Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo [Paperback]

Murat Kurnaz (Author), Patti Smith (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 4, 2009

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The most compassionate, truthful and dignified account of the disgrace of Guantanamo that you are ever likely to read." --John le Carré

 

"I thank God that  Murat kept his sanity in the hell of injustice and torture of nearly 5 years in Guantanamo so he could tell his story. May it be studied in every school and college in Europe and the USA. May it help to close down all the illegal and secret prisons and camps, as well as Guantanamo, and restore the prisoners to their families. I am sure Murat's book will educate a whole generation about justice and the defense of human rights." -- Vanessa Redgrave

 

"Like many of the men imprisoned in Guantánamo, Murat Kurnaz was held for years without proper charge or trial. After intensive campaigning by his friends, family and Amnesty International members all over the world, he was finally released. This book is a profound and detailed account of his experiences. After suffering torture and detention without trial, it is testament to great strength of character that he is able to tell his story with such power and clarity." -- Kate Allen, Director, Amnesty International UK

"Murat makes the horrors and inanities of Guantánamo so real; his voice is by turns young and headstrong, wry and wise. Murat's mother came to the Unites States to hear our first Guantánamo case argued before the Supreme Court back in 2004 - when I met her, I didn't know whether she would ever see her son again.  Now he is home safe and has produced this riveting and moving account of his torture and abuse at the hands of the U.S. government to shine a light in a dark place and try to help all those still languishing without hope.  This is a must read." -- Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights and attorney representing the Guantánamo detainees.

"Kurnaz recounts his woes, and those of his fellow prisoners, with modesty and compassion. . . . He has written a measured and readable account, which is often even humorous in a Swiftian sort of way." -- The Economist

"A vital document that should - rightly - shock and appall." -- Kirkus Reviews

"A plainspoken account, Five Years of My Life focuses on the daily humiliations and surreal texture of life at Guantanamo" - Mother Jones

"May well represent our best hope yet of preserving the truth about this depraved chapter in American history...Kurnaz describes the varied tortures to which he was subjected for the next five years with such a level-headed lack of self-pity that they come across as neither bitter rallying cry nor unbearable litany of torment. In his gentle, understated way, Kurnaz describes the reality behind the euphemisms used to describe the 'enhanced interrogation practices' the Bush administration has openly authorized in the 'war on terror'." --  The Santa Barbara Independant

"This is a book politicians should read, and should inspire anguished soul-searching among the rest of us." -- The Washington Post

“Kurnaz…avoids sensationalism for a harrowing record of barbarities carried out in the name of democracy…[written] in stark, unadorned prose, with no scores to settle, knowing that his account is beyond most people’s imagination.” -- The Guardian (UK)

 

"Kurnaz reveals Guantanamo shorn of media spin." -- The Guardian (UK)

 

"[Kurnaz] is the same age as my son, Jackson. When I read the story, I realised how I would feel as a mother if my son had been taken away at the age of 20, put into chains, without any hope of leaving, without any direct charge."--Patti Smith

About the Author

Murat Kurnaz is a Turkish citizen and legal resident of Germany, where he was born in 1982. He was in the process of becoming a German citizen when he was arrested in Pakistan and held prisoner for five years. He now lives in Germany. This is his first book.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; Reprint edition (August 4, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0230614418
• ISBN-13: 978-0230614413
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #437,910 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Inside Gitmo, April 1, 2008

By 

Kerry Walters (Lewisburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo (Hardcover)

It's rare (at my age, anyway!) for a book to keep me up all night. But Murat Kurnaz's memoir of his five years in the Guantanamo prison camp did just that. I spent most of the night hours reading it, alternately grateful that we finally have an insider's view of Gitmo and horrified at Kurnaz's descriptions of what he and the other prisoners endured. The rest of the night I spent pacing, too agitated by what I'd read to sleep. If even a small part of what Kurnaz says is true--and we have independent evidence that suggests his tale is accurate--the treatment of prisoners at Gitmo is indecent and, by any reasonable person's standard, illegal.

Kurnaz, a German-born (in 1982) Turk, traveled to Pakistan in late 2001 to study at a madrassa. Shortly thereafter, through a combination of false evidence, police corruption, alleged guilt by association, and bureaucratic incompetence, he was arrested and handed over to American military authorities. After a three-month imprisonment in Afghanistan, he was transferred to Gitmo, where he would stay until his exoneration and release in August 2006. (This despite the fact that the U.S. authorities quickly realized, as Kurnaz's lawyer, Baher Azmy, compellingly argues in the book's epilogue, that Kurnaz was innocent.)

Kurnaz's first three months in Gitmo were spent in Camp X-Ray, so called because the prisoners where in open air cages where everything was "completely transparent" to the scrutiny of the guards. The cages were 15 square feet (smaller than German requirements for caging animals), open to the weather as well as spiders, snakes, and scorpions. prisoners were irregularly fed, denied medical treatment, and given bad water to drink. They were also forbidden to stand, lie down during the day, or touch the sides of the cages. Breaking any rule brought swift retribution from the IRF, Immediate Reaction Force, whose members would quickly pepper-spray the offending prisoner and then beat him senseless. But spraying and beating could also come out of the blue. The point, Kurnaz quickly concluded, was to break prisoners and humiliate them--but also, at least in some cases, to provide guards an opportunity to vent (p. 147).

Transferred from open cages to cages within buildings--a new prison called Camp Delta--Kurnaz underwent regular and harsh interrogation, endured often uneatable food, participated in a couple of hunger strikes when the Koran was trampled by American guards, and suffered under a new policy of "maximum discomfort" initiated by a change of camp commanders. The new CO, General Geoffrey Miller, began Operation Sandman, intended to deprive prisoners of sleep by subjecting them to continuous cell rotations and loud heavy metal music. Rebelling against the physical abuse and the psych-ops mistreatments, Kurnaz was repeatedly thrown into solitary confinement--basically a "ship container with a door" whose temperature could be manipulated to be either frigid or suffocatingly hot (p. 161).

A particularly poignant moment in Kurnaz's imprisonment was when one of his American guards, conscience-stricken, confessed to him that the treatment of Gitmo prisoners constituted torture. On the day of his discharge from the military, the guard removed his MP armband and threw it on the ground (pp. 193-94). Other guards, indoctrinated before their tour of duty with films and lectures that described Gitmo prisoners as murderous prisoners, were brutal.

Kurnaz's story is horrifying, both because of its details and because it affirms what most of us uncomfortably have already pieced together--that prisoners are being tortured at Gitmo. How ironic that the logo over the Guantanamo gates says "Honor Bound to Defend Freedom" (p. 147).

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read it and Weep!, December 10, 2009

By 

Barrie Murphy (Kintnersville, Pa.) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo (Paperback)

I consider myself well-read but had no idea of the scale of abuse at Guantanamo until I read this excellent but harrowing account by former detainee Murat Kurnaz.
Kurnaz manages to maintain a sense of humor despite five years without a decent night's sleep, regular beatings, casual racism and indifferent interrogators. A copy should be sent to Cheney home, for he was the prime motivation behind this grotesque gulag.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars American disgrace, July 31, 2008

By 

Gillian A (NY, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo (Hardcover)

In this book, translated from German, Murat Kurnaz, a German Turk, tells his tragic story. When only nineteen and an apprentice shipbuilder, while taking time off in Pakistan for religious study, he was hauled off a bus and imprisoned for a short time before being `sold' to the US Administration for $3,000. This was a bargain - the Americans were offering $5,000 - $25,000 to locals for anyone suspected of being Taliban or Al Qaeda. With such tempting offerings, many innocent men - usually foreigners - were gladly exchanged for the money which converted into huge amounts in the local currency.

Murat was sent first to a prison camp in Kandahar, Afghanistan and then later to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In both places he was repeatedly and relentlessly tortured. Among other things he was constantly beaten, often for no reason, he was water boarded, he was electrically shocked on the soles of his feet, he was hung from the ceiling by his arms tied behind him for hours on end, he was deprived of sleep for weeks at a time, he was forced to stand for days, he was starved, he was force fed, he was put in an air-tight metal container and subjected to extreme heat and cold and of course there were the months of solitary confinement. In Guantanamo he came across prisoners as young as 14 and a few even in their 80s and 90s.

Like all the books on Guantanamo, there is almost a shock a page. Besides the main tortures listed above, what I found almost as deplorable was how vindictive, sadistic and cruel the soldiers were to the detainees in little ways, all the time and always there were endless lies. Also appalling were Murat's descriptions of female soldiers in one of the camps, watching while naked male prisoners defecated in a communal bucket in the open pen. And in Guantanamo, scantily dressed young women rubbed themselves against him and made sexual suggestions. One wonders if their male superiors ordered them to do this or if they thought up these little torments themselves. But it should also be said that a few guards treated the detainees with basic decency.

At the end of the book we learn that the Administration knew 6 months into Murat's capture that he was innocent, but kept him on, continued the torture and even made wild accusations against him - presumably to save face. After 5 years when he was finally to be sent back to Germany, on the way out they made a last ditch effort to make him sign a statement saying he was either Taliban or Al Qaeda or he must stay in Cuba. He refused.

How do we know all this is true? Having read so many similar accounts from so many prisoners of many different nationalities and languages, from different cell blocks, who could not have collaborated, I am convinced that what is described is essentially what happened. The Epilogue, written by his American attorney, Baher Azmy, a law professor in New Jersey, is excellent.

Murat was robbed of part of his youth with no explanation or apology so it is hardly surprising he felt compelled to tell his story. He finishes with - "We have to tell the world how Abdul lost his legs and how the Moroccan captain lost his fingers. The world needs to know about the prisoners who died in Kandahar. We have to describe how the doctors came only to check whether we were dead or could stand to be tortured for a little longer."