[Marxism] One Muslim's Odyssey to Guantanamo (NYT)

[Walter Lippmann <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

June 5, 2005
(Very few of the individuals being imprisoned at
Guantanamo are known to the public in any 
detailed manner. That's a deliberate policy by
US officials so that the public thinks that "where
there's smoke, there's fire, and nothing but "bad
guys" are being held there. But as we can see in
this report, that's hardly the case.  

(Bush, Cheney and their media reject the opinion
of Amnesty that Guantanamo is part of a world-
wide gulag archipelago being operated by the
United States government. Readers may have a
different opinion of the population at Guantanamo
after they finish reading this. IMPORTANT.)
====================================

June 5, 2005
One Muslim's Odyssey to Guantanamo
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
THE NEW YORK TIMES

BREMEN, Germany - About two months after the attacks on the World Trade Center 
and
the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, the Pakistani police picked up Murat Kurnaz, a 
19-year-old
Muslim from Germany who was traveling by bus near the city of Peshawar.

The police turned Mr. Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen born in Germany, over to the 
American
military in Pakistan, who in turn transferred him to Afghanistan, and he was 
held
as a terrorist suspect.

Mr. Kurnaz, it seemed, had chosen a poor time to go to Pakistan, just as the 
American
war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban was getting started. Could he have been a 
Muslim
fighter, recruited to help the enemy? The fact that he was a religious young 
Muslim
from this city in northern Germany, only an hour's train ride from Hamburg, 
where
the main plotters of the Sept. 11 attacks had lived, apparently supported the 
American
suspicions that he was.

Indeed, Mr. Kurnaz's lawyer in the United States said that interrogators in 
Afghanistan
seemed convinced that he was an associate of Mohamed Atta, who is believed to 
have
piloted one of the hijacked planes flown into the World Trade Center.

Though no link to Mr. Atta was ever found, Mr. Kurnaz was sent to the American 
prison
camp at Guant�¡namo Bay, Cuba, where he has been held for about three years 
now 
as an enemy combatant, specifically accused of being a member or ally of Al 
Qaeda
or its terrorist network. The evidence against him is that, while he was 
traveling
in Pakistan, he was the guest of a militant Islamic group said to have supported
terrorist acts against the United States.

In addition, Mr. Kurnaz was known to have intended to travel to Pakistan with a 
close friend, Selcuk Bilgin, another Turkish citizen from Bremen. And Mr. 
Bilgin,
according to an American military tribunal's findings on Mr. Kurnaz, later 
carried
out a suicide bombing.

But in recent months, as details of the charges against Mr. Kurnaz have come to 
be known, German officials here in Bremen who have investigated both Mr. Kurnaz 
and Mr. Bilgin have reacted to the American conclusions about Mr. Kurnaz with 
astonished
incredulity.

The most striking element in the picture is that, contrary to the American 
assumption
about Mr. Bilgin having carried out a suicide bombing, the Germans say that 
claim
is demonstrably false.

"He lives here," Uwe Picard, the Bremen criminal prosecutor who carried
out the German investigation into Mr. Bilgin, said in an interview in his office
here. "He is still alive."

Moreover, even American documents indicated that much of the evidence on Mr. 
Kurnaz
actually seemed more to exonerate him than to incriminate him. The decision of 
the
three-member Guant�¡namo tribunal that found Mr. Kurnaz to be an enemy 
combatant
last September refers to classified material in his file and indicates that that
is where the reputed links to Al Qaeda would be documented.

But a Federal District Court judge, Joyce Hens Green, in reviewing Mr. Kurnaz's 
case early this year, found that there was only a single document, called R-19, 
that incriminates Mr. Kurnaz as a member of Al Qaeda. About this material she 
concludes,
"Not only is the document rife with hearsay and lacking in detailed support
for its conclusions, but it is also in direct conflict with classified 
exculpatory
documents."

Judge Green's summary of the classified file was briefly unclassified earlier 
this
year and reported on by The Washington Post in March. It contained several 
intelligence
reports that exonerated Mr. Kurnaz of the very charges the Guant�¡namo 
tribunal 
made against him.

There is one report by the Command Intelligence Task Force, the intelligence 
unit
of the Southern Command whose responsibility includes Guant�¡namo, that said, 
"CITF
has no definite link/evidence of detainee having an association with Al Qaeda or
making any specific threat against the United States."

Yet, Mr. Kurnaz remains in detention in Guant�¡namo, and the three-member 
Combatant
Status Review Tribunal that heard his case last year concluded, "By a 
preponderance
of the evidence, Mr. Kurnaz meets the criteria to be designated as an enemy 
combatant."
It is a designation that means in theory that Mr. Kurnaz can be kept in prison 
until
President Bush declares that the campaign against terrorism is over.

Asked the reasons for the determination in the Kurnaz case, a Pentagon 
spokesman,
Lt. Cmdr. Alvin Plexico, said, "The bottom line is that we have a Combatant
Status Review Tribunal to review all this information, and they have come to the
conclusion that he is an enemy combatant, and they are certainly in a better 
position
to judge than you and I are."

But an investigation of Mr. Kurnaz's case reveals no evidence that he ever 
fought
against the United States or planned to.

Though Mr. Kurnaz was born in Bremen he has remained a Turkish citizen because 
his
parents, who came to Germany as guest workers from Turkey more than three 
decades
ago, never became German citizens.

He grew up in Bremen in a largely secular Muslim family. But when he became 17 
or
18, Mr. Kurnaz became more religiously observant, his mother, Rubiye Kurnaz, 
said
in an interview in his lawyer's office in Bremen. He grew a beard, she said, and
began going to a largely Arab mosque, rather than the Turkish mosque that his 
family
attended. He also began to criticize other members of his family for what he saw
as their lack of piety.

Three weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Kurnaz decided to go to Pakistan. 
The
purpose of his trip, according to his German lawyer, Bernard Docke, was to 
deepen
his knowledge of Islam. Mr. Bilgin intended to accompany him on this trip.

As things turned out, Mr. Bilgin was stopped from leaving Germany by the border 
police because he had failed to pay a fine for an unrelated misdemeanor. 
According
to Mr. Picard, the prosecutor, when the police called Mr. Bilgin's family to see
if the fine could be paid so Mr. Bilgin could leave, one of the family members 
said
that they did not want him going to Pakistan for fear that he would join a 
Muslim
group there fighting against the United States.

It was this comment that prompted Mr. Picard's investigation into Mr. Bilgin and
the Abu Bakr mosque that he and Mr. Kurnaz attended.

"Of course, we were concerned with the possibility that Murat Kurnaz had been
radicalized by a preacher at the mosque," Mr. Picard said. According to some
officials, German intelligence has identified one member of the Abu Bakr mosque 
as having recruited fighters for pro-Qaeda groups, which would seem to justify 
an
effort to find out if Mr. Kurnaz was one of them.

But Mr. Picard said his investigation of the mosque, which included 
interrogations
of the suspected recruiter and a search of his home, produced no evidence of 
terrorist
connections or of any attempts to recruit Muslims there to fight against the 
United
States.

"We get rumors sometimes that they preach hatred there," Mr. Picard said
of the Abu Bakr mosque. "But there is no proof."

Though Mr. Bilgin was prevented from leaving Germany, Mr. Kurnaz did go to 
Pakistan
on Oct. 3, 2001. About three weeks later, he was arrested by the Pakistani 
police
in a routine check of a passenger bus near the northern city of Peshawar. 
According
to Mr. Docke, the Pakistani police held Mr. Kurnaz for about a week and then 
turned
him over to the American military in Pakistan. From there, Mr. Kurnaz was taken 
to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and eventually transferred to Guant�¡namo, 
where
he has been since.

"For us what is very important," Mr. Docke said, "is that he had 
no weapons when he was arrested, that he was arrested in Pakistan, not on the 
battlefield
in Afghanistan, and he was arrested by the Pakistani police during a routine 
check
of a bus."

But his very presence in Pakistan raised suspicions among American military 
interrogators,
and so did the fact that, by his own account, he was the guest in Pakistan of an
Islamic group, Tablighi Jamaat. The group, which is based mostly in Pakistan and
Bangladesh and keeps up an energetic fundamentalist missionary drive in many 
European
countries, was described by the Guant�¡namo tribunal as a supporter of 
terrorism.
That link, and Mr. Kurnaz's association with Mr. Bilgin, are the two 
unclassified
charges made against him to support the tribunal's conclusion that he is an 
"enemy
combatant."

Furthermore, the tribunal's findings listed no particulars of how Tablighi 
Jamaat
is thought to have supported terrorism against the United States. Some experts 
say
it has no record of supporting terrorism or Islamic militancy, but others have 
said
it supported the mujahedeen fighting Russians in Afghanistan and aids Muslim 
separatists
in Kashmir. The tribunal's decision on Mr. Kurnaz only refers to the fact that 
he
received free food, lodging and schooling from the group.

As for Mr. Kurnaz's travels from mosque to mosque in Pakistan, some people who 
make
such trips come into contact with more militant schools of Islam, and 
counterterrorism
experts have noted that some of those who are attracted to the group move on to 
more militant groups.

But one expert on Tablighi, Jamal J. Elias, a professor of religion at Amherst 
College,
wrote in a letter that Mr. Kurnaz's travels were exactly the sort of activity 
that
the group undertakes in its efforts to encourage greater Muslim piety and that 
nothing
he was reported to have done with the group indicated that he was being 
recruited
as a terrorist.

    * Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company



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