One Muslim's Odyssey to Guantánamo
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
June 5, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/international/europe/05prisoner.html

BREMEN, Germany - About two months after the attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept.
11, 2001, the Pakistani police picked up Murat Kurnaz,
a 19-year-old Muslim from Germany who was traveling by
bus near the city of Peshawar.

The police turned Mr. Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen born
in Germany, over to the American military in Pakistan,
who in turn transferred him to Afghanistan, and he was
held as a terrorist suspect.

Mr. Kurnaz, it seemed, had chosen a poor time to go to
Pakistan, just as the American war against Al Qaeda
and the Taliban was getting started. Could he have
been a Muslim fighter, recruited to help the enemy?
The fact that he was a religious young Muslim from
this city in northern Germany, only an hour's train
ride from Hamburg, where the main plotters of the
Sept. 11 attacks had lived, apparently supported the
American suspicions that he was.

Indeed, Mr. Kurnaz's lawyer in the United States said
that interrogators in Afghanistan seemed convinced
that he was an associate of Mohamed Atta, who is
believed to have piloted one of the hijacked planes
flown into the World Trade Center.

Though no link to Mr. Atta was ever found, Mr. Kurnaz
was sent to the American prison camp at Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba, where he has been held for about three
years now as an enemy combatant, specifically accused
of being a member or ally of Al Qaeda or its terrorist
network. The evidence against him is that, while he
was traveling in Pakistan, he was the guest of a
militant Islamic group said to have supported
terrorist acts against the United States.

In addition, Mr. Kurnaz was known to have intended to
travel to Pakistan with a close friend, Selcuk Bilgin,
another Turkish citizen from Bremen. And Mr. Bilgin,
according to an American military tribunal's findings
on Mr. Kurnaz, later carried out a suicide bombing.

But in recent months, as details of the charges
against Mr. Kurnaz have come to be known, German
officials here in Bremen who have investigated both
Mr. Kurnaz and Mr. Bilgin have reacted to the American
conclusions about Mr. Kurnaz with astonished
incredulity.

The most striking element in the picture is that,
contrary to the American assumption about Mr. Bilgin
having carried out a suicide bombing, the Germans say
that claim is demonstrably false.

"He lives here," Uwe Picard, the Bremen criminal
prosecutor who carried out the German investigation
into Mr. Bilgin, said in an interview in his office
here. "He is still alive."

Moreover, even American documents indicated that much
of the evidence on Mr. Kurnaz actually seemed more to
exonerate him than to incriminate him. The decision of
the three-member Guantánamo tribunal that found Mr.
Kurnaz to be an enemy combatant last September refers
to classified material in his file and indicates that
that is where the reputed links to Al Qaeda would be
documented.

But a Federal District Court judge, Joyce Hens Green,
in reviewing Mr. Kurnaz's case early this year, found
that there was only a single document, called R-19,
that incriminates Mr. Kurnaz as a member of Al Qaeda.
About this material she concludes, "Not only is the
document rife with hearsay and lacking in detailed
support for its conclusions, but it is also in direct
conflict with classified exculpatory documents."

Judge Green's summary of the classified file was
briefly unclassified earlier this year and reported on
by The Washington Post in March. It contained several
intelligence reports that exonerated Mr. Kurnaz of the
very charges the Guantánamo tribunal made against him.

There is one report by the Command Intelligence Task
Force, the intelligence unit of the Southern Command
whose responsibility includes Guantánamo, that said,
"CITF has no definite link/evidence of detainee having
an association with Al Qaeda or making any specific
threat against the United States."

Yet, Mr. Kurnaz remains in detention in Guantánamo,
and the three-member Combatant Status Review Tribunal
that heard his case last year concluded, "By a
preponderance of the evidence, Mr. Kurnaz meets the
criteria to be designated as an enemy combatant." It
is a designation that means in theory that Mr. Kurnaz
can be kept in prison until President Bush declares
that the campaign against terrorism is over.

Asked the reasons for the determination in the Kurnaz
case, a Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Alvin Plexico,
said, "The bottom line is that we have a Combatant
Status Review Tribunal to review all this information,
and they have come to the conclusion that he is an
enemy combatant, and they are certainly in a better
position to judge than you and I are."

But an investigation of Mr. Kurnaz's case reveals no
evidence that he ever fought against the United States
or planned to.

Though Mr. Kurnaz was born in Bremen he has remained a
Turkish citizen because his parents, who came to
Germany as guest workers from Turkey more than three
decades ago, never became German citizens.

He grew up in Bremen in a largely secular Muslim
family. But when he became 17 or 18, Mr. Kurnaz became
more religiously observant, his mother, Rubiye Kurnaz,
said in an interview in his lawyer's office in Bremen.
He grew a beard, she said, and began going to a
largely Arab mosque, rather than the Turkish mosque
that his family attended. He also began to criticize
other members of his family for what he saw as their
lack of piety.

Three weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Kurnaz
decided to go to Pakistan. The purpose of his trip,
according to his German lawyer, Bernard Docke, was to
deepen his knowledge of Islam. Mr. Bilgin intended to
accompany him on this trip.

As things turned out, Mr. Bilgin was stopped from
leaving Germany by the border police because he had
failed to pay a fine for an unrelated misdemeanor.
According to Mr. Picard, the prosecutor, when the
police called Mr. Bilgin's family to see if the fine
could be paid so Mr. Bilgin could leave, one of the
family members said that they did not want him going
to Pakistan for fear that he would join a Muslim group
there fighting against the United States.

It was this comment that prompted Mr. Picard's
investigation into Mr. Bilgin and the Abu Bakr mosque
that he and Mr. Kurnaz attended.

"Of course, we were concerned with the possibility
that Murat Kurnaz had been radicalized by a preacher
at the mosque," Mr. Picard said. According to some
officials, German intelligence has identified one
member of the Abu Bakr mosque as having recruited
fighters for pro-Qaeda groups, which would seem to
justify an effort to find out if Mr. Kurnaz was one of
them.

But Mr. Picard said his investigation of the mosque,
which included interrogations of the suspected
recruiter and a search of his home, produced no
evidence of terrorist connections or of any attempts
to recruit Muslims there to fight against the United
States.

"We get rumors sometimes that they preach hatred
there," Mr. Picard said of the Abu Bakr mosque. "But
there is no proof."

Though Mr. Bilgin was prevented from leaving Germany,
Mr. Kurnaz did go to Pakistan on Oct. 3, 2001. About
three weeks later, he was arrested by the Pakistani
police in a routine check of a passenger bus near the
northern city of Peshawar. According to Mr. Docke, the
Pakistani police held Mr. Kurnaz for about a week and
then turned him over to the American military in
Pakistan. From there, Mr. Kurnaz was taken to Bagram
Air Base in Afghanistan and eventually transferred to
Guantánamo, where he has been since.

"For us what is very important," Mr. Docke said, "is
that he had no weapons when he was arrested, that he
was arrested in Pakistan, not on the battlefield in
Afghanistan, and he was arrested by the Pakistani
police during a routine check of a bus."

But his very presence in Pakistan raised suspicions
among American military interrogators, and so did the
fact that, by his own account, he was the guest in
Pakistan of an Islamic group, Tablighi Jamaat. The
group, which is based mostly in Pakistan and
Bangladesh and keeps up an energetic fundamentalist
missionary drive in many European countries, was
described by the Guantánamo tribunal as a supporter of
terrorism. That link, and Mr. Kurnaz's association
with Mr. Bilgin, are the two unclassified charges made
against him to support the tribunal's conclusion that
he is an "enemy combatant."

Furthermore, the tribunal's findings listed no
particulars of how Tablighi Jamaat is thought to have
supported terrorism against the United States. Some
experts say it has no record of supporting terrorism
or Islamic militancy, but others have said it
supported the mujahedeen fighting Russians in
Afghanistan and aids Muslim separatists in Kashmir.
The tribunal's decision on Mr. Kurnaz only refers to
the fact that he received free food, lodging and
schooling from the group.

As for Mr. Kurnaz's travels from mosque to mosque in
Pakistan, some people who make such trips come into
contact with more militant schools of Islam, and
counterterrorism experts have noted that some of those
who are attracted to the group move on to more
militant groups.

But one expert on Tablighi, Jamal J. Elias, a
professor of religion at Amherst College, wrote in a
letter that Mr. Kurnaz's travels were exactly the sort
of activity that the group undertakes in its efforts
to encourage greater Muslim piety and that nothing he
was reported to have done with the group indicated
that he was being recruited as a terrorist.




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