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Detainees Unaware of Lawyers
Carol Rosenberg
June 16, 2006
The Miami Herald
Jun. 16--The Yemeni captive who killed himself at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had an attorney arranging to visit him in August, but did not know it when he committed suicide.
One of the Saudis, Mani Shaman al Utaybi, 30, had been approved for transfer to a jail back home, but also had never been told he was cleared to depart the U.S. detention center.
As the Pentagon was silent Thursday on the repatriation of the bodies of the three men from the island prison, their lawyers questioned whether their isolation and lack of knowledge about their status contributed to their deaths.
The three men hanged themselves in Camp 1 with nooses made from shredded bedsheets and towels on Saturday in what the military called a choreographed group suicide. Rear Adm. Harry Harris Jr., the camps' commander, described it as an act of "asymmetrical warfare."
But attorneys for the men -- who the military initially said had no lawyers -- say that had the detainees known of legal efforts on their behalf, they might be alive today.
"As far as we know he [Ali Abdullah Ahmed] did not know he had an attorney. We certainly never got through to him to advise him of that fact," said Dave Engelhardt of Washington, D.C., who had filed a habeas corpus petition for Ahmed, the 29- or 30-year-old Yemeni.
"Perhaps he would have not have committed suicide if he had known the facts of his representation of counsel and the progress that is being made in the American courts for the detainees."
In Yemen, Ahmed's father told the Associated Press did not believe his son, as a Muslim, would have committed suicide.
Utaybi's sister in Saudi Arabia echoed the sentiments, and said the family would seek an independent autopsy.
The Pentagon said Ahmed and Utaybi were part of the al Qaeda terror movement. It identified the third man, Yasser Talal al Zahrani, 21, as an alleged Taliban fighter who arrived at Guantanamo as a teenager.
Both Engelhardt and attorney Jeff Davis of Charlotte, N.C., said government lawyers had thwarted repeated attempts to see their clients.
Davis said his firm was notified more than a month ago that Utaybi was approved for transfer back to Saudi Arabia. But the notice came under a seal of secrecy, said Davis, so Utaybi, who had never met his lawyer, did not know he would be sent home -- which The Miami Herald confirmed independently.
"I think the humane thing to do when you've decided to change those conditions of confinement, you tell him, particularly if the change is to send him home," said Davis.
Meantime, there was no word from the Pentagon on the planned return of the men's bodies to their homelands.
A Muslim Navy chaplain washed and shrouded the dead men and put them in plain wooden boxes for traditional Islamic death rites.
But it was unclear whether the repatriations had been approved or undertaken.
The Pentagon cleared all independent journalists from the base Wednesday morning, and canceled all attorney-detainee visits until at least next week.
Lawyers met clients at Guantanamo on Monday through Wednesday. A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Lt. Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, said by e-mail that scheduled lawyer-detainee meetings "had to be canceled due to . . . operational support of the investigation related to the detainee suicides."
The deaths on Saturday were the first detainee deaths at the detention center in southeast Cuba. As of Thursday, the most current count of captives at Guantanamo stood at "approximately 460."
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