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The Guantanamo Suicides
U.S. must redouble efforts to repatriate or charge detainees
Editorial
Sarasota Herald Tribune
June 15, 2006
The recent suicides at the detention facility at GuantanamoBay are a grisly reminder that the Bush administration has delayed too long in dispensing justice for the prisoners there.
The 460 foreign detainees held at the Cuba facility should either be charged and given a speedy trial or released. To do otherwise is cruel, inhuman and un-American.
Many Guantanamo prisoners have languished in legal limbo for four years while the administration has interrogated them and argued that, as "enemy combatants," they are not entitled to the basic human rights accorded prisoners of war.
With no resolution of their cases, far from their homes and denied family contact, is it any wonder some prisoners would take their own lives, whether out of despair or to draw attention to the plight of others?
There had been 41 unsuccessful suicide attempts by 25 inmates prior to the deaths Saturday of two Saudi Arabian prisoners and a Yemeni.
The continued imprisonment of many of the Guantanamo prisoners is indefensible. U.S. military officials have conceded that many are no longer viewed as a threat. Arlen Specter, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has said the arrests of most of the detainees were based on "the flimsiest sort of hearsay."
Even President Bush has expressed his desire to close the facility. "We're now in the process of working with countries to repatriate people," he said last Friday, "but there are some that -- if put out on the street -- could create a grave harm to American citizens and other citizens of the world."
The problem with closing the Guantanamo facility, as many critics have demanded, is that U.S. officials need somewhere to send the detainees who are not charged. A lawyer representing 17 detained Yemenis told The Christian Science Monitor that Yemen and Saudi Arabia, in particular, are resisting U.S. efforts to repatriate prisoners.
Still, U.S. military officials owe it to the prisoners to tell them as soon as possible who will be released when circumstances permit, and who will face charges and possible trial. And the administration should redouble its efforts toward repatriation.
The sooner the United States can close the Guantanamo facility, the sooner this nation can again be regarded as a champion of human rights.
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