Murat Kurnaz

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service conducted an investigation, releasing a heavily redacted report in 2008. In 2009 the law school at Seton Hall University released a study, alleging that DOD claimed the suicides in a coverup of homicides due to torture. In a joint investigation, reported in January 2010, Harper's Magazine and NBC News also alleged that the military had committed homicides in the course of torturing detainees and tried to cover up these three deaths.

After his release, Kurnaz wrote and published his memoir Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo (2007). It was published in German, French, Norwegian, Danish, and Dutch in 2007. Excerpts were published serially by The Guardian beginning April 23, 2008, the same month that Palgrave Macmillan published an English translation of the book in the United States. A Polish translation was published in 2009. British author John le Carré described it in a blurb as "[t]he most compassionate, truthful, and dignified account of the disgrace of Guantanamo that you are ever likely to read."

Kurnaz testified via videolink in 2008 to a United States Congressional hearing on Guantanamo. On June 15, 2008, the McClatchy News Service published a series of articles based on interviews with 66 former Guantanamo captives, including Kurnaz. In the interview Kurnaz said that since his return to Germany, he has lived with his parents. He has a desk job, which he enjoys. He says he does not hold ordinary Americans responsible for the abuse he endured.

According to the BBC, Germany refused to accept him at that time, although the US offered to release him. Kurnaz was detained and abused at Guantanamo for nearly five more years. He published a memoir of his experience, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo in German in 2007; translations to other European languages and English followed. In 2008 he testified in US Congressional hearings about treatment of detainees at the camp. He and his family live in Germany.

After finally being released, Kurnaz wrote a memoir of his years at Guantanamo, which was published in German in 2007 and in English the following year. The following sections contain mostly material from his account. He said that he was chained to the floor of an aircraft with other prisoners and kicked and beaten by US soldiers during a flight to Kandahar. Upon his arrival, although his head was covered with a sack, he could make out soldiers filming and photographing them. Later the US released such photos to the media as "evidence" of his capture in the Afghanistan war zone—although Kurnaz and all the prisoners had just been flown in from Pakistan.

Kurnaz cooperated in the German government's 2007 investigation of German soldiers who had interrogated him in Kandahar. According to articles by the United Press International, Deutsche Welle and Reuters, Kurnaz identified his interrogators from photos he was shown of members of the German military's KSK unit. The German Ministry of Defense initially had denied that KSK members were in Afghanistan at that time. By May 2007, they acknowledged that the KSK had officers in Kandahar and had contact with Kurnaz. Although the investigation was dropped in 2007, the government conceded abuse may have occurred.

In 2007, a German Parliamentary inquiry undertook investigation of the extent to which German military and counter-terrorism authorities participated in the United States extraordinary rendition program.

Although the US reported numerous suicide attempts, the only deaths reported by the US military at Guantanamo during the period when Kurnaz was detained were three suicides on June 20, 2006. The prisoners were two Saudi Arabians Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser al-Zahrani, and a Yemeni citizen, Ali Abdullah Ahmed. A State Department spokesman said the prisoners were apparently not aware that one was to be transferred to Saudi Arabia, although to be held in custody there, and another was to be released to Saudi Arabia. Human rights groups and defense lawyers called for investigation.

On February 12, 2006, Deutsche Welle reported that German authorities were negotiating Kurnaz's repatriation. The German magazine Focus reported in 2006 that the Bush administration was trying to tie the release of Kurnaz to Germany's agreeing to accept four other Guantanamo detainees. The USA had cleared approximately 120 detainees for release or transfer. But many could not be returned to their countries of origin. The German and American governments denied that Kurnaz's release had been tied to Germany accepting other detainees. Focus reported that the German government had agreed to accept one other detainee, not four. It said that the US had not informed the German government of the identities of the other detainees it wanted them to accept.

Kurnaz was released on August 24, 2006. As during his arrival at Guantanamo, he was transported to his destination by plane, restrained in shackles and wearing a muzzle, opaque goggles, and sound-blocking ear-muffs, and denied food and water during the 17-hour flight.

After two and a half years at Guantánamo, in 2004, Kurnaz was brought before a military tribunal. The Combatant Status Review Tribunals began after the US Supreme Court decision in Rasul v. Bush that detainees had a right to due process and habeas corpus to challenge the grounds of their detention. A Summary of Evidence memo was prepared for each detainee listing the allegations that supported detention as an "enemy combatant". Tribunal rules forbade Kurnaz from seeing or challenging his file.

In October 2004, after two years of abuse and weeks after the tribunal had classified him as an "enemy combatant", a civilian American lawyer, Professor Baher Azmy from the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), succeeded in getting an interview with Kurnaz. Professor Azmy brought a handwritten letter from Kurnaz's mother, proof that his family knew of his situation and was working for his release. His mother's German lawyer had heard that the US Center for Constitutional Rights represented Guantánamo detainees; they contacted the CCR, who assigned Azmy to the case. Azmy also showed Kurnaz newspaper and magazine clippings about his case. Kurnaz was one of the first three Guantanamo prisoners allowed to see an attorney.

Kurnaz's lawyer challenged the legality of his detention in a Washington, D.C. federal court. A writ of habeas corpus, Murat Kurnaz v. George W. Bush, was submitted on his behalf in October 2004. His case was one of nearly 60 reviewed and coordinated by Judge Joyce Hens Green of the US Appeals Court for the District of Columbia.

In response, on 15 October 2004, the Department of Defense published 32 pages of unclassified documents related to his Combatant Status Review Tribunal. In 2005, Kurnaz's entire file was declassified, through a bureaucratic slip-up. During the brief window when it was declassified, in March 2005 the Washington Post reviewed all the evidence against him and published a summary.

American and German intelligence agencies had concluded that Kurnaz was innocent of any involvement in terrorism by early 2002. He was held at Guantanamo under these conditions and brutalized for five more years, until 2007.

The file documented that neither German nor United States Army investigators found any evidence of a tie between Kurnaz and Al-Qaeda, or involvement in any terrorist activities, and had concluded in 2002 that he should be released. But, US authorities continued to hold Kurnaz at Guantanamo, subject to continued abuse and interrogation, until the late summer of 2006.

Inmates emptied their toilet buckets over soldiers who had thrown the Koran on the dirt floor. After the arrival of General Geoffrey Miller in late 2002 (the abuse by the military was reported as considerably worsened during his command), the inmates coordinated a welcome, emptying their buckets of excrement on him as he walked past their cages. Thereafter inmates called him "Mr. Toilet." For dumping excrement on General Miller, Kurnaz reported prisoners received an extra month of solitary confinement. Later the cellblock was subject to reduced rations, which were halved for about forty days.

Murat Kurnaz was born in Bremen, Germany, and grew up there. He was considered a Turkish citizen because his parents were immigrants, but they had lived and worked in Germany for years. He was a legal German resident and married a Turkish woman in Germany. In October 2001 Kurnaz at age 19 traveled from Germany to Pakistan, hoping to study at the Mansura Center (which turned him down); he spent the next two months as a tablighi, a Muslim pilgrim sojourning from mosque to mosque. In December 2001, while Kurnaz was on a bus to the airport to return to Germany, Pakistani police at a checkpoint detained him. After questioning him for a few days, they turned him over to American soldiers. Later, Kurnaz learned that after its invasion of Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks, the United States had distributed fliers there and in Pakistan promising "enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life" as a bounty for suspected terrorists. Kurnaz says "a great number of men wound up in Guantánamo as a result." One of Kurnaz's interrogators at Guantanamo confirmed that he'd been "sold" for a $3,000 bounty.

Murat Kurnaz (born 19 March 1982) is a Turkish citizen and legal resident of Germany who was held in extrajudicial detention by the United States at its military base in Kandahar, Afghanistan and in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba beginning in December 2001. He was allegedly tortured in both places. By early 2002, intelligence officials of the United States and Germany had concluded that accusations against Kurnaz were groundless.