[Ppnews] Guantánamo Suicides (sic)

[Political Prisoner News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/

October 24, 2007


Who is Telling the Truth?


The Guantánamo Suicides

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

The grim story of the Guantánamo 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 report into the deaths, 
Navy Capt. Patrick McCarthy, the senior lawyer on 
Guantánamo's management team, spoke out in an 
interview, declaring that all four men had killed 
themselves with "craftily fashioned 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 Guantánamo, 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 fashioned "a string type of noose" to 
kill himself, although Carol Rosenberg of the 
Miami Herald, who reported the story, added that "he did not elaborate."

The circumstances 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 documents released by the Pentagon 
earlier this year, however, which described, in 
minute and numbing detail, the weights of all the 
detainees in Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo, 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 Guantánamo -- 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 report, 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 circumstances 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 
reported 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 Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo, 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 Guantánamo'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 
'<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745326641/counterpunchmaga>The 
Guantánamo 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: <http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/>www.andyworthington.co.uk

He can be reached at: 
<mailto:andy at andyworthington.co.uk>andy at andyworthington.co.uk




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