Religious Abuse in the ’War on Terror’

Religious Abuse in the ’War on Terror’

Michael Peppard

In Fünf Jahre meines Lebens (“Five Years of My Life”), the most powerful memoir yet published by a former Guantánamo detainee, the German Murat Kurnaz remembers an especially disturbing episode that took place while he was in a cage at Camp X-Ray: “One time there was a long, tortured cry. I turned around. There was a second and then a third cry, but they sounded different from the cries of people being beaten. It was the long and frightening wail of death. Through the chain-link fencing I could see a guard in the cage of one of the Arab prisoners. I immediately knew what had happened.”

Reading these lines for the first time, you might imagine, as I did, that these cries signaled some extreme form of physical abuse—electrocution, waterboarding, or rape, something reserved for Donald Rumsfeld’s “worst of the worst.” I certainly couldn’t have guessed what Murnaz actually saw that day:

We were searched every day. They even searched the Qur’ans. The guards grabbed the books by their spines and shook them to see if anything was concealed in the pages. This guard must have thrown the Qur’an on the ground-otherwise the prisoner wouldn’t have howled like that. I saw the guard trampling on something. Some of the prisoners sprang to their feet. A terrible wailing arose. One by one, all the prisoners were losing their cool. “Allahu akbar!” they yelled. “Don’t do that!” I screamed. The guard continued trampling on the Qur’an. It was as though lightning had struck in a zoo.

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http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=2390