Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo | 
 enlarge | Author: Murat Kurnaz
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 185022
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 0230603742
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.931092
EAN: 9780230603745
ASIN: 0230603742
Publication Date: April 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 Amazing Truth!! August 14, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I am so shocked and moved after reading this book. This is a must read for everyone.. What happens in Guantanamo is inhumane. Not even animals are treated this way.
American disgrace July 31, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
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 - talking between the detainees was almost always prohibited - 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."
Senator Dick Durbin was right about Guantanamo July 23, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
After reading an FBI report about the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, the U.S. Senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin, compared it to the Nazis. He was later forced to apologize after the Anti-Defamation League, among otheres, objected to any comparison with the Holocaust. It's too bad Durbin apologized because after reading Murat Kurnaz's account of his experience at Guantanamo, Nazilike is the only adjective that comes to mind. We should keep in mind that the Holocaust--that is, genocide on an industrial scale--didn't spring full-blown in the Nazi's plans. Those plans were enabled by the failure of the international community to try to stop the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Kristallnacht was preliminary to the Holocaust but the fact that the Nazis got away with it, paved the way for the Holocaust. Other reviewers have commented on how upset they were reading this book and how difficult they found it to sleep afterwards. I had the same response, in part because you realize that we too are capable of bestiality, that we, too, are living in a period of incipient fascism in this country. If the true authors of the torture policies at Guantanamo--Dick Cheney, David Addington, John Yoo, Alberto Gonazales, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, etc.--are allowed to get away with their crimes and are not held accountable, we will have enabled our leaders to carry out even greater crimes.
A must read! June 26, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
The book highlights some of the darkest sides of the Bush administation's "War On Terror". Murat Kurnaz tells a breathtaking and horrifying story about the unlawful detention that took away his youth.
He was exposed to some of the most humiliating, inhumane and painful treatments possible. He was hung up on a hook in the ceiling for five days, electified, nearly drowned, subjected to mock execution, put in solitary confinement for extreme stretches in unbearable heat or cold, put in a room with no air supply among many, many other things.
This book is a wake-up call to the cruel world we live in, and is a MUST READ for anyone interested in what REALLY happens outside their backyard.
Must read May 19, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
A first hand testimony of how things can go so wrong when we forget to treat people as human beings
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