"Three US Detainees Commit Suicide; Guantanamo prisoners found hanging in cells" by Charlie Savage Boston Globe June 11, 2006
WASHINGTON -Three detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Navy Base in Cuba were found dead yesterday after committing suicide, marking the first prisoner deaths at the US military prison since it opened 4 1/2 years ago.
Guards discovered the three men -- two Saudi prisoners and a Yemeni -- just after midnight yesterday. They were hanging in their cells from nooses improvised from bedsheets and clothing, the Guantanamo prison commander, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, said in a conference call.
Pentagon officials said the three men who committed suicide were held in the Guantanamo compound with the highest security. (Brennan Linsley/ Associated Press/ File 2006)
The men, who were in the same cellblock, were not breathing, and emergency medical teams were unable to revive them, Harris said. He declined to release their names, but said they had all been involved in long-term hunger strikes over the past year.
Pentagon officials said the three men were in the compound with the highest security.
"The detainees we have here are dangerous men, committed to killing Americans on the battlefield," Harris said. "They are smart. They are creative. They are committed. They have no regard for life -- either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but rather was an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us."
Yeah, they warred on you by killing themselves!
This is a disgusting fascist murderer if I've ever seen one.
Lawyers for some Guantanamo detainees took a different stance, expressing outrage in their own conference call. They attributed the deaths to mounting frustration and hopelessness among the detainee population, most of whom have been held for four years without charges.
"Nobody should be surprised by this," said Josh Colangelo-Bryan, who witnessed his client attempt to hang himself in October and called guards to stop it. "One of my clients told me that he would rather die than live there forever without rights."
Lawyer Anant Raut, in a separate interview, also reported a "mounting sense of frustration and futility" among the detainee population.
"Unfortunately, maybe these three gave up hope and were hoping that through their deaths they can bring some more attention to the situation down there," he said.
Harris said none of the three detainees who were found dead had been represented by a lawyer, nor were any of them among the handful who have been charged with conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism before a military commission.
One of the men, Harris added, was a "mid- to high-level Al Qaeda operative." Another had been involved in a prison uprising in Afghanistan, and a third was involved in another Middle Eastern group deemed to be terrorists. He declined, however, to offer any specific details about the men or the evidence against them.
White House spokesman Tony Snow said President Bush "expressed serious concern" when he was told about the suicides. Bush, who is at Camp David this weekend, was told of the deaths by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
The United States is currently holding about 460 people at Guantanamo. The government began transporting detainees there in January 2002, shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent war to remove the Taliban in Afghanistan . More than 280 additional detainees have been released or transferred.
Numerous hunger strikes and suicide attempts have occurred at the prison over the past four years. But until yesterday, none had succeeded. The military has used force-feeding to keep those on hunger strikes alive, and Harris said all three of the detainees had been force-fed in the past.
Autopsies would be performed on the bodies, he said, and the circumstances of the deaths would be investigated independently by the Navy Criminal Investigative Service.
In Miami, General Bantz J. Craddock, the head of the US Southern Command, said that he did not know whether the detainees' remains would be interred at Guantanamo or sent home to Saudi Arabia and Yemen. He said the State Department was talking with those governments about how to handle the situation.
"The remains of the deceased detainees are being treated with the utmost respect," Craddock said. "A cultural adviser is assisting . . . to ensure that the remains are handled in a culturally and religiously appropriate manner."
Yeah, that will make people happy.
I think I'm going to puke, readers!
Former Army Captain James Yee, the onetime Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo, said in an interview yesterday that he had prepared detailed Muslim burial procedures when stationed at the base in 2002 and 2003.
Under the procedures, he said, if the military decides to bury the detainees at the base, the bodies would be washed and put in the ground wrapped in white sheets rather than placed in coffins, according to Muslim tradition.
The military has set aside a section in a base cemetery for Muslim use, Yee added. The base ordered U-shaped concrete covers to go over detainee bodies, making it easier to exhume them in case their remains were later sent to their home nations.
Muslim tradition usually calls for bodies to be buried with 24 hours of death, a timeline that could not be met because the bodies are undergoing autopsies.
So we DISRESPECT them once again!
Harris said the military had obtained a fatwah, or religious ruling, from a "reputable imam" that the 24-hour deadline could be waived when the cause of death is under investigation.
The suicides were the latest in a string of actions that have recently renewed global attention on the Guantanamo prison.
Which quickly fades from the AmeriKan MSM!!!
Last month, two detainees tried to kill themselves by taking overdoses of prescription medicines they had secretly hoarded. On the same day, a group of detainees ambushed guards in a separate part of the base.
Also last month, the United Nations Committee Against Torture called on the United States to close Guantanamo. And Britain's attorney general, Peter Goldsmith, said the prison "should close" because it is an "unacceptable" symbol of injustice.
Yesterday's suicides occurred a day after Bush, speaking to reporters at Camp David during a visit by the prime minister of Denmark, said his visitor had raised the issue of Guantanamo with him. Bush said that he, too, would like Guantanamo to be closed.
"We would like to end Guantanamo," Bush said. "We'd like it to be empty. And we're now in the process of working with countries to repatriate people. But there are some that, if put out on the streets, would create grave harm to American citizens and other citizens of the world."
Bush said that such dangerous detainees "ought to be tried in courts here in the United States." He said the administration was waiting on the Supreme Court to decide whether such detainees could be tried by military commissions -- a decision the court probably will make by the end of the month.
The Pentagon said it was postponing the scheduled military commission trial of Binyam Muhammad, an Ethiopian detainee, originally scheduled for this week. Muhammad is charged with conspiring with Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders to attack civilians and commit other crimes.
Within hours, the suicides prompted diplomatic outreach by officials of the National Security Council, the State Department, and White House congressional liaisons.
Snow said administration officials contacted the UN, the European Union, the leaders of most European nations individually, the embassies of Mideast and near-Mideast countries, and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Also contacted were congressional leaders and the ranking members of the House and Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence committees.
Snow said the Pentagon and the White House were working to investigate the matter and to determine whether all proper procedures were followed to prevent suicides. He said there was no direct indication that the suicides were connected to the killing last week of terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a US air strike in Iraq.
"3 Prisoners Commit Suicide at Guantánamo" by JAMES RISEN and TIM GOLDEN
WASHINGTON, June 10 — Three detainees being held at the United States military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, committed suicide early on Saturday, the first deaths of detainees to be reported at the military prison since it opened in early 2002, United States military officials said.
The deaths come at a time of mounting international criticism of the Bush administration's handling of terrorism suspects at Guantánamo and other prisons around the world. President Bush, who was at Camp David on Saturday, expressed "serious concern" about the deaths, said Tony Snow, the White House spokesman.
The three detainees were not identified, but United States officials said two were from Saudi Arabia and the third was from Yemen. Military officials said that the three hanged themselves in their cells with nooses made of sheets and clothing and died before they could be revived by medical personnel.
Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., the commander of the detention camp at Guantánamo, told reporters in a news conference that the deaths were discovered early on Saturday when a guard noticed something out of the ordinary in a cell and found that a prisoner had hanged himself. Admiral Harris said guards and a medical team rushed in to try to save the inmate's life but were unsuccessful. Then, guards found two other detainees in nearby cells had hanged themselves as well; all were pronounced dead by a physician.
Military officials on Saturday suggested that the three suicides were a form of a coordinated protest.
One begins to wonder if they were "suicides" at all.
Were they perhaps killed by TORTURE?!
"They are smart, they are creative, they are committed," Admiral Harris said. "They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."
Pffffffftttt!
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service has opened an investigation into the deaths, and the State Department has notified the governments of Saudi Arabia and Yemen, according to a statement issued on Saturday by the United States Southern Command, the military organization that oversees Guantánamo.
You ever hear back about any of these "investigations," readers?
I never did!
All three men left suicide notes in Arabic, officials said. One of the detainees was a mid- or high-level Qaeda operative, another had been captured in Afghanistan and the third was a member of a splinter group, Admiral Harris said, in an account by The Associated Press. He said all three had participated in hunger strikes at the detention center.
He said the acts were tied to a "mystical" belief at Guantánamo that three detainees must die at the camp for all the detainees to be released. There have been 41 suicide attempts by 25 detainees since the facility opened, officials said.
Boy, that NYT can really shovel the government shit, huh?
Lawyers for the detainees, human rights groups and legal associations have increasingly questioned whether many of the prisoners can even rightfully be called terrorists. They note that only 10 of the roughly 465 men held at Guantánamo have been charged before military tribunals, and that recently released documents indicate that many have never been accused even in administrative proceedings of belonging to Al Qaeda or attacking the United States.
Advocates for the detainees said they believed the suicides resulted from the deep despair felt by inmates who are being held indefinitely.
"The total, intractable unwillingness of the Bush administration to provide any meaningful justice for these men is what is at the heart of these tragedies," said Bill Goodman, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, the New York advocacy group that oversees lawyers representing many of the detainees. "We all had the sense that these men were getting more and more hopeless. There's been a general sense of desperation that's been growing."
Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, a lawyer at Dorsey & Whitney in New York who represents one detainee who has repeatedly attempted suicide, said, "These men have been told they will be held at Guantánamo forever. They've been told that while they're held there they do not have a single right."
Foreign governments and international organizations have stepped up their criticism of detainee treatment at Guantánamo. Just last month, a United Nations treaty panel reviewing the United States' compliance with the international prohibition on torture argued that Guantánamo should be shut down. Last week, the Council of Europe issued a separate investigative report that said the United States had created a "reprehensible network" of dealing with terror suspects, highlighted by secret prisons believed to be in Eastern Europe and other nations around the world.
Responding to the growing furor over the issue in Europe, Mr. Bush said in an interview with German television in May that he would like to close the Guantánamo prison, but that his administration had to await the outcome of a Supreme Court ruling on whether the detainees should be tried by civilian courts or military commissions.
Whatever happened with that anyway -- I say 18 months later!
Meanwhile, the situation inside the detention center has grown more volatile in recent months, with reports that prisoners have engaged in hunger strikes, suicide attempts and violent attacks on guards.
Like it is an EQUAL BATTLE!!!
Pfffffffftttt!
Lawyers for the detainees have predicted for months that some would kill themselves. They have complained repeatedly about their access to the detainees, and have litigated in federal courts to try to get more information about the prisoners' medical and psychological health.
The lawyers have also strenuously protested the administration's efforts to have all litigation over the treatment of the detainees dismissed under the Detainee Treatment Act, a law signed by Mr. Bush on Dec. 30 that would strip the courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions from detainees.
Action on nearly all of those petitions has been suspended in recent months, pending a ruling by the Supreme Court this month on the case of a former driver for Osama bin Laden.
In public statements, Defense Department officials have often dismissed the detainees' suicide attempts as less than serious and as the actions of trained Qaeda terrorists to manipulate public opinion.
Yeah, but the U.S. government and it MSM agenda-pushers never do that!
They just lie us into wars!
The first hunger strikes by detainees at Guantánamo began soon after the camp opened in January 2002, and two of those prisoners were forcibly fed through tubes that year. Dozens of other suicide attempts followed.
Over one eight-day period in August 2003, 23 detainees tried to hang or strangle themselves, including 10 on a single day. But the Pentagon did not disclose the episode until January 2005, and lawyers for the detainees have complained about what they say has been a pattern in which the government has withheld information about suicide attempts or minimized their importance.
In late 2003, military officials at Guantánamo began to re-classify many of the suicide attempts as "manipulative, self-injurious behavior" that was intended to bring pressure for better conditions or for release. Officials at Guantánamo acknowledged that those designations were not necessarily made after any formal psychological evaluation.
But early last summer, as a new wave of protests broke out, officials at Guantánamo and at the Pentagon grew increasingly concerned, Defense Department officials said.
Doctors overseeing the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo sought new guidance from the Pentagon about the circumstances under which they could force-feed hunger strikers by tubes inserted through their noses and into their stomachs.
That sounds like torture right there!
While Defense Department officials took new measures to try to break a wave of hunger strikes that began last summer, they also undertook a review of procedures they would follow for the possible burial of detainees or the transfer of their remains in the event that any of them succeeded in committing suicide, military officials said.
Military officials began trying to discourage the detainees from killing themselves in part by having military and medical personnel cite passages in the Koran that condemn suicide. The detainees were systematically told that annual reviews of their status as "enemy combatants" had been completed, that they would remain at Guantánamo for at least another year, and that they should reconcile themselves to the situation, Defense Department officials said.
The military's review of the hunger-strike issue, which included senior Pentagon officials and officers of the United States Southern Command, which oversees Guantánamo, eventually led to a decision to begin strapping those detainees who refused to eat into metal "restraint chairs" while they were force-fed.
After the use of the chairs was disclosed by The New York Times in February, military officials insisted that they were acting only to save the lives of hunger-striking detainees who were precariously close to serious harm or death.
Interviews with military officials indicated that only a handful of the detainees who were then being force-fed had lost so much weight that they were classified by doctors there as "severely malnourished." The restraint chair was used on all of those who refused to eat, military officials said, regardless of their medical condition.
For months after the use of the restraint chairs became public, lawyers for the detainees and other critics of United States detention policy predicted that the tougher measures would push the prisoners to take more radical steps to end their lives.
What may have been the most serious such incident before Saturday's suicides came on May 18, when two detainees were found unconscious in their cells after ingesting a large quantity of anti-anxiety medication that various prisoners had apparently hoarded for the purpose. Another detainee said he had also tried to commit suicide but did not have enough medication; military officials said they did not believe his attempt had been serious.
Military officials said other detainees violently attacked guards in subsequent searches of their cells. A few of the detainees have since told their lawyers that the upheaval was provoked by guards who mistreated the prisoners' Korans as they tore through their cells.
Another brief hunger strike began barely two weeks later, the military authorities said, and eventually involved some 75 detainees. The chief spokesman for the military task force charged with guarding and interrogating the detainees, Cmdr. Robert Durand of the Navy, described that episode, like others before it, as an "attention getting" effort intended to increase public pressure for their release."
You ever hear much about Gitmo in the AmeriKan MSM, readers?
No, it's all bullshit celebrities and propaganda politics day after day!
