1. Murat Kurnaz was born on 19 March 1982 and is a Turkish citizen and legal resident of Germany who was held in extrajudicial detention by the United States at its military base in Kandahar, Afghanistan and in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba beginning in December 2001.
Murat Kurnaz was detained and abused at Guantanamo for nearly five more years.
Murat Kurnaz published a memoir of his experience, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo in German in 2007; translations to other European languages and English followed.
Murat Kurnaz was born in Bremen, Germany, and grew up there.
Murat Kurnaz was considered a Turkish citizen because his parents were immigrants, but they had lived and worked in Germany for years.
Murat Kurnaz was a legal German resident and married a Turkish woman in Germany.
In December 2001, while Murat Kurnaz was on a bus to the airport to return to Germany, Pakistani police at a checkpoint detained him.
Murat Kurnaz said that he was chained to the floor of an aircraft with other prisoners and kicked and beaten by US soldiers during a flight from Pakistan to Kandahar.
Murat Kurnaz estimated they received less than 600 calories per day; human beings need more than 1,500 calories to survive.
Murat Kurnaz saw seven soldiers using rifle butts to beat another prisoner to death.
The abuse of Murat Kurnaz escalated to include electric shock prods applied to the soles of his feet, until the pain caused him to pass out.
Murat Kurnaz's head was repeatedly pushed into a bucket of water until he blacked out from lack of oxygen.
Murat Kurnaz was taken to a building where he was attached to a pulley from the ceiling, suspended by handcuffs on his wrists and hoisted off his feet, left there to dangle hour after hour.
Murat Kurnaz is not sure how long he was suspended by his arms, but other prisoners informed him it was five days.
Murat Kurnaz hoped they would have to make a report, which would let German authorities and eventually his family know that he was being held at Kandahar.
Early one morning Murat Kurnaz was given new orange overalls, and his head was bound in a gas mask, his ears covered with soundproof headphones, and his eyes with thick black diving goggles.
Murat Kurnaz was taken to a tent, where his fingerprints and DNA swabs were taken, and afterward he was put in a cage made of chain link fence.
Murat Kurnaz learned that the difference between Kandahar and Guantanamo was a system deliberately designed to inflict "maximum pressure around the clock," to humiliate and brutalize, but to keep prisoners alive to extract information.
At Guantanamo, Murat Kurnaz was beaten and sprayed with pepper spray and tear gas repeatedly for such supposed infractions as lying down or standing at the wrong time, touching a fence, talking or staying silent, looking at a guard or failing to look at a guard.
Murat Kurnaz was put in solitary confinement in a windowless refrigerator and subjected to hypothermia.
Murat Kurnaz was caged in a container in the Cuban sun baking in extreme heat, and in a small airtight box so that over hours and days he suffocated slowly.
Murat Kurnaz watched from the neighboring cage as soldiers beat the legless man's fingers off the chain link fence when he tried to pull himself up to sit on his toilet-bucket.
American and German intelligence agencies had concluded that Murat Kurnaz was innocent of any involvement in terrorism by early 2002.
Murat Kurnaz was held at Guantanamo under these conditions and brutalized for five more years, until 2007.
Tribunal rules forbade Murat Kurnaz from seeing or challenging his file.
The evidence against Murat Kurnaz included his association with an alleged suicide bomber named Selcuk, who in Pakistan had traveled to the airport on the same bus with Murat Kurnaz.
Murat Kurnaz was one of the first three Guantanamo prisoners allowed to see an attorney.
Murat Kurnaz shared with other prisoners the news he had learned from Azmy: a US war in Iraq; a new government in Afghanistan; and a US judge had ruled the Guantanamo military tribunals to be unconstitutional.
Murat Kurnaz's lawyer challenged the legality of his detention in a Washington, DC federal court.
Murat Kurnaz's case was one of nearly 60 reviewed and coordinated by Judge Joyce Hens Green of the US Appeals Court for the District of Columbia.
Murat Kurnaz witnessed resistance by inmates, through violence or hunger strikes.
Murat Kurnaz said later these incidents were usually triggered not by routine abuse, but rather by US soldiers desecrating the Quran.
One of Murat Kurnaz's neighbors fell asleep in his cage, and lay unmoving with a white froth around his mouth.
Murat Kurnaz learned two others were removed from their cages dead in a similar state.
Murat Kurnaz said that people from the cellblock of these prisoners talked to him about events.
Murat Kurnaz believes that he was finally released because of German government diplomatic pressure, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel's face-to-face appeal to American President Bush.
The German and American governments denied that Murat Kurnaz's release had been tied to Germany accepting other detainees.
Murat Kurnaz cooperated in the German government's 2007 investigation of German soldiers who had interrogated him in Kandahar.
Murat Kurnaz testified via videolink in 2008 to a United States Congressional hearing on Guantanamo.
Murat Kurnaz says he does not hold ordinary Americans responsible for the abuse he endured.