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RT has a new interview with Murat Kurnaz, the former Guantanamo prisoner who wrote about his experiences in Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo. Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen and German resident, has been one the more outspoken former detainees since his release in August 2006.
Last March, Kurnaz told the German press about the forcible use of drugs on detainees at Guantanamo, including the administration of anti-malarial medications. One article at DW World cited investigatory stories by Jason Leopold and myself on the use of the controversial drug mefloquine on all the Guantanamo detainees.
In the RT video, Kurnaz talks about his stay in Kandahar, imprisoned by the U.S. military before he was shipped to Guantanamo. He was age 19.
“In Kandahar,” Kurnaz says, “was happening all kinds of things, what you can just imagine under torture. I saw many people get killed under torture in Kandahar.”
It has long been believed that there were many more deaths under torture, or other circumstances the U.S. would rather not reveal, than has been admitted. In an article last December, I revealed one of the few pieces of documentary evidence of such deaths at Guantanamo in the earliest weeks of the prison camp’s operation. Despite the reports of former detainees such as Murat Kurnaz, or evidence unearthed by researchers like myself, the issue of the deaths has failed to gain the attention of government or human rights investigators, much less the press.
Kurnaz also says that in the U.S. prison in Afghanistan, electroshock was administered to get him to confess he was with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. He was also subjected to a form of “water treatment” he says some would call waterboarding. Kurnaz is among a number of Guantanamo prisoners who have described some kind of waterboarding or other kind of “water treatment” or “water torture” meant to simulate drowning or cause suffocation.
The issue of Department of Defense use of waterboarding or “water treatment” — something that is officially denied by the government — will be the subject of a major new story I’ll have out in the next day or so.
17 Comments
We may be politically powerless, but we can still tell the truth. This is the medicine we and America needs. A good dose of the truth.
Of course this will get little coverage, remember Oblunder told us we need to look forward. meanwhile I hear he will be celebrating his birthday with billionairs and private jet owners
Jeff-I am going back to two commentaries about the wrongness of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars from 2007 and 2008 and I am going to recap’ the message. The truth about the evils of war and the insidious demonization of other countries, leading up to wars, cannot be over stated or repeated too often. It is the same situation with torture. Until we stop torturing people in our country’s name we have no legal and moral legitimacy out in the broader world. I can foresee a day in which there are sanctions placed upon the United States for its abrogation of international human rights abroad and at home in our prison-states. I can foresee a day when our dictators are deposed by foreign countries acting as a coalition against the tyranny of our own leaders.
thanks.
The Dissenter is the kind of blogging I’d hoped for when FDL adopted the “kick ass journalism” mantra. Keep it up you guys. It’s the antidote to “here we go ’round the mulberry bush” disinformation looped over and over by the lame-stream media.
Jeff, the powerful elites of this country, using the power of government to hide, obscure, and belittle genuine evidence of unconscionable wrong doing, hope to hide both their complicity and their plans for extending their brutal control over the thinking of any who challenge the “official” history and the presumptive “right” of that elite to do whatever they choose.
You are among those standing against such abuse of power and reason.
You have my undying gratitude for so doing.
I will share with you a growing concern of mine, and that is that too many American citizens, even here at FDL, have not the stomach to fully understand, in all the depths of its depravity, what has gone and IS going on.
It is far worse than many, in their worst imaginings, may comfortably perceive.
Especially as many, even, here, are overwhelmed with other despairs.
Yet there is more than mere “connection” between what has happened “over there”, being a term which has less to do with geographical distance than with the distance of mind-numbing shock at the torture of reason as well as humanity which our “leadership” seems, literally, hell-bent upon pursuing, and what is happening “here”, which also is more about the geography of conscousness than some notion of “place”.
We face a assault upon moral integrity at the individual level, even as “experts” now tell us that our sense of moral awarness is not merely the “gut” reaction of being appalled or realizing that we must step forwrd to save and protect the lives of others whom we perceive to be under threat, but also the reasoned “perception” that the “greatest good” may require the sacrifice of “others” and the reshaping of principle to account for chages in our consciousness of “connection”, that we may embrace a different, more bloody “expediency”.
WE are told and frequently reminded that todays “battlefield” is “everywhere” and its most powerful “battles” are now ocurring within the minds and consciousness of each and every one of us.
DW
Thanks Jeff,
The murders are the lynch pin of their downfall, if that day ever comes.
When we murder over a million Iraq citizens, for nothing they did, the torture is sure to follow but it’s great being Sparta instead of Greece.
Just like rubberneckers at an accident many read your postings but are numb to the facts and the proper response. The torture goons are among us now as they return to a “normal” life here at home.
Thanks to all above for their sensitive and penetrating comments. Yes, I do understand (I am a psychologist, after all) that the horror the U.S. government has unleashed is psychically numbing to individuals, including probably even people at FDL. (Although, I’d note, the people running FDL have found it important enough to give me masthead space to share with Kevin Gosztola, because they understand the importance of this issue.)
The torture and extrajudicial killings are part and parcel of the economic war on the citizenry. Both originate in a militaristic policy, meant to prop up an imperialistic state. The fate of all such states and policies in history is clear: it is doomed to destruction. The historical question of interest for us is: can we make the change as little horrible as possible? Can it be done democratically, or will a future U.S. state, transformed from nominal democracy into an authoritarian or totalitarian dictatorship fall prey to the cycles of revolution and counter-revolution?
I don’t know the answer to those questions, but the parameters of what face us are clear. Someday the American people will be up to the task of the mammoth change required. It could be tomorrow. It could be a hundred years from now. I only hope than when it comes, it does not come too late.
I did not mean to imply, in any fashion, Jeff, that those “running” FDL were deficient in any way in their understanding of “what” is ongoing, nor in their support of you and Kevin.
The important forum provided you and Kevin, I am convinced, simply needs more daily and “deep” attention from those many who gather at FDL, however appalling and revealing the truth it courageously reveals.
Bluntly, I am simply saying that, judging from the number of comments both of your posts often garner, it were important that more of the Lake’s denizens, for their own understanding and the ability it provides of talking knowledgeably to others, find the inclination to “stop by” and avail themselves of what you both (and FDL) are offering for their consideration.
“Dissenter” posts reguire more than justifiable outrage, they require a deeper perusal and contemplation … which is not only good for the soul but sharpens awareness of hidden connection and inevitable consequence.
Jeff, you and Kevin, as well as the TRUTH, deserve a larger audience, which, over time, I am certain will realized.
DW
People enveloped in war become insane. This perpetual war is crazy making. The only way for it to end is to just stop it. Too often that only happens when all sides are exhausted and impoverished.
Those who will read and know are really islands of sanity. At least if it can’t be stopped there will be someone there to pick up the pieces.
As always, thank you for all you do Jeff.
It puzzles me that so many opponents of waterboarding nevertheless adopt the language of the defenders/apologists of the practice. I submit that it is not “simulated” drowning but “controlled” drowning(see this definition of drowning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drowning). “Simulation” serves to diminish the harshness of a “treatment” that, if uninterrupted, would result in death (and may do so anyway – see “near drowning” in the wikipedia article above). While I’m at it, I also take issue with the frequent description of waterboarding as being “reverse engineered” from SERE training. What exactly has been “reverse engineered”? I think the proper word is “adopted.”
Tirman in The Deaths of Others speaks about “the gratuitous violence” of war as if Americans saw in the violence some form of redemption or gratification. More later on that. Thanks everyone for keeping the issue of torture and our responsibility to stand up for the human rights of others, alive here at FDL.
Re “simulated drowning”, etc. I think of waterboarding, and other forms of “water torture” than involve forced intake or suffocation by water (head dunked in toilet, hose down the throat, etc.) to be forms of “partial drowning” or “interrupted drowning”, i.e., it IS drowning, but it is simply not effected unto death. It is meant to stimulate the reflexes and biological response of actual drowning, which is quite a profound experience, made worse when it is combined with the helplessness and rage one feels when totally in another person’s control.
The actual experience is so awful, that even practicing it briefly has been banned now in all the SERE schools.
Jeff,
I’m still spitting mad and today I am getting the little secrets that nobody talked about before the votes! Your post above makes me so sick and now I am boiling because it’s just not going to stop until we the people make it. Just get a load of this and you’ll understand what I mean. The damn dirty, low down, tricksters of Congress!
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/08/02/pentagon-lands-extra-50-billion-out-of-debt-deal/
I’ve long said that Americans would not care about what is happening to ‘furriners’ until they understood that it is happening to Americans.
JK@8::
Parameters may be coming into focus. Specifics not so much. Yet.
The story waiting to happen will bring altmedia into progmedia. And yes, one wonders if the Murkin public has the stomach for it. Numb for some, sociopathy in others. Yet still, it’s eyebrow raising to see “pods and zombies” making more frequent appearances in common language. fwiw, the Canadian press & film media is becoming more open, in no small part due to the successful litigation and uncovered history. They’ve also not become corporate PR wings. Over here, progmedia is our best hope.
The truth is out there.
DW,
Yes, they deserve a larger audience! I think we have all been so focused on the debt/deficit deals and votes that we had to let other posts slip. I am still reeling from the treasonous actions of Congress.
zenmouser writes: “I’ve long said that Americans would not care about what is happening to ‘furriners’ until they understood that it is happening to Americans.”
Exactly. And it is, of course, already happening. It’s been happening for years in the so-called War on Drugs, and now it’s happening to even more people in the so-called War on Terror. Both are just euphemisms for Abusing People With Impunity.
The increasing militarization of the police, the expanding assaults on civil liberties, the encroachment and thuggishness of the TSA, not only at airports but at other venues — our chickens are coming home to roost.
I would say Americans need to brush up on their Martin Niemöller, but it’d fall on deaf ears.