An American Gulag (William Grigg)

William Grigg says the false imprisonment and continuous brutal torture of Murat Kurnaz at the hands of the U.S. military is strikingly similar to the methods employed at the infamous Soviet Gulags. An excerpt:

At one point, driven to a frenzy of violence by Dolgun's quiet but persistent refusal to admit espionage activities of any kind, Sidorov flew into a spittle-flinging paroxysm of rage, beating the American and threatening to kill him and track down his family. Seeking to bend the recalcitrant American to the State's will, Sidorov put the matter in the most elementary terms imaginable:

"The State f***s you, you stupid son of a bitch!"

If that specific phrase was ever directed at Murat Kurnaz during his five years in U.S. military custody, the young man is too decorous to admit it. Kurnaz, a Turkish national and legal resident of Germany, was sold into the hands of torturers for $3,000 by Pakistani bounty hunters in late 2001. He was detained in a former Soviet military base in Afghanistan before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. His tormentors wore the uniforms of the United States Armed Forces, and the treatment inflicted on him as an "unlawful enemy combatant" were nearly identical to the torture methods applied to Dolgun by the Soviet secret police.

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