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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
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June 18th, 2006 - How US hid the
suicide secrets of Guantanamo |
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How US hid the suicide
secrets of Guantanamo After three inmates killed themselves, the Pentagon declared the
suicides an act of 'asymmetric warfare', banned the media and went on a PR
offensive. But as despair grows within the camp, so too does outrage mount at
its brutal and secretive regime By David Rose Sunday June 18, 2006 The Observer In Guantanamo Bay's Alpha
Block, the night was like any other: sweltering and seemingly endless.
Although the temperature was down to the high 70s outside, the block's steel
roof and walls were radiating heat, and in the two facing rows of 24 cells it
felt little cooler than it had at midday. 'The nights are worse than the
days,' the British former prisoner Shafiq Rasul recalled yesterday. 'You hear
the rats running and scratching. The bugs go mad and there's no air.
Especially where that block is: there's no breeze whatsoever.' According to Guantanamo's
rules, a six-person team of military police should have been patrolling
constantly, and as usual the bright neon lights stayed on. A guard should
have passed each detainee's cell every 30 seconds. 'From the landing, you can
see right into every cell,' said Rasul. 'They don't have doors, just gates
made from wide-spaced mesh. There's no privacy. If you hang up a towel
because you want to go to the toilet, they make you take it down.' The high degree of
surveillance has foiled dozens of previous attempts by prisoners to take
their own lives. 'It happened in front of me several times. The soldiers
would see what was happening and they were in the cell in seconds,' Rasul
said. But somehow, in circumstances that the Pentagon has succeeded in
keeping totally obscure, late on Friday, 9 June, three detainees, all weak
and emaciated after months on hunger strike and being force-fed, managed to
tease bedsheets through their cells' mesh walls, tie them into nooses and
hang themselves. With the cells little taller than the height of a man, they
stood no chance of breaking their necks: the only way they could die was
slowly, by hypoxia. 'That would take at least
four or five minutes, probably longer,' said Dr David Nicholl, consultant
neurologist at Birmingham's Queen Elizabeth Hospital, who has been
co-ordinating international opposition to Guantanamo by physicians. 'It's
very difficult to see how, if the landing was being properly patrolled, they
could have managed to accomplish it.' Accomplish it, however, they
did. And virtually simultaneously. A little before midnight the bodies of
Manei Shaman Turki al-Habadi, 30, and Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, 21, both from
Saudi Arabia, and of a Yemeni, Ali Abdullah Ahmed, 29, were found on Alpha
Block. How long they had been like that, the Pentagon will not disclose.
Their mouths were stuffed with cloth, apparently to muffle any cries. As often before in its
four-and-a-half-year propaganda war over Guantanamo, the US military and its
masters in Washington decided that the best means of defence to what looked -
at best - like a case of criminal negligence was to go on the offensive. The
dead men, said Guantanamo's commander, Navy Rear Admiral Harry Harris, when
the news broke last Saturday, had 'no regard for human life, neither ours nor
their own. They are smart, they are creative, they are committed. I believe
this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare against
us.' Colleen Graffy, a senior
State Department official who recently visited London to make the case for
Guantanamo with the UK media, called the suicides a 'good PR move' and 'a
tactic to further the jihadi cause'. The US government tried to distance
itself from Graffy's remarks. But early on Sunday The Observer talked to the
camp's top Washington spin doctor, Lieutenant Commander Jeffrey Gordon, an
official in Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's office and the Pentagon's
chief press officer. According to Gordon, whatever the outcome of the
investigation now being conducted by the Naval Criminal Investigative
Service, there was no need to regret the deaths. All three men, Gordon said,
had been dedicated terrorists: 'These guys were fanatics like the Nazis,
Hitlerites, or the Ku Klux Klan, the people they tried at Nuremberg.' He went on to make specific
allegations against each: Ahmed had been a 'mid-to-high-level al-Qaeda
operative' with key links to Abu Zubaydah, an al-Qaeda leader captured in
2002; Habadi had been a 'militant recruiter' who worked with a second tier
group called Jama'at Tabligh, and knew of operations in Qatar and Pakistan.
As for Zahrani, he was a 'frontline Taliban fighter' who had played a prominent
part in the November 2001 prison uprising in Mazar-e-Sharif, in which a CIA
man died. All this may be true. On the
other hand, they had not been charged with anything. Questionable as it often
is and consisting of statements made after torture or coercion, the Pentagon
has disseminated some evidence against more than 300 Guantanamo detainees, in
federal court filings and at internal camp boards that reviewed their
detention. Against the three suicides, it has presented nothing. Meanwhile, the information
available suggests that the explanation of the deaths rejected by Harris -
that the men tried to kill themselves through despair and succeeded through
the incompetence of his staff - remains more plausible. Rasul said: 'I was shocked
by what happened, though not surprised, because I saw it almost happen so
often. It was always scary: I would see people deteriorating mentally in
front of my eyes until they tried to take their own lives, and you always
thought: "That could be me". There were even times when I thought
about it myself, but I wanted to be strong for my family. When I did, believe
me, it wasn't because I was trying to hurt the United States, but on days
when I'd just been told I'd never see England again, and that I was a
terrorist, and when I denied it they wouldn't listen.' The suicides triggered new
calls to close Guantanamo, from the Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, the
European Union and others. But the Pentagon will go to considerable lengths
to block any independent scrutiny of what happened. News of the suicides broke
while I was flying to Washington from London, in order to travel to
Guantanamo on a military flight next day and cover a military commission
tribunal. A message on my mobile phone - from a fellow reporter, not the
Pentagon - said that both had been cancelled. Thus I made the first of many
calls to Jeffrey Gordon. At first, he could not have been more helpful. To
enter Guantanamo, he said, one needed an 'area clearance', and because mine
had been issued for the tribunal it was no longer valid. However, the press
office at Guantanamo or Southern Command in Miami might be able to issue a
new one, Gordon said. Clearance was not, he pointed out, the only problem.
Now that the military plane had been cancelled, the only way to reach
Guantanamo was on scheduled 18-seat flights from Florida and Kingston,
Jamaica. They tended to be fully booked well in advance. I teamed up with another
British journalist, David Jones of the Daily Mail, to organise clearance and
investigate flights. By the end of Sunday, we thought we were on our way.
Jones found a private charter firm willing to fly us to the camp from
Kingston. Guantanamo's head of public affairs, Commander Robert Durand,
explained in an email he was seeking authorisation from Harris. 'He's a
pretty open sort of guy,' Durand said, 'and I can't see any reason for not
granting you clearance since you were coming already.' At 7.30pm one of
Durand's staff phoned to say there were new clearances. He faxed them a few
minutes later. Next day Jones and I got up
at 4am to fly to Miami, where we checked with Guantanamo one last time that
everything was in order and got on a plane to Kingston. There, at check-in
for our private flight, the manager was apologetic. 'Guys, I'm so sorry.
Jeffrey Gordon called me from the Pentagon five minutes ago. Your clearances
have been revoked.' Over the next 48 hours, I had several heated
conversations and email exchanges with Gordon. At first he was apologetic:
the new clearances had been 'a mistake' and he would try to get us a refund
on the plane costs. Later he became more aggressive: forgetting that he had
advised me to approach Durand at Guantanamo, he claimed that we tried to 'get
round' the Pentagon by obtaining clearance from a clerk. His last email stated
that our conduct had been 'ethically questionable, at best'. It was left to
Durand to shed a little light. For the time being, he said, his ability to
issue clearances had been removed and assumed by Rumsfeld's office alone. Meanwhile, three US reporters
at the base were ordered to leave. According to a Pentagon spokesman quoted
by the US media, the reason was that two barred British reporters - us - had
threatened to sue if the Americans were allowed to stay. This was, of course,
untrue. Closing Guantanamo to the
media meant there were no reporters there as the Naval Criminal Investigative
Service team went about its work; none when pathologists conducted post
mortem examinations; and none last Friday when, after a Muslim ceremony
conducted by a military chaplain, the first body - Ahmed's - was prepared to
be flown home. It was also impossible to gauge the impact of the deaths on
the 460 inmates. Yet our bizarre experience
raises a fundamental question: when it comes to Guantanamo, can the world
believe a single word that Gordon and his numerous cohorts say? There is, to
say the least, an alternative explanation for the three Guantanamo deaths. Since
early 2003, when the Red Cross issued the first of many reports stating that
inmates were experiencing high levels of depression, there has been mounting
evidence that detention there has wrought havoc on some prisoners' mental
health. It is not so surprising: most prisoners get just two 30-minute
periods out of their cells - the size of a double bed - each week, except
when being interrogated. Some have endured this since 2002, and have no idea
when, if ever, they may leave. By the time of my own visit
in October 2003, a fifth of them were on Prozac and there had been so many
suicide attempts - 40 by August 2003 - that the Pentagon had reclassified
hangings as 'manipulative self-injurious behaviours'. Cannily, perhaps, it
has refused to give exact statistics on how many SIBs have occurred, claiming
that since the reclassification there have been (until last week) only two
genuine attempted suicides. Tarek Dergoul, another freed
British former detainee, knew two of the dead men well. 'I was next to or opposite
Manei [Habadi] for weeks, maybe months,' he said, 'and like me his morale was
high. He was always up for a protest: a hunger strike or a non-co-operation
strike. He used to recite poetry, not just Arabic, but English - he knew
chunks of Macbeth and he taught me how to read the Koran correctly. When you
go through that sort of experience with someone, you really get to know them.
I just can't believe he would take his own life. He would have had to be
really desperate.' Likewise, Dergoul said, Zahrani was 'a person everyone
loved. It's offensive to me to say he could have killed himself.' Apart from
anything else, all three men would have been deeply aware of Islam's
prohibition of suicide. However, the men may well
have been so desperate that they ignored the prohibition - even if, as seems
likely, they co-ordinated their deaths in the hope of increasing their
political impact. Many lawyers who have visited clients at Guantanamo have
spoken eloquently of their despair: this year a prisoner tried to kill
himself in front of his US attorney, somehow managing to open his veins,
covering himself in blood, as the lawyer watched in horror, unable - because
of the screen that separated them - to intervene. Dergoul also suggested how
the three may have been able to kill themselves undetected. Sometimes, he
said, instead of patrolling the guards 'used to sit in their room at the end.
It's a long walk from end to end of the block and some nights they didn't
feel like it: they'd sit in their room, smoking and playing cards. You'd need
toilet paper or something and you'd yell "MP, MP!" But they
wouldn't come - it could be as long as an hour.' One might, just about,
imagine such a scene in a British prison. One can also envisage what might
happen if three men committed suicide on the same landing at the same time:
public inquiries, sackings, outrage. All three had been on hunger strike,
with few breaks, since the middle of last summer. This meant that, four times
a day, they were strapped down in restraining chairs so that they could not
move their limbs and force-fed through nasal tubes, inserted and removed each
time - a process the Pentagon's own court documents state causes bleeding and
nausea. It is not hard to see why that may have made them depressed. According to newly
declassified testimony by another prisoner shortly before the suicides, a
guard recently told him: '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 right now.' This prisoner, the former British resident Shaker Aamer,
told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, that the three dead men and other
hunger strikers were so ill whenever their feeds contained protein that it
went 'right through them' causing severe diarrhoea. Last week Rumsfeld got what
he wanted: the removal of media scrutiny from Guantanamo's deepest crisis.
Potentially embarrassing, perhaps very damaging, headlines have been averted,
and tomorrow, with the most sensitive tasks in the wake of the deaths complete,
Guantanamo's public affairs office will resume its chaperoned tours. But the
bigger costs of shutting out the daylight are making themselves felt. On BBC1's Question Time last
week, Falconer called the camp 'intolerable and wrong', adding that it acted
as a recruiting agent for those who would attack all our values. Proving his
point next day, some former Guantanamo detainees suggested the three dead men
had been murdered, a claim echoed by their families and the government of
Yemen next day. The Pentagon response to the
suicides was characterised by panic, smears and blatant obstruction. One
might be forgiven for thinking that its vehement denials lacked a little
weight. Guardian Unlimited ©
Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006 External link:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1800218,00.html |