Why I Fight Against Torture, Part One
More importantly, Dan came back with his personality changed. He was given badly cooked or undercooked rice to eat during his captivity with occasional pieces of badly cooked fish or vegetables, so food was a huge issue for the rest of his life. There was never enough food to satisfy his psychological hunger. For the last two years of his life he was on dialysis, which is a long, slow, difficult road, but the worst part was the diet. Dialysis doesn't take all the excess potassium or phosphorus out of your blood like your kidneys do, so you have to be very careful about how much of these nutrients you consume every single day or you can die. This was, and I use the term advisedly, torture for Dan; he became completely miserable and I became his warden, having to enforce the rules. His mind was so consumed by what it felt to be the deprivation of this diet that it rebelled and he began to eat in his sleep. He literally had no idea that he was doing it until I showed him the evidence. Even then, he was powerless to stop.
The nightmares were the worst though. He would scream out in pain many nights, even all these years later. In fact, they became more prevalent after the current war started, probably because the news brought it all back again. Often, he would speak urgently in Vietnamese in his sleep, which he had been taught as part of his training. It seemed as though he was trying to convince whoever he was talking to of something. There was a sense of desperation in his voice that was chilling and agonizing.
Almost four years ago, after four years of being disabled with diabetes and congestive heart failure, and two years on dialysis, Dan had a heart attack and didn't come back. It has become my mission to try to live up to his legacy.
I need your help.
I need each and every one of you to stand up and tell the President, the Congress, and the Attorney General, that those responsible for torture MUST be held accountable, legally accountable. That you will accept nothing less.
I am at the beginning of gathering the people and organizations to bring together a March for Accountability. If you would like to be involved, my email address is in my profile.
Please stand up and give Dan the legacy that he deserves.
With gratitude and standing for justice and accountability,
For Dan,
Heather
This is the start of a series of diaries which I will be writing daily about the effects of torture from the persepctive of the person being tortured. I hope it will help to open some hearts and widen some perspectives.
Why I Fight Against Torture, Part Two
Murat Kurnaz
As promised, today I will share the story of one of the former Guantanamo Bay detainees:
Murat KurnazMr. Kurnaz was born in Bremen, Germany, had always lived in Germany, and was of Turkish descent. In Germany, those of Turkish descent having a much more difficult time becoming German citizens even those born in Germany. In 2001, he decided to learn more about his religion, Islam, in preparation for his Turkish wife joining him, so he traveled to Pakistan to learn from peaceful Imams. Enroute back to Germany, on December 1, 2001, he was taken off a bus in Pakistan, and taken to a prison in Peshawar, Pakistan, then to Kandahar, Afghanistan, and, finally to Guantanamo Bay, where he remained until August 4th, 2006.
What I share now are excerpts from his book "Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo." These are the things that have been done to fellow human beings.
Today I will share some of his experiences in Kandahar, tomorrow the rest of his journey.
In Kandahar:
Did they have a lie detector? I asked myself. The man was holding something in his hands. It looked like two irons that he was rubbing together. Or one of those machines used to revive people who have heart attacks. Before I realized what was happening, I felt the first jolt.
It was electricity. An electric shock. They put the electrodes to the soles of my feet. There was no way to remain seated. It was as though my body was lifting itself off the ground of its own accord. I felt the electric current going through my whole body. There was a bang. It hurt a lot. I felt warmth, jolts, cramps. My muscles cramped up and quivered. That hurt, too.
... I heard screams.
They were my screams
On the table, there was a shallow, blue plastic bucket about 20 inches in diameter, full of water.
...
I knew what was coming.
They pushed my head into the plastic tub.
It's like bobbing for apples, I thought.
...
I wasn't afraid, but I was very nervous. I didn't know whether I was going to survive.
...
Someone grabbed me by the hair. The soldiers seized my arms and pushed my head underwater.
...
They pulled my head back up.
"Do you like it?"
"You want more?"
"You'll get more, no problem."
When my head was back underwater, I felt a blow to my stomach. I had to exhale and cough. I wanted to breathe back in but forced my self not to, and I supressed the urge to cough. Still, I inhaled a bit of water and could hardly hold my breath.
"Where is Osama?"
"Who are you?"
I tried to speak but I couldn't.
"More!"
I felt blows to my stomach and against my back. I swallowed some water. It was a strange feeling. I don't know whether the water went to my lungs. It became harder and harder to breathe, the more they hit me in the stomach and pushed my head underwater. I felt my heart racing. They didn't let up. I tried to answer their questions when I managed to get a fresh breath of air, but all I could manage was "yes" and "no." I was choking. I felt like I was going to vomit, then I coughed and spat. I was dizzy and nauseous.
When they pushed my head under water again and me in the stomach, I imagined myself screaming underwater.
Habe allahu we ne emel weki!
I would have told them everything. But what was I supposed to tell them?
It wasn't a room, just a pen enclosed by aluminum and chain-link fence. Hanging from a beam was a hook like the ones used in butcher shops. A chain dangled from the ceiling.
The soldiers took the chain and ran it underneath my handcuffs. They looped the chain over the hook like a block and tackle and fed it into a winch. I was hoisted up until my feet no longer touched the ground. They clamped the chain to the beam and then left without a word, shutting the corrugated door behind them.
The cuffs cut off the blood to my hands. I tried to move.
...
I knew they were going to leave my hanging there until I couldn't take it any more. After a while, the cuffs seemed like they were cutting my wrists down to the bone. My shoulders felt like someone was trying to pull my arms out of their sockets.
At some point, I began rocking myself back and forth in the hope that would get my blood flowing. But every movement hurt, no matter how tiny. Especially in my wrists and elbow. The best thing was just not to move and resign yourself to the pain.
At some point, hours later. someone came and let me down. A doctor examined me and took my pulse. He was wearing a uniform like the other soldiers, but he had a badge of rank on his shoulders, and a patch on his chest said: "Doctor."
"Okay,: he said.
The soldiers hoisted me back up.
Three times a day. the soldiers came with the doctor and lowered me.
...
My hands had swollen. In the beginning, I'd felt pain in them. Later on, I lost all feeling in my arms and hands. I still felt pain in other parts of my body, like in my chest around my heart.
When they hung me up backwards, it felt as though my shoulders were going to break. They bound my hands behind my back and hoisted me up. I could remember seeing something like that in a movie once - only in the film, it was Americans being strung up by the Vietnamese with their hands behind their backs until they died.
...
I didn't recognize the man. He was hanging as I was from the ceiling. I couldn't tell whether he was dead or alive. His body was mostly swollen and blue, although in some places it was pale and white. I could see a lot of blood in his face, dark streams of it. His head lolled to one side. I couldn't see his eyes.
...
No one came to lower the man next to me. They had forgotten him. He just hung there in the same position. I thought about the prisoner with the blanket wrapped around his head. They didn't seem to care whether we died.
...
I watch his chest for a while. Nothing moved.
...
I was strung up for about five days.
These are some of the things that were done in your name. I will continue Murat Kurnaz's story tomorrow
It is extremely important that those responsible, from the highest to the lowest are held accountable, legally accountable.
Torture is not what Dan fought for. It is not what Dan gave his physical health for. It is not what Dan gave his mental health for.
Please, I need YOUR help. We need to stand up and show those in power in Washington that we will settle for nothing less than independent investigations and prosecutions. We MUST take that responsibility.
We must March for Accountability.
I am just at the beginning of bringing together the people and organizations necessary to organize a March for Accountability. If you would like to help, or want to keep updated, please email me at the address in my profile.
With gratitude and respect,
Hugs,
Standing for Justice and Accountability,
For Dan,
Heather
Why I Fight Against Torture, Part Three
Murat Kurnaz, Part Two
Yesterday, I shared the first part of the story, of Murat Kurnaz, who was born in Germany of Turkish descent. He spent five years as a detainee.
Today, I continue Mr. Kurnaz's story, with excerpts from his book "Five Years of My Life". These excerpts are from his time at Guantanamo.
He was young, around my age, maybe nineteen or twenty. He lay on the ground making soft noises.
...
He didn't have any legs. His wounds were still fresh.
I sat in my cage, hardly daring to look, but every once in a while I had to look in his direction. The stumps of his legs were full of pus. The bandages wrapped around them had turned red and yellow. Everything was bloody and moist. He had frostbite marks on his hands. He seemed hardly able to move his fingers. I watched as he tried to get up. He crawled over to the bucket in his cage and tried to sit on it. He had to go to the toilet. He tried to raise himself up with his hands on the chain-link fence, but he didn't make it. He couldn't hold on with his swollen fingers. Still, he tried, until a guard came and hit his hands with his billy-club. The young man fell to the ground.
Every time he tried to hoist himself onto the bucket, the guards came and hit him on the hands. No one was allowed to touch the fence - that was an iron law. But a young man with no legs? They told him he wasn't allowed to stand up. But how could he have done that without any legs? He wasn't even allowed to lean on the fence or to crawl onto the bucket.
...
The bandages wrapped around Abdul's stumps were never changed. When he took them off himself, they were full of blood and pus. He showed the bandages to the guards and pointed to his open wounds. The guardsw ignored him. Later, I saw how he tried to wash the bandages in his bucket of drinking water. But he could hardly move his hands, so he wasn't able to. And even if he had, where would he have hung them up to dry? He wasn't allowed to touch the fence. He wrapped his stumps back up in the dirty bandages.
Abdul wasn't the only prisoner who had parts of his body amputated. I saw other such cases in Guantanamo. I know of a prisoner who complained of a toothache. He was brought to a dentist, who pulled out his healthy teeth as well as the rotten one. I knew a man from Morocco who used to be a ship captain. He couldn't move one of his little fingers because of frostbite. The rest of his fingers were all right. They told him they would amputate the little finger. They brought him to the doctor, and when he came back, he had no fingers left. They had amputated everything but his thumbs.
The general's goal was to completely deprive us of sleep, and he achieved it.
...
Days and nights without sleep. Blows and new cages. Again, the stabbing sensation of a thousand needles throughout my entire body. I would have loved to step outside my body, but I couldn't.
...
I know longer knew what block I was in. Sometimes, I would start quivering for no reason. The movement of my hands, arms, and legs seemed to be taking place in a dream.
...
Sometimes I heard ringing sounds that weren't there. Other times I heard a low hum in my ear that refused to go away.
...
When I could no longer get up, they sent in the IRF team, who said they would hit me for as along as it took for me to get up and go with them to the next cell. But I was too weak. All I could feel was a buzzing in my head like a siren. They picked me up, and my knees buckled. During the last days of this treatment, they had to carry me around. They'd take me from one cage to the next, then to Jack, and then to another cage. I can only remember bits and pieces of this.
In the end they gave up - probably because it was simply too much work for the guards to carry me around all the time. Over time, it was as if they were the ones getting punished. I was allowed to sleep, and when I woke up, the other prisoners helped me calculate how long this treatment had lasted. Three weeks. I went three weeks without sleep. At this point, I weighed less than 130 pounds.
I was put in a solitary confinement cell like any other, fitted out with corrugated metal sheeting. I had never been to India, and I was surprised that it wasn't cold. I immediately realized that something was wrong. There wasn't any air! The air conditioning unit over the door wasn't humming, and that was the only supply of air here. They had turned off the air conditioning.
...
Suddenly the peephole opened. Tear gas streamed into my cell.
"Quiet! You're not allowed to talk!"
August 24th, 2006: Kurnaz is released and flown to the US Air Base in Ramstein, Germany. He remains under surveillance of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution until December 2006.
January 23, 2007: The EU Parliament's Special Investigations Committee Concerning the CIA releases its final report, which includes Kurnaz's descriptions of being tortured. The report states:"As early as 2002 the intelligence agencies of the US and Germany concluded that Murat Kurnaz had no connections to either AlQaeda or the Taliban, and did not represent a terrorist threat.
These are not okay ways to treat fellow human beings, and make no mistake, these are fellow human beings.
The people who were responsible MUST be held accountable, legally accountable.
We must show those in Washington that we will accept nothing less.
I am in the beginning stages of bring together the people and organizations who can help to organize a March for Accountability.
If you are interested, please email me at the address in my profile.
Thank you for doing the hard work of reading this diary.
I will bring another story of what the detainees have actually been through tomorrow.
Standing for justice and accountability,
For Dan,
Heather
To delve into more details
Murat Kurnaz is a German of Turkish descent who was kidnapped off a bus in Pakistan and spent the next five years in the hell of three different detention facilities. Five Years of My Life is his first person account of what he and some of the other prisoners suffered. It is not for the faint of heart, but, in my opinion it should be required reading for every American adult.
Guantanamo's Child is an account of the life and incarceration of Omar Khadr, a Canadian born in Toronto. Omar was 15 years old when he was incarcerated at a detention facility in Pakistan. He has been in Guantanamo Bay since shortly after he turned 16 years old, in 2002. He remains there to this day.
Jane Mayer, an award winning journalist with New Yorker magazine, wrote "The Dark Side" to document why and how torture had become the law, policy and practice of the United States. It is superb. I believe it is important to know how and why this happened in order to understand why holding those responsible accountable is to so important.
Torture Team is Philippe Sands' excellent detailing of how and why torture became the law, policy and practice of the United States. Mr. Sands is a lawyer and professor specializing in international law.
