Memoir by Murat Kurnaz, Survivor of American Torture, May Help U.S. Face Reality

[maddezmom]

For the last two years, my mother has flown to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, every few months to meet with her pro bono client, a 32-year-old Algerian man named Abdul Aziz Naji. When she explains to friends and acquaintances how Aziz ended up in Guantánamo, where he has been held for nearly six years without charge, the responses often contain a note of suspicion. “What did he do again?” people will ask. Or, “How do you know he’s innocent?”

Most Americans, even those opposed to Bush administration policies, can’t help but guard themselves against the reality of Guantánamo. It is unthinkable that our government — the government of the country we love for its political, intellectual, and personal freedom — is rounding up Muslim men whose most suspicious behavior is their commitment to the Qur’an, holding them in torturous conditions, allowing them virtually no contact with the outside world, and inventing charges to justify their detentions that, in the words of one dissident military lawyer, “lack even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence.”

Perhaps the only way to grasp the severity of the human rights abuses the U.S. is committing at this moment is to connect with the detainees’ stories on a personal level. So I am deeply grateful to Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen who grew up in Germany and was released from Guantánamo in August 2006. His memoir, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo, was published in English this month and may well represent our best hope yet of preserving the truth about this depraved chapter in American history. Kurnaz’s harrowing story is consistent with those of countless other detainees who have spoken out after their release or through their American lawyers.

more:http://www.independent.com/news/2008/apr/24/memoir-murat-kurnaz-survivor-american-torture-may-/