Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo | 
 enlarge | Author: Murat Kurnaz
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 31457
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 0230603742
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.931092
EAN: 9780230603745
ASIN: 0230603742
Publication Date: April 1, 2008
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Product Description
In October 2001, nineteen-year-old Murat Kurnaz traveled to Pakistan to visit a madrassa. During a security check a few weeks after his arrival, he was arrested without explanation and for a bounty of $3,000, the Pakistani police sold him to U.S. forces. He was first taken to Kandahar, Afghanistan, where he was severely mistreated, and then two months later he was flown to Guantanamo as Prisoner #61. For more than 1,600 days, he was tortured and lived through hell. He was kept in a cage and endured daily interrogations, solitary confinement, and sleep deprivation. Finally, in August 2006, Kurnaz was released, with acknowledgment of his innocence. Told with lucidity, accuracy, and wisdom, Kurnaz's story is both sobering and poignant--an important testimony about our turbulent times when innocent people get caught in the crossfire of the war on terrorism.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 A must read! June 26, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
The book highlights some of the darkest sides of the Bush administation's "War On Terror". Murat Kurnaz tells a breathtaking and horrifying story about the unlawful detention that took away his youth.
He was exposed to some of the most humiliating, inhumane and painful treatments possible. He was hung up on a hook in the ceiling for five days, electified, nearly drowned, subjected to mock execution, put in solitary confinement for extreme stretches in unbearable heat or cold, put in a room with no air supply among many, many other things.
This book is a wake-up call to the cruel world we live in, and is a MUST READ for anyone interested in what REALLY happens outside their backyard.
Must read May 19, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
A first hand testimony of how things can go so wrong when we forget to treat people as human beings
 An unnecessary Martyr May 12, 2008
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
In this rather harrowing story, Murat Kurnaz's a Turkish immigrant living with his family in Germany, recounts the events that landed him in a series of U.S. sanctioned Post-911 prisons: establishments we have since learned are to be referred to as part of U.S. "renditions:" that is prisons operating with U.S. consent but outside normal U.S. legal jurisdiction. What we have since learned is that they are strung across the globe from Afghanistan to Cuba.
In graphic details, the author gives an almost blow-by-blow account of the almost uncivilized treatment he received in each prison. Although he never actually uses that term torture, the reader can draw his own conclusions about what to call it.
No matter what one calls it, if even a small part of his story is true, there is nothing revealed here that in any way could make the U.S. proud of its actions. Although in defense of those actions, it is not just a minor detail that Murat and his brother were arrested a few months after the 911 attack on America, when both were enroute to Afghanistan. And when detained they gave contradictory reasons for their travels.
According to Murat the purpose of the trip was to attend a Madrassa better to get in touch with their Muslim religions roots. However, this is not the story told by his brother, who was stopped at the German border by immigration authorities. According to his brother, they were headed to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban. In fact, it is this his brother's version (told to the German authorities unbeknownst to Murat), that eventually got Murat into hot water once he arrived at the Pakistani-Afghan border. The brother's version took on added significance when it was also learned by German authorities (through subsequent interviews with his family) that both had left Germany in secrecy and without giving warning even to their families. On the surface, even Murat's telling of this story looks suspiciously like preparatory terrorists activity. It didn't help matters either that Pakistan authorities were being paid a bounty of $3,000 for turning in suspected terrorists.
If indeed the author and his brother were headed to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban, as the latter claimed, then they surely could not have been expecting any sympathy from the U.S. government. And indeed, had he been properly charged and brought before a normal U.S. bar of justice, there would be no story to tell here. I frankly would have had no sympathy for their plight either, because under this more normal set of circumstances, evidence could have been brought forth, including the testimony of his brother, and the family. And as is customary in such cases, their respective fates would have been left to the mercy of the U.S. courts, either military or civilian. Based just on the facts told here, the chances would have been about 50-50 that they could have been convicted on charges of conspiring to give support to sworn U.S. enemies.
But that is not the story told here. Instead of being given at least the minimum of due process guaranteed under the Geneva Convention, of being formally charged under U.S. law, transported and held over for trial, and then given proper legal representation, instead Murat was unconscionably held incommunicado and against every percept of American law, tortured for more than five years.
Even if no lawsuits ensue, just as was the case with Abu Ghraib, irreparable damage has been done to the U.S. international reputation. Leaving all of the torture aside, which is difficult to do given how blatant it was, the sheer insanity of our leaders to engage in such unconscionable practices even in the aftermath of 911, simply staggers the imagination. Are we a Banana Republic or what?
Three stars.
 A Big Black Eye for America April 28, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Assuming everything Murat writes about in this book is true, and for now I'm assuming that it is because I have no reason to believe otherwise, it is the most revealing and disturbing account of how we, America, captured many of the prisoners at Guantanamo and treated them while they were under our control. As an American, and former marine, I am saddened, horrified, and ashamed that we would torture anyone. And make it a policy - then deny it!?!? It was clearly a decision and an order from our nation's leadership to manage the situation in a manner that I could only compare to the way in which Hitler ordered the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. I can't get out of my mind the terrible conditions that we forced these men to endure -- the ones who have survived. This book has ignited in me a desire to learn more about what is happening in Guantanamo and to do whatever I can to stop our government from torturing human beings.
How can we just sit back while our country's leadership illegally tortures and kills people in the name of our security?
RICK "SHAQ" GOLDSTEIN SAYS: "AN APPALLING CONFINEMENT... BUT WITNESSES NAMES NEED TO BE REVEALED." April 22, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
On October 3, 2001 (Shortly after the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11) the author, 19-year-old Murat Kurnaz flew from Germany to Pakistan to fulfill his personal goal of becoming more educated in his Muslim religion. On December 1, 2001 on the way to the airport in Peshawar, "Kurnaz is stopped at a police checkpoint and is detained for several days in Pakistani jails before being handed over to the U.S. military", which starts an arduous, dehumanizing, bleak, chain of events that leads the author to jails, prisons and detainment locations in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkey and Cuba. Though the treatment dealt out upon the author is described in minute detail, and is obviously below any acceptable level of human decency, he never assigns any names to these evil henchmen. On a couple of occasions he says he knows their name but won't use it i.e."The man told me to call him Jack (not his real name). My question is: "Why won't he use the real names if their deeds were so hideous? The author is safely out of prison, and in fact he makes the statement on page 236: "I believe I've remained the same person I always was, WITH THE SAME NAME, LIVING IN THE SAME HOUSE." How can America and the world try to right these wrongs so that the atrocities described in this book don't happen again, if this author doesn't give us names?
Throughout the telling of this story the reader is aghast at the two main events that transpire. The first is why this seemingly innocent young man out of all the people in the world is plucked up by an unjust government to be dropped into the hellish prison environment this book describes. By the end of the book if you put the pieces together there is a plausible explanation, that in my opinion isn't acknowledged with as much fervor as the dehumanizing treatment is. First of all Kurnaz left Germany (where he was born, but was a Turkish citizen, which complicated things later on.) without telling his family. When his mother reported to the police that her son was missing. She also stated her son had changed recently, growing a beard and becoming more religious. Kurnaz's friend Selcuk who was accompanying Kurnaz on the trip to Pakistan, was stopped by security at the Frankfurt airport because he had an outstanding warrant. Kurnaz went ahead to Pakistan with the understanding that Selcuk would straighten things out and meet him in Pakistan the next day. Little did he know, nor does the reader know, until much later that Selcuk's brother told the border police that the two men intended to go to Afghanistan and fight with the Taliban.
The daily, weekly, monthly, YEARLY, physical and mental abuse meted out is barbaric, and if it's all true, should be abolished by the United States. But how can we know for sure, if the main witness, the author, now safe in his home won't give any names? The author, on one hand being capable of over 200 pages of intricate detail regarding the tortuous mistreatment, either won't name names, or as the following quote from the book states; that he "forgot" to ask perhaps the only American portrayed in this entire book as having any human compassion at all, for his name!
"He was working in my block on his last day. He came to me and said: "Murat, I've only got two hours to go." He was very excited. Then he came back and said: "Only one hour to go." When his time was almost up, he reappeared, parked himself in front of the door of my cage and looked at his watch. There were a few guards standing a bit off to the side. He called them over. "Hey come and watch what I'm doing!" the guards came closer. He looked at his watch and started to count. "Five, four, three, two..." When he counted to zero, he took off his armband. To the outrage of the other guards, he motioned as if he was about to wipe his butt with it. Then he threw the armband on the floor and stamped on it. "I'm not an MP anymore!" he trampled on it in the way the guards had trampled on the Koran." "You see that? That's it!" I don't know whether he was punished for his actions. That evening he came back to my cage. I was sitting on the floor and he squatted down in front of my door. "I'm sorry. I really hoped you would get out. I wanted to say goodbye." He had tears in his eyes. "I'll try to help you when I get back to the States." He pushed his fingers through the wire mesh. We said goodbye. I thanked him for his friendship and the many extra helpings that he gave me. UNFORTUNATELY, I NEVER ASKED HIM HIS NAME."
What would the Nuremberg Trial have accomplished without names? How would we have arrested Nazi war criminals even sixty years later without names? I agree with the author's lawyer who says: "We need to vindicate a principle: that there should be no prison beyond the law." Kurnaz, we need names.
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