Murat Kurnaz was released in August from the dentainment center at Guantanamo Baywhere he’d spent the last half of five years imprisonment for being a suspected ‘enemy combantant.’ A Turkish citizen, Mr. Kurnaz was born and raised in Germany. In October, 2001, he and a friend planned to fly to Pakistan to immerse themselves in islamic studies and travel from mosque to mosque with the Tablighi Jama’at.
Tablighi Jama’at is a Muslim missionary and revival movement founded in 1920’s. It’s center of operations is in New Delhi and the movement has spread to 150 countries and has an estimated, active, following of 70 to 80 million people. Imagine the mormons with numbers like that. One could easily predict those who fear Islam and the muslim world would fear an organization like Talbighi Jama’at; And that intelligence analysts would describe it like this: "Jama’at Al Tablighi, a Pakistan-based Islamic missionary organization, is becoming increasingly radicalized, and is being used as a cover to mask travel and activities of terrorists including members of al Qaida." It is inevitable that persons involved in what the U.S.A., or anyone, views as terrorist activities will take advantage of an infrastructure like and as large as Tablighi Jama’at’s. But does it make it a true terrorist front? That would be like saying because some mormons have been involved in crimes, the Mormon organization is a front for criminal activity; or, since serial killers have travelled by Greyhound, Greyhound is a front for a serial killer transportation service. That’s absurd. Any large structure is open to unintended use. Governments aren’t any different. The people who study Tablighi Jama’at believe that it is essentially what Graham Fuller, a former CIA official and expert on Islam, characterized it as: "[a] peaceful and apolitical preaching-to-the-people movement." Jamal J. Ellias, a Professor of Religion at Amherst College makes the point that: “…the Tablighis formally and actively believe that traveling to engage in missionary activity fully discharges any religious obligation to engage in Jihad.” The risks we take.
Nevertheless, Mr. Kurnaz, was picked up weeks after arriving in Pakistan, pulled off a bus because, according to the New York Times, he had stayed at a Tablighi Jama’at hostile the night before; by January of 2002 he was in a U.S. prison in Kandahar. The friend he had been traveling with didn’t make it that far: Selcuk Biligin was detained at the airport in Germany because of an unrelated outstanding warrant. That was the sign Kurnaz received that his movements were being observed. But how was he to make that connection? He was a pioneer in getting pulled in new net of the war on terror. Since Mohammed Atta and his cell of infidel-kamikaze pilots were living in Germany, it was a bad place from which to leave, and a bad time, for on an Islamic missionary journey to Pakistan. Disappointing words to write. Five years, later, Mr Kurnaz looks like a man in his forties. He says he’s been tortured, sexually humiliated, and isolated. He’s looking at the fact that Germany wouldn’t except him back. He isn’t a citizen of Germany, but he has permanent residence status in Bremen, the city of his birth; however permanent residents need to check in every six months. Since Mr. Kurnaz was incarcerated, he was unable to renew his residency; since he lost his residency, Germany wouldn’t except him when the U.S. tried to return him to German custody. So he ends up spending five years of his life, with no recourse to do anything but workout, for which he was also punished. As he embarks on his journey of seeking the form justice takes in his case he is aware that “…those years in prison…Nobody could give them back, even if they gave me several million dollars. Cars and houses, you can buy. Freedom, you can’t buy.”
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Bush administration announced that detainees released from the Guantanamo prison, or other secret military prisons, are not permitted to tell anybody, not even their lawyers, about the techniques used on them by their interrogators because it "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage," to the ‘war on terror’. There isn’t much to say then. The Khans, a Pakistani family who call Maryland home, have a 26 year old son who is one of 14 detainees recently transfered from CIA "black’ sites to Guantanamo. But the government is blocking Khan’s lawyers access to the detainees; since Khan "was detained by CIA in this program, he may have come into possession of information, including locations of detention, conditions of detention, and alternative interrogation techniques that is classified at the TOP SECRET//SCI level," CIA Information Review Officer Marilyn A. Dorn states in an affidavit. (SCI stands for ’sensitive compartmented informantion’) If that doesn’t sound grim, at least to the family Khan, this must: detainees such as Khan previously held in CIA site have no automatic right to speak to lawyers because of the the Military Commissions Act, sign by President Bush last month, stripped them of access to U.S. courts. Military courts are their only recourse.
If ever a Nation waged a campaign of fear on the psychology of humanity it is the United States now. People around the world have made choices in the last five years that were influenced by this ‘war on terror’, touched by a paranoia not their own. A young man will think twice about going on a missionary program with Tablighi Jama’at. Like industrial fisheries who drag their trawl nets along the sea bed, tossing the unfortunate by-catch away, the Bush administration’s methods of catching terror suspects not only damage the environment we all share but ruin individual lives (radiating into their families): scooped up one day because they are Muslim and on holiday, tossed into a dehumanizing prison for years without contact with family or lawyers– it is a nightmare perpetrated in our names in some form every day by the U.S. government . That U.S. stands for US. There are a lot of things going on in the world, things are changing fast. Perhaps every time I hear or read the word terror I will visualize its opposite, that thing that beats within our chests(imagine the pounding hearts of the women in Palestine, unarmed, standing before their comrades) with its own kind of mind; or children, in a war sundered city opening their doors and going out to play for the first time in years because the war is over, with smiles as big and bright as the sun. The holy trinity of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam– father, son, holy ghost– dissociated from their harmonizing; for within the harmony of the three there is a great peaceable chord, a transforming potential.
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