The other day German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble told the Rheinsiche Post that the United States should shut down the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He said that he could not discern any compelling reason for the US to maintain the prison, and its existence is damaging the image and influence of the US. I’m sure that Donald Rumsfeld – a dedicated reader of the Rheinische Post – was upset at this criticism (Rumsfeld’s boss- GW Bush never reads a newspaper) At the same time, Schäuble continued to defend the participation of German intelligence officers in the interrogation of detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere.
We know that the young Turkish-German detainee Murat Kurnaz was interrogated at least twice by German officials. His German lawyer, Berhard Docke, is convinced that these officials shared detailed information about Kurnaz and his circle of acquaintances in Bremen with the US military. Yesterday the UPI correspondent Stefan Nicola put out the best report so far in English about Murat Kurnaz. Read Lost in Guantánamo in its entirety:
On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. … On another occasion, the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night."
Welcome to the hell of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish national born and raised in the northern German city of Bremen, has been locked away without charges for the last four years.
The above account from an unnamed FBI official is included in a Jan. 31, 2005, verdict by Federal District Court Judge Joyce Hens Green, who concluded that the detention of Kurnaz — classified an "enemy combatant" by a U.S. military tribunal — was simply wrong. Green argued Kurnaz’s imprisonment at Guantánamo was based on flimsy evidence and an unfair trial. The U.S. government appealed Green’s decision.
The only good news is that the CIA affair has brought this case out into the open. Docke intends to make a big international push to free his client in early 2006.
