Today in the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.
I cannot turn away.
My ears still ring with the screams of my husband, Dan, who survived tortured during Vietnam, those he has been gone for six years.
Each day my bones and my skin feel his pain, and the pain of those tortured by the United States over the last ten years.
I cannot turn away.
Please, don't turn away.
I know it's not easy, but please stay with me.
excerpts from Murat Kurnaz' book "Five Years of My Life". These excerpts are from his time at Guantanamo.
He was young, around my age, maybe nineteen or twenty. He lay on the ground making soft noises.
...
He didn't have any legs. His wounds were still fresh.
I sat in my cage, hardly daring to look, but every once in a while I had to look in his direction. The stumps of his legs were full of pus. The bandages wrapped around them had turned red and yellow. Everything was bloody and moist. He had frostbite marks on his hands. He seemed hardly able to move his fingers. I watched as he tried to get up. He crawled over to the bucket in his cage and tried to sit on it. He had to go to the toilet. He tried to raise himself up with his hands on the chain-link fence, but he didn't make it. He couldn't hold on with his swollen fingers. Still, he tried, until a guard came and hit his hands with his billy-club. The young man fell to the ground.
Every time he tried to hoist himself onto the bucket, the guards came and hit him on the hands. No one was allowed to touch the fence - that was an iron law. But a young man with no legs? They told him he wasn't allowed to stand up. But how could he have done that without any legs? He wasn't even allowed to lean on the fence or to crawl onto the bucket.
...
The bandages wrapped around Abdul's stumps were never changed. When he took them off himself, they were full of blood and pus. He showed the bandages to the guards and pointed to his open wounds. The guardsw ignored him. Later, I saw how he tried to wash the bandages in his bucket of drinking water. But he could hardly move his hands, so he wasn't able to. And even if he had, where would he have hung them up to dry? He wasn't allowed to touch the fence. He wrapped his stumps back up in the dirty bandages.
Abdul wasn't the only prisoner who had parts of his body amputated. I saw other such cases in Guantanamo. I know of a prisoner who complained of a toothache. He was brought to a dentist, who pulled out his healthy teeth as well as the rotten one. I knew a man from Morocco who used to be a ship captain. He couldn't move one of his little fingers because of frostbite. The rest of his fingers were all right. They told him they would amputate the little finger. They brought him to the doctor, and when he came back, he had no fingers left. They had amputated everything but his thumbs.
The general's goal was to completely deprive us of sleep, and he achieved it.
...
Days and nights without sleep. Blows and new cages. Again, the stabbing sensation of a thousand needles throughout my entire body. I would have loved to step outside my body, but I couldn't.
...
I know longer knew what block I was in. Sometimes, I would start quivering for no reason. The movement of my hands, arms, and legs seemed to be taking place in a dream.
...
Sometimes I heard ringing sounds that weren't there. Other times I heard a low hum in my ear that refused to go away.
...
When I could no longer get up, they sent in the IRF team, who said they would hit me for as along as it took for me to get up and go with them to the next cell. But I was too weak. All I could feel was a buzzing in my head like a siren. They picked me up, and my knees buckled. During the last days of this treatment, they had to carry me around. They'd take me from one cage to the next, then to Jack, and then to another cage. I can only remember bits and pieces of this.
In the end they gave up - probably because it was simply too much work for the guards to carry me around all the time. Over time, it was as if they were the ones getting punished. I was allowed to sleep, and when I woke up, the other prisoners helped me calculate how long this treatment had lasted. Three weeks. I went three weeks without sleep. At this point, I weighed less than 130 pounds.
I was put in a solitary confinement cell like any other, fitted out with corrugated metal sheeting. I had never been to India, and I was surprised that it wasn't cold. I immediately realized that something was wrong. There wasn't any air! The air conditioning unit over the door wasn't humming, and that was the only supply of air here. They had turned off the air conditioning.
...
Suddenly the peephole opened. Tear gas streamed into my cell.
"Quiet! You're not allowed to talk!"
These are but a few examples of what has been done in YOUR name !
And none of it has truly been punished. Yes, it is true that a few of the front line troops at Abu Ghraib went to prison, but Donald Rumsfeld, who authorized the "removal of clothing", "stress positions", the use of phobias, including "dogs", the use of sleep deprivation, the use of sensory deprivation, and other torture techniques, not only has not been punished, but has been enriched since leaving his office. The Principals Group, who included Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, and other high officials, has all gotten away scott-free and been enriched since leaving their offices. They should all be standing trial for war crimes, yet they are given the respectability of being asked to comment in the media and being quoted as experts. They are not shunned, as would happen in a moral and just society.
What are we telling our children, our grandchildren, my niece and nephew, when we turn away and allow these crimes to go unpunished ?
Will YOU turn away ? What will YOU do ?
Will YOU write to the President ?
Will YOU write and speak to your senators and their staff members ?
Will YOU write and speak to your congressional representative and his or her staff members ?
What will YOU do ?
What will you DO ?
Will you join me in fighting for, in standing for
justice and accountability,
For Dan,
Heather