Murat Kurnaz (born 19 March 1982) is a Turkish citizen and legal resident of Germany who was held in extrajudicial detention[2] 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.

[7][8] He 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.

[11] Later, Kurnaz learned that after its invasion of Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks, the United States had distributed fliers there and in Pakistan promising "enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life" as a bounty for suspected terrorists.

Later the US released such photos to the media as "evidence" of his capture in the Afghanistan war zone, although Kurnaz and all the prisoners had just been flown in from Pakistan.

[18] The abuse of Kurnaz escalated to include electric shock prods applied to the soles of his feet, until the pain caused him to pass out.

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.

[23] Early one morning 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.

[25] 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.

[27] 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.

A series of interrogators always asked the same questions, did not appear to believe his answers, and when he passed out from exhaustion, they hit him in the face and head as "they couldn't think of any better way to keep me awake.

He 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.

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.

[3] The Combatant Status Review Tribunals began after the US Supreme Court decision in Rasul v. Bush that detainees had a right to due process and habeas corpus to challenge the grounds of their detention.

A Summary of Evidence memo was prepared for each detainee listing the allegations that supported detention as an "enemy combatant".

[42] Based on this evidence the tribunal ruled Kurnaz a dangerous "enemy combatant," a member of Al Q'aeda.

[42] In October 2004, after two years of abuse and weeks after the tribunal had classified him as an "enemy combatant", a civilian American lawyer, Professor Baher Azmy from the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), succeeded in getting an interview with Kurnaz.

Professor Azmy brought a handwritten letter from Kurnaz's mother, proof that his family knew of his situation and was working for his release.

[43] His mother's German lawyer had heard that the US Center for Constitutional Rights represented Guantánamo detainees; they contacted the CCR, who assigned Azmy to the case.

[45] 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.

In response, on 15 October 2004, the Department of Defense published 32 pages of unclassified documents related to his Combatant Status Review Tribunal.

[49] The file documented that neither German nor United States Army investigators found any evidence of a tie between Kurnaz and Al-Qaeda, or involvement in any terrorist activities, and had concluded in 2002 that he should be released.

[52] After the arrival of General Geoffrey Miller in late 2002 (the abuse by the military was reported as considerably worsened during his command), the inmates coordinated a welcome, emptying their buckets of excrement on him as he walked past their cages.

"[53] For dumping excrement on General Miller, Kurnaz reported prisoners received an extra month of solitary confinement.

The prisoners were two Saudi Arabians Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser al-Zahrani, and a Yemeni citizen, Ali Abdullah Ahmed.

In 2009 the law school at Seton Hall University released a study, alleging that DOD claimed the suicides in a coverup of homicides due to torture.

[61] In a joint investigation, reported in January 2010, Harper's Magazine and NBC News also alleged that the military had committed homicides in the course of torturing detainees and tried to cover up these three deaths.

[64] The German magazine Focus reported in 2006 that the Bush administration was trying to tie the release of Kurnaz to Germany's agreeing to accept four other Guantanamo detainees.

As during his arrival at Guantanamo, he was transported to his destination by plane, restrained in shackles and wearing a muzzle, opaque goggles, and sound-blocking ear-muffs, and denied food and water during the 17-hour flight.

British author John le Carré described it in a blurb as "[t]he most compassionate, truthful, and dignified account of the disgrace of Guantanamo that you are ever likely to read.

[4] On 15 June 2008, the McClatchy News Service published a series of articles based on interviews with 66 former Guantanamo captives, including Kurnaz.