Admiral: Guantanamo Suicides "Acts Of War"
Guantanamo suicides 'acts of war'
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/gua...964396421.html
(Gold9472: This administration certainly picks the "cream of the crop" for the really important assignments don't they?)
6/11/2006
Three Guantanamo Bay detainees hanged themselves using nooses made of sheets and clothes, the commander of the detention centre said, in the first reported deaths among hundreds of men held at the base.
The suicides, which military officials said were coordinated, triggered further condemnation of the isolated detention centre, which holds some 460 men, including Australian David Hicks, on suspicion of links to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Only 10 have been charged with crimes and there has been growing international pressure on the US to close the prison.
Two men from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen were found dead shortly after midnight today in separate cells, said the Miami-based US Southern Command, which has jurisdiction over the prison. Attempts were made to revive them, but they failed.
"They hung themselves with fabricated nooses made out of clothes and bed sheets," base commander Navy Rear Adm. Harry Harris told reporters in a conference call from the US base in southeastern Cuba.
"They have no regard for human life," he said. "Neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us."
Military officials said the men, whose names were not released, had been held in Guantanamo Bay for about four years. All three detainees had engaged in a hunger strike to protest their indefinite incarceration and had been force-fed before quitting their protest, base commander Navy Rear Admiral Harry Harris said in a conference call from Guantanamo Bay.
One of the detainees was a mid- or high-level al-Qaeda operative, while another had been captured in Afghanistan and participated in a riot at a prison there, Harris said. The third belonged to a splinter group, he added.
Detainees have not been allowed to know about classified evidence of allegations against them and thus are unable to respond.
"They're determined, intelligent, committed elements and they continue to do everything they can ... to become martyrs in the jihad," said General John Craddock, commander of the Miami-based US Southern Command, which has jurisdiction over the prison.
All three left suicide notes, Craddock said in the conference call. He refused to describe the contents.
Pentagon officials said the three men were in Camp 1, the highest-security area at Guantanamo, and that none of them had tried to commit suicide before. To help prevent more suicides, guards will now give bed sheets to detainees only when they go to bed and remove them after they wake up in the morning, Harris said.
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service was investigating the deaths.
Guantanamo Bay has become a sore subject between President George Bush and US allies who otherwise are staunch supporters of his policies.
A UN panel said May 19 that holding detainees indefinitely at Guantanamo violated the world's ban on torture and the detention centre should be closed.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, among leaders, have recently have urged the United States to close the prison.
Bush, who was spending the weekend at Camp David, expressed "serious concern" over the suicides and directed his administration to reach out diplomatically while it investigates, White House press secretary Tony Snow said this evening.
Guantanamo officials have reported 41 unsuccessful suicide attempts by 25 detainees since the US began taking prisoners to the base in January 2002. Defence lawyers contend the number of suicide attempts is higher.
The inmates "have this incredible level of despair that they will never get justice", said Barbara Olshansky of the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represents about 300 detainees.
Of the three who died, she said: "Now they're gone. And they died without ever having seen a court."
James Yee, a former US Army chaplain at Guantanamo Bay who was arrested in a 2003 espionage probe and later cleared, attributed the suicides to desperation.
"It was only a matter of time," Yee said in a phone interview from Olympia, Washington.
Mark Denbeaux, a law professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey who represents two Tunisians at Guantanamo, said he believes others there are candidates for suicide.
Denbeaux said one of his clients, Mohammed Abdul Rahman, appeared to be depressed and hardly spoke during a June 1 visit. Rahman was on a hunger strike at the time and was force-fed soon after, Denbeaux added.
"He told us he would rather die than stay in Guantanamo," the lawyer said. "He doesn't believe he will ever get out of Guantanamo alive."
