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The Guantanamo Suicides
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Counterpunch - Oct 24, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington10242007.html
The Guant!namo Suicides
Who is Telling the Truth?
By ANDY WORTHINGTON
The grim story of the Guant!namo suicides--the deaths of three men, Ali
al-Salami, Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser al-Zahrani in June 2006, and
another, Abdul Rahman al-Amri, in May this year--took another turn last
week, when, in the absence of the Naval Criminal Investigative
Service's long-awaited re****t into the deaths, Navy Capt. Patrick
McCarthy, the senior lawyer on Guant!namo's management team, spoke out
in an interview, declaring that all four men had killed themselves with
"craftily fa****oned nooses."
Speaking as the ridiculous saga of smuggled underwear continued to make
waves in the media, McCarthy attempted to highlight the seriousness of
the administration's response to ludicrous claims that underwear had
been surreptitiously delivered to two detainees, saying, "There was a
Speedo in the camp and someone can hang himself with it. The Speedo
also has a drawstring on it. The drawstring can be used to tie the
Speedo, the noose apparatus up onto a vent.'"
Breaking with protocol, McCarthy also spoke about the deaths in
Guant!namo, claiming that he had personally seen "all four men
dead--each one hanging--and that the first three men had used
sling-style nooses." This is the first time that a representative of
the US military has spoken openly about the death of al-Amri, who,
McCarthy said, had fa****oned "a string type of noose" to kill himself,
although Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald, who re****ted the story,
added that "he did not elaborate."
The cir***stances of the men's deaths have long been contentious. After
the 2006 suicides, many former detainees who had known the men spoke of
their shock and incredulity at the news. Tarek Dergoul, a British
detainee released in 2004, spent three weeks in a cell beside
al-Utaybi. He recalled "his indefatigable spirit and defiance," and
pointed out that he was "always on the forefront of trying to get our
rights." He had similar recollections of al-Zahrani, describing him as
"always optimistic" and "defiant," and adding that he "was always there
to stand up for his brothers when he saw injustices being carried out."
In a press release shortly after the deaths were announced, former
detainees, including the nine released British nationals, "poured
scorn" on allegations that the deaths were suicides, and claimed that
they were "almost certainly accidental killings caused by excessive
force" on the part of the guards. A note of caution, however, was
provided by British resident Shaker Aamer, who was told by a guard in
Camp Echo, an isolation block where they were held for some of the time
(and where Aamer himself has now spent two years and two months without
any meaningful human company), "They have lost hope in life. They have
no hope in their eyes. They are ghosts, and they want to die. No food
will keep them alive now. Even with four feeds a day, these men get
diarrhea from any protein which goes right through them."
As the NCIS has, inexplicably, yet to conclude its investigation, it's
impossible to know at this point what the official conclusion will be.
Clearly, the military has stepped back from its initial response, when
the prison's commander, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, attracted worldwide
condemnation for claiming that the men's deaths were "an act of
asymmetric warfare." As was revealed in do***ents released by the
Pentagon earlier this year, however, which described, in minute and
numbing detail, the weights of all the detainees in Guant!namo
throughout their detention, all three men had been long-term hunger
strikers, and two had been force-fed until days before their deaths.
This deliberately painful process, designed to "break" the strikers,
is, it should be noted, illegal according to internationally recognized
rules regarding the rights of competent prisoners to undertake hunger
strikes, but in this, as with almost everything else at Guant!namo, the
administration regards itself as above the law.
Al-Zahrani was force-fed several times a week from the start of October
2005, and daily from November 14 to January 18, 2006, during which time
his weight fluctuated between 87.5 lbs and 98.5 lbs. Al-Utaybi, who
weighed just 89 lbs at various times in September and October 2005, was
force-fed several times a week from July to September 2005, and daily
from December 24 to February 7, 2006. Crucially, his force-feeding
began again on May 30, 2006, and continued until the records ended on
June 6, just three days before his death.
Even more disturbing is the chronicle of al-Salami's hunger strike.
Although his weight loss did not appear as dramatic -- he weighed a
healthy 172 lbs on arrival in Guant!namo -- he lost nearly a third of
his body weight at the most severe point of his hunger strike, when his
weight dropped to 120 lbs. What was particularly disturbing about his
weight re****t, however, was the revelation that he was force-fed daily
from January 11, 2006 until, as with al-Utaybi, the records ended on
June 6, just three days before his death.
Given this information, it's unsurprising that those who are suspicious
of the administration -- and of Capt. McCarthy's supposed frontline
recollections -- might conclude, as the former detainees suggested,
that it would not have taken much on the part of the authorities to
finish off three men who had persistently aroused the wrath of the
administration through their lack of cooperation and their hunger
strikes, and who were all critically weak at the time of their deaths.
As for al-Amri's death, Carol Rosenberg noted that suspicions over the
cir***stances of his death have been exacerbated by the fact that he
died in Camp Five, one of the prison's maximum security blocks. She
explained that "prison camp tours for media and distinguished visitors
emphasize that Camp Five is designed with suicide proofing such as
towel hooks that won't bear the weight of a detainee, to prevent him
from hanging himself," and that, moreover, "the tours emphasize that
each captive, housed in single-occupancy cell, is under constant
Military Police and electronic monitoring, which means a guard is
supposed to look in on him at least every three minutes."
An even more critical approach to al-Amri's death was presented by
lawyer Candace Gorman, who re****ted last week on a visit in July to one
of her clients, Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi. A Sudanese shopkeeper, who is
married to an Afghan woman and has a child that he has not seen for six
years, al-Ghizzawi was "visibly shaken" on meeting Gorman, and
immediately told her of his "despair" over al-Amri's death. As Gorman
described it, "Al-Ghizzawi knew that Amri had been suffering from
Hepatitis B and tuberculosis, the same two conditions from which he
himself suffers. Like al-Ghizzawi, Amri had not been treated for his
illnesses. Al-Ghizzawi, now so sick he can barely walk, told me that
Amri, too, had been ill and then, suddenly, he was dead." Al-Ghizzawi's
conclusion, as described on Gorman's website, was that al-Amri had
actually died of "medical neglect," although she also noted that
al-Ghizzawi "had mentioned that Amri had engaged in hunger strikes in
the past but had stopped a long time ago because of his health."
While this was correct, one can only wonder what the effect on
al-Amri's health had been of his participation in the mass hunger
strike in the fall of 2005, when his weight, which had been 150 lbs
when he arrived in Guant!namo in February 2002, dropped at one point to
just 88.5 lbs, and he was force-fed, often several times a week, from
October 2005 to January 2006. Like the three men who died in June 2006,
al-Amri was a non-cooperative detainee, who had refused to take part in
any of the sham tribunals and administrative reviews at Guant!namo, and
it does not take much imagination to conclude that, with his severe and
untreated illnesses, he, like the three men the year before, could
actually have died not through medical neglect, but as another
"accidental killing caused by excessive force" on the part of the
guards.
I do not profess to know the truth of the matter one way or the other,
but in revisiting the stories of these men's deaths I hope to have
demonstrated that, far from clearing the air, Capt. McCarthy's comments
have, ironically, served only to revive Guant!namo's most tragic
stories, which, presumably, the rest of the administration hoped had
been forgotten. Sixteen months after the first deaths, and four months
after the additional death that caused such distress to Abdul Hamid
al-Ghizzawi, it is surely time for the investigators of the Naval
Criminal Investigative Service to deliver their verdict.
[Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the author of 'The
Guant!namo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal
Prison' (to be published by Pluto Press in October 2007). Visit his
website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk ]
*
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