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Guantanamo Bay : Dead Bear Witness

Editorial
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
June 13, 2006

Colleen Graffy, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, was callous to term the suicides of three GuantanamoBay detainees as "a good PR move to draw attention." Sadly, she may be right.

That three young men would take their own lives rather than face another day in what Amnesty International calls America's "legal black hole" offers damning testimony.

There have been more than 40 reported suicide attempts among the 460 or so men being held there. Less than a month ago, six prisoners were injured after jumping U.S. guards lured into a unit of the prison by an inmate who appeared to be about to hang himself with a bed sheet, which is how the three men killed themselves over the weekend.

The deaths will intensify the global attention on and criticism of the way the Bush administration has used the facility to deny basic legal and human rights.

The administration has applied a cruel Catch-22 at Guantanamo. Were the men there considered prisoners of war, their detention and treatment would be covered under the Geneva Convention. The president says they're not prisoners of war but "unlawful combatants." Were they criminals, they would be covered by U.S. and international criminal justice systems. But the president continues to hold them without charges.

Calls for the mere closure of Guantanamo miss the point. The problem lies not with the facility itself but with the political leadership that would allow it to be put to such use.

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