NEWARK, NJ – Baher Azmy, professor of law at Seton Hall University School of Law’s Center for Social Justice and legal counsel to former Guantánamo detainee Murat Kurnaz, filed suit today in federal court to compel the Department of Defense to release transcripts relating to his client’s detention.

The government held Kurnaz, along with hundreds of other men, at Guantánamo Bay for over four years without charges or trial. Instead of a trial, the military held its own “combatant status review tribunals” and “administrative review board” hearings, with the military’s own officers to judge the detainees. It is the transcripts of these hearings – which purported to justify Kurnaz’s detention – that are sought by today’s suit, filed in federal district court for the Southern District of New York.

In January 2005, Judge Joyce Hens Green of federal district court in Washington, D.C. ruled that Kurnaz’s detention was illegal. She pointed to five exculpatory statements by U.S. intelligence authorities and questioned why the Defense Department had ignored them.

“Not only is Kurnaz obviously innocent of any wrongdoing, the United States actually knew of his innocence as early as 2002,” said Azmy. “Why wasn’t this evidence shared with him? How did the government justify detaining him in spite of this evidence? The government needs to come clean and explain to Murat Kurnaz and the American people why the military continued to detain a person who was never connected to terrorism.”

Though Kurnaz was transferred to German custody and allowed to return home last August, there has been no official declaration from the United States government explaining why he was released and whether he is, or ever was, a terrorist suspect.

Last January, Judge Jed S. Rakoff ordered the Department of Defense to release Guantánamo hearing transcripts that the government had wrongfully withheld in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Associated Press. Among the transcripts of 63 detainees’ Administrative Review Board Proceedings disclosed pursuant to that court order, Kurnaz’s were absent. Two months ago, Azmy submitted a Freedom of Information Act request of his own, seeking all transcripts from Kurnaz’s Combatant Status Review Tribunal and Administrative Review Board proceedings. The government’s failure to provide a substantive response to that request, said Azmy, triggered his decision to go to court today to obtain the transcripts for his client.

“The government’s evidence against Kurnaz has ranged from incredibly tangential to at times preposterous,” said Azmy, who has represented Kurnaz since July 2004 and visited with him in Guantánamo several times. “Now the government is withholding the transcripts of its hearings because it doesn’t want the world to see that it knew it was making a mistake and keeping an innocent man locked up to save face.”

Kurnaz had gone to Pakistan to study in 2001. He was arrested by local police as part of a routine bus stop, then handed over to the U.S. military. He was never charged with any crime, nor was he alleged to have entered Afghanistan, trained militarily in any way, or ever to have held a weapon.

Both U.S. and German intelligence concluded in as early as 2002 that Kurnaz had no connections to Al Qaeda, the Taliban or any other specific terrorist threat. German intelligence sources concluded that Kurnaz was simply at the “wrong place at the wrong time” and that he had “nothing to do with terrorism, let alone Al-Qaeda.”

The primary evidence the U.S. government relied upon publicly to support his detention is that one of his friends in Germany allegedly blew himself up in a suicide bombing in Istanbul in 2003. Apart from the fact that this incident was alleged to have occurred two years after Kurnaz was detained in Guantánamo, it has been conclusively proven false. The alleged suicide bomber is alive and well in Bremen and under no suspicion of terrorism by the German government.

Azmy is represented by himself and colleague Scott Michelman, also of the Seton Hall Law School Center for Social Justice. Third-year Seton Hall law students David Gardner and Pinar Ozgu assisted with the drafting of the complaint and development of the case.

A copy of the complaint can be found on Seton Hall Law School’s webpage: http://law.shu.edu/administration/public_relations/press_releases/
2006/kurnaz_complaint_12_21_06.pdf.
 


The only private law school in New Jersey, Seton Hall University School of Law was founded in 1951, and is located in the city of Newark. Seton Hall Law School offers both day and evening programs leading to the Juris Doctor (J.D.), Master of Laws (LL.M.) and Master of Science in Jurisprudence (M.S.J.) degrees. For more information on Seton Hall Law School, visit law.shu.edu.