AP News, April 13th, 2007
Rocker Patti Smith said Friday that her concern for the hundreds of men imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay compelled her to record a song about a former detainee.
"I feel responsible as an American citizen," Smith told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from New York. "It's a terrible injustice and I think it will be a stain upon us when history examines this period."
Smith's "Without Chains" focuses on Murat Kurnaz, a German-born Turkish citizen who said he was kept under fluorescent lights for 24 hours at a time and complained of being beaten at the U.S. military detention center in southeast Cuba. Detainees are held there on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or the Taliban, many without the opportunity to face trial.
"I'm not really politically articulate, so I try to respond to the things that move me in a humanistic way," the 60-year-old singer told the AP. "I can't imagine people languishing in prison for years while other people are trying to decide what to do."
At the Pentagon, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon said Guantanamo is reserved for the most egregious terror suspects and insisted that the U.S. military does not hold any detainee for longer than necessary.
In the track, which Smith said will be posted soon on her Web site for downloading, she sings: "For four long years I wasn't a man, dreaming chained with the lights on in another world, a netherworld. Four long years with nothing to say. Thoughts impure at Guantanamo Bay."
Kurnaz, 25, was released in August from the detention center without being charged and flown to Germany. In October, German prosecutors said they found no evidence linking Kurnaz to Islamic radicals in Pakistan or Afghanistan and formally dropped their investigation.
U.S. officials have maintained Kurnaz was a member of al-Qaida, based on classified evidence. Kurnaz's New Jersey-based lawyer, Baher Azmy, has told the AP that he was shown the classified evidence and found it unpersuasive. He also said it contained a half-dozen statements exonerating Kurnaz.
Smith, who straddled the hippie and punk eras with her 1975 album "Horses," is best known for her hit "Because the Night," co-written with Bruce Springsteen.
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On the Net:
Patti Smith: http://www.pattismith.net/intro.html
