Ex-Afghanistan Detainee Alleges Torture by U.S.

A resident of Germany who was imprisoned for two months at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan has told an interviewer that his interrogators hung him from a ceiling for five days and that several doctors periodically checked him before authorizing the torture to continue.

Murat Kurnaz said that shortly after his capture in Pakistan in fall 2001, the American interrogators insisted he admit to being an al-Qaeda operative and associate of 9/11 plotter Mohamed Atta. Kurnaz said when he said he did not know Atta or refused to talk, the interrogators punished him by hanging him by his arms to the rafters of a freezing aircraft hangar.

Kurnaz's allegations about his abusive treatment in a prison at the U.S. military base in Kandahar are to be publicly aired for the first time tomorrow on CBS's "60 Minutes." He was released by the U.S. military in August 2006 after spending nearly five years at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Kurnaz made similar allegations of systematic torture in 2005 when he was still a U.S. prisoner, according to newly declassified notes his attorney took during a conversation at Guantanamo. Kurnaz said then that interrogators in Kandahar dunked his head in water, administered electric shocks to the soles of his feet and hung him by his hands -- when he denied being a terrorist.

Kurnaz, who the U.S. military eventually freed without giving a reason, is publishing a book in April that describes his experiences in custody. An ethnic Turk raised in Germany, Kurnaz traveled to Pakistan to study Islam in 2001. He was seized by Pakistani police after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and was turned over to U.S. troops as a terrorism suspect for a cash bounty, military records show.

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