Evidence Of Innocence Rejected at Guantanamo

[live love laugh]

Carol D. Leonnig
1709
12/5/2007
The Washington Post
English
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved

Just months after U.S. Army troops whisked a German man from Pakistan to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2002, his American captors concluded that he was not a terrorist. "USA considers Murat Kurnaz's innocence to be proven," a German intelligence officer wrote that year in a memo to his colleagues. "He is to be released in approximately six to eight weeks." But the 19-year-old student was not freed. Instead, over the next four years, two U.S. military tribunals that were responsible for determining whether Guantanamo Bay detainees were enemy fighters declared him a dangerous al-Qaeda ally who should remain in prison. The disparity between the tribunal's judgments and the intelligence community's consensus view that Kurnaz is innocent is detailed in newly released military and court documents that track his fate. His attorneys, who sued the Pentagon to gain access to the documents, say that they reflect policies that result in mistreatment of the hundreds of foreigners who have been locked up for years at the controversial prison.

<snip>

Lawyers for the Bush administration will argue that the tribunals have afforded suspected enemies all the rights to which they are entitled. The administration maintains that detainees need not know all of the evidence against them. The tribunals were established in 2004 after the Supreme Court ruled that such panels are needed when holding prisoners indefinitely, and Congress endorsed them in 2005. U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green, who was privy to the classified record of a tribunal's decision-making about Kurnaz in 2004, concluded in January 2005 that his treatment provided powerful evidence of bias against prisoners, and she deemed the proceedings illegal under U.S. and international law. But her ruling, which depicted the allegations against Kurnaz as unsubstantiated and as an inappropriate basis for keeping him locked up, was mostly classified at the time.

In newly released passages, however, Green's ruling reveals that the tribunal members relied heavily on a memo written by a U.S. brigadier general who noted that Kurnaz had prayed while the U.S. national anthem was sung in the prison and that he expressed an unusual interest in detainee transfers and the guard schedule. Other documents make clear that U.S. intelligence officials had earlier concluded that Kurnaz, who went to Pakistan shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to visit religious sites, had simply chosen a bad time to travel.
The process is "fundamentally corrupted," said Baher Azmy, a professor at Seton Hall Law School who represents Kurnaz. "All of this just reveals that they had the wrong person and they knew it." He added: "His entire file reveals he has no connection with terrorism. None. Confronted with this uncomfortable fact, the military panel makes up evidence" to justify its claim that only real terrorists are incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay.

<snip>

Kurnaz was released from Guantanamo Bay in August 2006, a few months after new German Chancellor Angela Merkel told President Bush in a private meeting that obtaining the detainee's freedom was one of her top priorities.

<snip>

In December 2001, Pakistani police pulled Kurnaz and missionaries off a bus and handed him to U.S. troops. Four weeks later, he was flown to Guantanamo Bay -- one of the first detainees to arrive in the newly opened prison.

<snip>

After the Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that Guantanamo Bay prisoners could not be held indefinitely without fact-finding by an objective tribunal, the Pentagon hastily assembled panels of field-grade officers to serve as Combatant Status Review Tribunals. Since they began, the panels have overwhelmingly supported the continued detention of those at Guantanamo Bay, ruling that 534 detainees were "enemy combatants," while only 38 were not. In September 2004, one such panel cited intelligence on a suicide bombing by someone Kurnaz allegedly knew -- an account later found to be incorrect -- in concluding that Kurnaz was "properly classified as an enemy combatant" and was a member of al-Qaeda.

<snip>

Not until August 2006, nearly five years after his imprisonment began, was Kurnaz flown home, goggled, masked and bound, as he had been when he was flown to Guantanamo Bay. As U.S. military officials led him out of Ramstein Air Base, and as he was about to take his first steps onto German soil, the Americans offered to leave plastic wrist cuffs on their former prisoner. German federal police declined. He was escorted as a free man to the back seat of a Mercedes-Benz sedan for the short ride to his reunion with his parents and two younger brothers.

[endarkenment]

1. goggled, masked and bound

Our standard treatment of prisoners, as sketched by that one phrase, is a crime against humanity. We are a nation of war criminals. We are the 'good germans' of this century, carefully avoiding the unpleasant reality of what all those 'bad germans' are up to.

[Solly Mack]

2. K&R

My government is for shit