A SIMPLE INJUSTICE

The Background:

By STEFAN NICOLAUPI
Germany Correspondent
BERLIN, April 26 (UPI) -- The United States reportedly paid Pakistani police some $3,000 for Murat Kurnaz before they locked him away for nearly five years without charges in Guantanamo.


The Details:

HITT: And as for confronting the evidence, consider the case of Azmy’s client, Murat Kurnaz, a Turkishcitizen raised in Germany. The Pentagon accidentally declassified the file with all the secret evidence against him. And here’s what’s in it: nothing.

AZMY: The classified file contains – the Washington Post wrote about it – six statements from military intelligence. That’s really what the classified file is. Memos saying “this person was here” or “so-and-so witnessed him…” In Kurnaz’s case, there are five or six statements saying, “There’s no evidence of any connection to Al Qaeda, the Taliban or a threat to the United States. The Germans have concluded he has got no connection to Al Qaeda. There’s no evidence linking him to the Taliban.” Over and over and over again.

HITT: But here’s the thing: At the hearing, nobody talks about any of that. His personal representative doesn’t bring it up. The tribunal doesn’t consider it. And Kurnaz himself doesn’t even know about it. He’s declared an enemy combatant; he’s still at Guantanamo today.
But wait. There’s more. The reason they give for holding him? A friend of his named Selcuk Bilgin blew himself up as a suicide bomber in Turkey in 2003. That’s 2 years after Kurnaz got picked up.

AZMY: So, setting aside the sort of remarkable legal proposition that one could be detained indefinitely for what one’s friend does, it’s actually preposterous in that a simple Google search or a call to the Germans would have revealed that his friend is alive and well, and under no suspicion of any such thing.

HITT: You heard that right. Kurnaz is in Guantanamo because two year after he got picked up, a guy he knows became a suicide bomber. Except that he didn’t become a suicide bomber and is currently living in Germany.

AZMY: Yeah, he’s walking around in Germany; I’ve met him.


The Court Rules¹:

Murat Kurnaz, a German of Turkish descent who was arrested in Pakistan while traveling with a busload of religious missionaries in October 2001 and taken to Guantanamo. A military tribunal determined last fall that Kurnaz was a member of Al Qaeda and properly categorized as an enemy combatant.


US District Judge Joyce Hens Green, who ruled in January that the military review tribunals are unconstitutional, cited Kurnaz's case as a particularly egregious example of how the process was insufficient to give an innocent detainee a fair chance of being released. Much of her opinion discussing Kurnaz was redacted because it dealt with classified evidence.

Asked how he reconciled his description of the process with what is known about the Kurnaz case, England said the tribunal had access to more evidence against Kurnaz that has not been made public.


"I know the data reported in the Washington Post was not all the data reported to the tribunal," he said.


However, Judge Green did have all the classified evidence before her. The Post reported that in the redacted portion of her opinion, she wrote that the tribunal's decision was based on a single memo that "fails to provide significant details to support its conclusory allegations, does not reveal the sources for its information and is contradicted by other evidence in the record."


THE CONCLUSION:

Murat Kurnaz released from Guantánamo
24 August 2006


¹The Boston Globe
March 30, 2005, Wednesday THIRD EDITION
SECTION: OBITUARY; Pg. A1
LENGTH: 1274 words
HEADLINE: US ORDERS 38 FREED FROM GUANTANAMO
BYLINE: By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff