Exclusive: Inside Gitmo with Detainee 061
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ON DECEMBER 1, 2001, Kurnaz boarded a bus to the airport in Peshawar, a smoggy city on the country's northwest border, where he says he planned to catch a plane back to Germany. Along the way, the vehicle was stopped at a routine checkpoint. One of the officers manning it knocked on the window and asked Kurnaz something in Urdu, then ordered him to step off the bus.
Kurnaz expected to show his passport and answer a few questions before being sent on his way. Instead, he was thrown in jail. A few days later, Pakistani police turned him over to U.S. forces, who transported him to Kandahar Air Base, a military installation in the southern reaches of Afghanistan. The Taliban had recently been driven from the region, and the base, built on the rubble of a bombed-out airport, was little more than a cluster of bullet-pocked hangars and decrepit runways. Despite the subzero temperatures, prisoners were kept in large outdoor pens, and a number of them later claimed they were subjected to harsh interrogation tactics. Kurnaz says he was routinely beaten, chained up for days in painful positions, and given electric shocks on the soles of his feet. He also says he was subjected to a crude form of waterboarding, which involved having his head plunged into a water-filled plastic bucket. (The Pentagon, contacted more than a dozen times by email and telephone, would not comment on Kurnaz's treatment or any other aspect of his case.)
One morning about two months after his arrival in Afghanistan, the detainee was roused before dawn and issued an orange jumpsuit. Then guards shackled and blindfolded him and covered his ears with soundproof earphones before herding him onto a military transport plane.
When the plane touched down more than 20 hours later, Kurnaz was led into a tent where soldiers plucked hairs from his arms, swabbed the inside of his mouth, and gave him a green plastic bracelet with number that would come to define him: 061. Finally, he was led to a crude cell block with concrete floors, a corrugated metal roof, and chain-link walls, which looked out on a sandy desert landscape. Inside his cell, he found a blanket and a thin green mat, a pair of flip-flops, and two translucent buckets, one to be used as a toilet and the other as a sink. He had no idea where he was.
Kurnaz later learned that he landed at Camp X-Ray, a temporary holding pen used to house Guantanamo detainees during the four months when the main prison camp was being built. Even before construction was done, Pentagon officials began to suspect that Kurnaz didn't belong there. On February 24, 2002, just three weeks after his arrival, a senior military interrogator issued a memo saying, "This source may actually have no al-Qaida or Taliban association."
IN LATE SEPTEMBER 2002, the three German agents arrived at Guantanamo to interrogate detainee 061. During the trip, they were assigned a CIA liaison, identified only as Steve H., who briefed them on their mission and kept tabs on the interrogations.
Much of the questioning the first day focused on why Kurnaz would choose to travel to Pakistan when war was brewing in the region. The detainee explained that a group of Muslim missionaries had visited his mosque and told him about a school in Lahore where he could study the Koran. But when he arrived there, he found people were suspicious of him because of his light skin and the fact that he spoke no Arabic. Taking him for a foreign journalist, the school turned him away. So he wandered around, staying in mosques and guesthouses, until he was detained near Peshawar (something he also attributed to his light skin and the fact that he spoke German but carried a Turkish passport).
The German agents came away with mixed opinions, according to testimony they later gave before a closed session of German Parliament. (Many other details of their trip were also revealed through that hearing, transcripts of which were obtained by Mother Jones.) The leader of the delegation, who worked for the foreign intelligence service, the BND, saw Kurnaz as a harmless and somewhat naive young man who simply picked a bad time to travel. One of his colleagues, a domestic intelligence specialist, argued it was possible that Kurnaz was on the path to radicalization. But everyone agreed it was highly improbable that he had links to terrorist networks or was involved in any kind of terrorist plot, and none of the agents voiced any objections to letting him go.
Given this fact, Steve H. proposed releasing Kurnaz and using him as a spy, part of a joint operation to infiltrate the Islamist scene in Germany. The German agents apparently took this suggestion to heart, because on day two of their visit, they arrived at the interrogation trailer bearing a chocolate bar and a motorcycle magazine, and asked the detainee point-blank whether he would consider working as an informant. He agreed. (Kurnaz later claimed that he had no intention of actually spying—that, in fact, he would "rather starve to death"—but thought feigning interest might hasten his release.)
That evening, the agents were invited to dinner with the deputy commander of the prison camp. The leader of the delegation later testified that he discussed Kurnaz's case with him, and according to an investigation by the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, after the meal, the American official sent a coded message to the Pentagon. A few days later, on September 30, the release form for Kurnaz was printed out. The cover memo, obtained by Mother Jones, notes that Pentagon investigators had found "no definite link/evidence of detainee having an association with al-Qaida or making any specific threat toward the U.S." and that "the Germans confirmed that this detainee has no connection to an al-Qaida cell in Germany."
AROUND THE SAME TIME, in October 2002, German police suspended their investigation into Kurnaz and his fellow suspects. No evidence of criminal wrongdoing ever surfaced. "We tapped telephones, we searched apartments, we questioned a large number of witnesses," Uwe Picard, the Bremen attorney general who led the probe, told me when we spoke in his office, an attic warren stacked waist-deep in files. "We didn't find anything of substance."
But police did turn up some troubling bits of hearsay. One of the students at a shipbuilding school Kurnaz attended told investigators that Kurnaz had "Taliban" written on the screen of his cell phone. Then there were the comments of Kurnaz's mother, who, when questioned by police days after her son's disappearance, fretted that he had "bought heavy boots and two pairs of binoculars" shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Seizing on these details, the German media dubbed Kurnaz the "Bremen Taliban." This was clearly unsettling to German officials, who just one year after the 9/11 attacks were still reeling from the revelation that three hijackers lived and studied in Germany without ever catching the attention of police or intelligence agencies. Many politicians had serious qualms about letting the German Turk back into the country.
The first sign of these doubts came in the form of a classified report on the Guantanamo visit, which was issued on October 8, 2002, and circulated through the top ranks of the German government. It argues that releasing Kurnaz and using him as a spy would be "problematic," in that he had "no access to the Mujahideen milieu." It also notes, "In light of Kurnaz's possibly imminent release, we should determine whether Germany wants the Turkish citizen back and, given the expected media attention, whether Germany wants to document that everything possible was done to prevent his return."
Three weeks later, Kurnaz's case was discussed at the presidential round, a standing Tuesday meeting held at the Germany Chancellery and attended by top officials from the foreign and interior ministries as well as the German security services. The group decided to block his return, and on October 30 the interior ministry issued a secret memo with a plan for keeping him out of the country, which involved revoking his residency permit on the grounds that he had been abroad for more than six months. Germany's domestic intelligence agency later notified the CIA in writing of the government's "express wish" that Kurnaz "not return to Germany."
Photo: Henning Schacht/Action Press/ZUMA Press
will be disappeared. A plague on the jerks who participated in these acts.
No, it is not OK to torture. The threat from within is far greater than the threat from "terrorist". Our government officials are the ones we need to keep our eyes on.
Yeah, it sounds good. War on Terror!!! Just like the War on Poverty, and the War on Drugs.
These wars are really profitable for some people.
I think we should have a war on people who care more about NASCAR than they do about liberty. Wake up people before it is too late.
Thank you Mother Jones. You have been fighting for a long time and I appreciate it.
How do we know Okame isn't an enemy combatant? How can he prove he isn't?
So you'd have us believe, would you, that being held for four years, for friggin NOTHING you ever did, isn't torture? Kept in solitary, paraded in leg- and handcuffs, by three MP's, down to the hearing room every couple of weeks, for another tribunal "review," that never can quite see that you don't belong there?
That isn't torture?
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kill your Faux "noose" channel.
Who gives a shiite what other citizens think of America!
Really, WHO GIVES A SHIITE? F.U.C.K. 'EM Ustah! Most of them are gonna hate us anyway, and if they're Islamic, they want to slit our throats regardless of what we do to appease them. Wise up, dumbazz.
And Katie is right - you people are a bunch of pansies! I think part of the problem is arm-chair-quarterbacking. You bunch of pissing, whining pansies have never been out in the rest of the world to see first hand what it's really like. Instead you rely on crap that is regurgitated here, or at the Daily Kos, or by Pig Woman Rosie O for your "knowledge". Get off the fuc-kin' computer, get a passport/join the Peace Corps/join the military and go out to see some of the shiiteholes of the world and what the US is doing to better their situations, instead of bashing your own fuc-kin' country first and foremost.
What a bunch of elite, socialistic losers.
Nice speech. Well written, calm, and insightful to the liberal mind. I take it you're on the squad of left wing arm-chair-quarterbacks who would rather sit back in the cushy confines of the safe, prosperous society that this nation provides, and berate that very nation rather than support or defend it against its enemies. Sure, you'll attend some bullshiite demonstration or rally and feel you're doing your part, but really. It's all just take, take, take for you folks. How do you live with yourselves?
I don't know if Mother Jones is a news web site as you state, or a commentary web site, since the "news" as they report it is obviously slanted, which is not a hallmark of news journalism. But I digress.
I do enjoy (to an extent) occasionally reading the whining and ranting of liberals - it lets me stay abreast of the mindset of those who wish to tear down our own country rather than defend it. I don't think I'll ever understand or agree with your positions, but it's an interesting read. (By the way, many of our Islamic enemies are now here within our own borders, many living as legal residents with millions of dollars coming in from the Saudis to support them, their schools, and mosques here in the US. That's not paranoia or Kool-Aid talking, just facts uncovered during a little research into Islam, the religion/way-of-life that commands its followers to slit the throat of Kefirs, Infidels, Unbelievers... Americans. But I suppose you don't have a problem with that... I'm sure you think that's America's fault too. Again I digress - that's another topic and argument for another day).
I have to wonder ma, since you don't watch TV, how do you know that, quote: "there is too much propaganda and garbage in it, like the constant lies and propaganda on the Fox News network, where most RW Bush worshipers get their misinformation, fear and hate... Bill Ocrazy should be charged with inciting hate crimes, he has incited many unbalanced angry racists to attack muslims and immigrants..." You get all that information without even watching the show? Interesting. Are you a sheep that just follows along with what others write about Fox/O'Reilly on the left wing hate sites? Being a Huffington Post adict doesn't seem like a good way to become informed and enlightened ma - you should know better. Personally, I can't stand most of the anchors on MSNBC anymore, so obviously twisted and slanted are their views and reporting. But, I watch them occasionally to get "the other perspective". (And having done so, I am amazed they can get away with such unabashed hate speech and outright slanted "journalism" and favoritism. But hey, they're on cable and they have the First Amendment, so I won't begrudge them their right. I just feel sorry for the saps who only watch that drivel and believe it is the true news.
When you say, "In war the old mentally balanced US always officially, followed the Geneva Convention, which sets humane reasonable rules for the treatment of prisoners of war...This was set up, so our own soldiers who were prisoners had a chance to survive the prison camps. In the middle east, no American soldier will have a chance if captured by enemies..They do have a chance of being tortured to death by very revengeful and angry radical terrorist types.." You sort of answer your own statement. Countries abide by Geneva Convention rules regarding POWs in hopes that enemies will treat captured soldiers in a likewise humane fashion. Obviously the North Vietnamese blew that theory out the window, with their incredible physical torture of our GIs. And the terrorists who capture our troops today would rather videotape their torture and decapitation than abide by any silly rules of war. Besides, no terrorist organization has ratified or signed the Geneva Convention rules, so in theory, we don't have to comply when we capture their fighters. However, the US Supreme Court did rule that we will provide at least the minimum of POW human rights to them, so we do. Do you know that there are Governors in the US who have visited Guantanamo Bay and commented afterward that the terrorists/enemy combatants being held there have it better than American citizen prisoners in many of our stateside prisons? Interesting eh? I wouldn't feel too sorry for captured terrorists, especially in light of the fact that they want to kill you personally, ma.
I love this... "the division between radical fascist, greedy, war monging right wingers and normal educated people who can think for themselves,is huge..." So in your eyes, left wing liberals are normal and educated, and can think for themselves, while the rest of us are knuckle-draggers bent on war, destruction and harboring our millions in blood money. Again, interesting insight into the liberal mind. Did you know that there are more "rich" Democrats in the US than rich Republicans? Not a big deal, but a fact that might not mesh with your ideas on greed.
"Bush and Gang deliberately misled, and lied about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so he could attack the country and occupy Iraq for profit, oil, and power..." Your inanity keeps me chuckling ma! So you mean to tell me that the FBI, CIA, British Intel, and Saddam's own Generals all were convinced that Saddam had WMDs, but it's Bush's fault and Bush misled the world? Don't you remember Saddam using nerve gas to kill Iraqi Kurds? And the UN passed 17 resolutions against Iraq/Saddam, pressuring him to come clean and let the inspectors do their job, but all were rejected. We went through 12 years of rejected diplomacy and resolutions before we took action, all the while Iraqi men, women and children were being tortured, raped, and killed by this madman while he maintained the means to transfer these WMDs to terrorists for use against the US. So, how much longer would you have waited to take action? (silly question, you're an arm-chair-quarterback who doesn't take action!) Tell me ma, how much profit, oil, and power are we getting out of this? Do you have an Iraqi oil pipeline coming through your neighborhood? Where was it ever in the plans to get any of the above? Or are you being a hate-site sheep again?
Just a couple final thoughts to try to correct your regurgitated liberal babble. (you really need to gather your own identity and integrity, and stop being such a tool for the left wing haters ma)
More Iraqis have been killed by Muslims/Islamists than by Americans. Stop your unfounded berating of America's military.
You say; "we have a new angry population of terrorist, who hate the crazy murdering invaders called Americans,... Bush and gang has made all Americans targets of hate,"
Well, let's see how things stack up ma. Shall we start with one of your heroes, Jimmy Carter? The Iranian militants captured the US Embassy and 70 Americans, holding them captive for 444 days – that’s over a year for the mathematically challenged liberals out there. Carter never did get them released… it took a strong willed conservative to get the job done. Then another of your heroes, Bill no-respect-for-women Clinton had the following take place under his watch: The World Trade Center bombing in 1993 (by another raghead group led by that blind shiek); the bombing of the USS Cole that killed 17 American Sailors while it was sat peacefully in a Yemeni port; the Khobar Towers got blown up in Saudi Arabia which killed 19 American military and wounded 372; two American Embassies got blown to smithereens at the same time in Africa and killed over 200 people; and of course, all the planning and staging for 19 homocide bombers who flew fully-fueled aircraft filled with people into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon soon after Bush took the reins from Clinton. Have you already forgotten? So how are your liberal heroes doing at protecting America ma?
Also, on more than one occasion, Clinton was offered Osama bin Laden, but he turned it down! The Sudanese government was going to hand OBL over to Clinton! And now the lunatic left blames Bush for not finding OBL in the high country of Afghanistan & Pakistan?!? Give me a break!
Can you enlighten me on this statement, as I AM VERY INTERESTED IN YOUR REPLY TO THIS: “We have watched our rights being taken away from us, we are no longer safe from harm by our own government...” Tell me ma, how have YOUR rights been altered? How has YOUR life been changed by your big, scary government? Me personally, I haven’t noticed one single change – not one! My life has not been affected one iota… but then again, I’m not a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer! I don't call terrorists overseas or donate to their causes. How about you, ma? Hell, I’ve even travelled into Muslim countries since Bush has been in office (But, I still don't trust the Islamists who are driven to kill all non-Muslims).
Start thinking for yourself ma - don't be a tool of radical left.