Barack Obama promised to close the Guantanamo Bay “detention camp” during his first presidential campaign, but failed to deliver when in office. Today, forty-one people are still officially held captive. At its beginning, the camp in the east of the Cuban island, opened in 2002, was in a process of substantial expansion. Still, in its first year, George W. Bush’s administration did release a small number of captives.

Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen born and raised in the German city of Bremen, could have been among them. Some months after January 2002, when Kurnaz was taken to Guantanamo, it was clear to intelligence operatives from both the United States and Germany that they were dealing with an innocent man.

However, in autumn 2002, instead of pushing for his release, the German government initiated measures to ban Kurnaz from reentering the country. Chair of the decisive meeting was Frank-Walter Steinmeier, then head of the chancellery under Gerhard Schröder and until last month the country’s foreign minister. For four more years Kurnaz had to remain in Guantanamo, where he experienced, in his own words, “beatings, endless solitary confinement, freezing temperatures and extreme heat, days of forced sleeplessness,” among other abuses.