even apologized for the actions of their government. But of course there were others who had a different perspective. One caller stated he "didn't believe one word" of Murat and his book. The whole story was fabricated to slam the United States and its struggle against "Islamofascism". Actually, the caller seemed to imply that Kurnaz was never really at Guantanamo at all!
You can read similar comments on the Talk of the Nation Blog. One commenter - Donna Largent - also rejects Kurnaz's story, and condemns NPR for being a mouthpiece of anti-American propaganda:
We are fighting a heinous war and the enemy is bloodthirsty and does all kinds of gross things like beheading with dull blades. Why is it that almost every time I turn my radio to your shows, you are knocking our wonderful country? If we are so bad, why don't you all at our indicting public radio organization find other places to live? I am tired of hearing you constantly slam the United States.
This is the typical response of the Authoritarian Right in the US when it is confronted with inconvenient facts: attack the patriotism of the messenger and insist that it is nothing but a conspiracy of lies.
UPDATE: In the radio interview and in his book Kurnaz mentions that he personally witnessed the deaths of detainees. For this he is accused of lying, for the US does not kill prisoners - even if they are only "enemy combatants" and not subject to the protections of the Geneva Conventions (according to the Bush administration). I would refer those doubters to this autopsy report by the Armed Forces Medical Examiner (pdf) about an "Iraqi Detainee who died while in US custody" (as written in the report itself). This detainee - as per the report - was hung by his wrists (like Kurnaz), gagged, and then brutally beaten. All of his ribs were fractured.
An unfortunate aberration by a few bad apples? There are 108 of such autopsy reports - that we know of so far...
It's no lie that our government detained a man in a foreign country, shipped him to Guantanamo and detained him for years without trial.
I have noticed an inability of late on the part of Americans to understand that we have laws and that when these are broken there should be consequences. Our present administration sets the (bad) tone.
Posted by: Hattie | April 12, 2008 at 05:24 PM
From Christian Morgenstern's poem "Die unmögliche Tatsache" (The Impossible Fact):
Und er kommt zu dem Ergebnis:
Nur ein Traum war das Erlebnis.
Weil, so schliesst er messerscharf,
nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf.
(And he comes to the conclusion:
His mishap was an illusion,
for, he reasons pointedly,
that which must not, can not be.)
Posted by: Axel | April 13, 2008 at 06:16 PM