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Suicides Fuel Guantanamo Criticism
Detainee deaths bring renewed calls for change, prison closure
CNN
June 12, 2006
LUXEMBOURG -- The suicides of three detainees at GuantanamoBay has sparked renewed calls for the U.S. prison camp to be closed.
Authorities at the facility, located on a Naval base in Cuba, reported Saturday that two Saudis and one Yemeni were found dead in their cells after using clothing and bedsheets to hang themselves.
The Pentagon has identified the three prisoners, describing one as a mid-ranking operative with close ties to a top al Qaeda figure.
The Bush administration has declared the prisoners to be "enemy combatants," but does not consider them prisoners of war who must be accorded the rights spelled out by the Geneva Conventions.
But detention without charges runs counter to established human-rights law, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that prisoners could challenge their detention in U.S. courts.
"Guantanamo should be closed. This is an occasion to reiterate that statement," EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said on Monday as he arrived for a meeting of the bloc's foreign ministers in Luxembourg.
Guantanamo Bay holds about 460 prisoners captured in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks. They are detained without trial or the right to family visits.
Luxembourg 's foreign minister also condemned a statement by U.S. officials that the suicides were a "PR move" and "asymmetric warfare."
"It's hard to understand why when three people kill themselves, that is an attack on America. Something has to change in the American mentality," Jean Asselborn said, according to Reuters.
Colleen Graffy, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, told the BBC the suicides were a "good PR (public relations) move to draw attention."
But another senior U.S. official took a different line on Monday. U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs Cully Stimson told the BBC: "I wouldn't characterize it as a good PR move.
"What I would say is that we are always concerned when someone takes his own life. Because as Americans, we value life, even the lives of violent terrorists who are captured waging war against our country," he said.
In the United States one Republican senator has urged the Bush administration to try suspected terrorists held there.
"Where we have evidence, they ought to be tried, and if convicted, they ought to be sentenced," Sen. Arlen Specter, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told CNN's "Late Edition."
Rear Adm. Harry Harris, commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, told reporters the men had been "determined to take their own lives." He said prisoners at the camp are "dangerous, committed to killing Americans."
But the arrests of most of the roughly 500 prisoners held there were based on "the flimsiest sort of hearsay," Specter said.
The Pennsylvania Republican told reporters the administration faces "a tough situation," since some of those held might return to their homelands to carry out attacks on Americans. "But too many have been detained for too long," he said.
"There is the overtone that quite a number of them will be tried, that there is tangible evidence," he said. "As to a great many others, there is not evidence which could be brought into a court of law."
There have been more than 40 suicide attempts at GuantanamoBay, but the inmates found dead over the weekend were the first to succeed, the government said. (Watch commanders explain how guards discovered the men -- 5:09)
Center for Constitutional Rights lawyers, who defend 200 of the detainees, said the suicides were acts of desperation carried out by people who had not been charged and have no hope of getting their day in court.
The human rights group Amnesty International blamed the Bush administration's policies for the deaths.
But Harris said the suicides were an act of "asymmetric warfare" aimed at getting the prison closed. He said a "mythical belief" had spread among inmates that the camp would be shut if three detainees were to die.
The Defense Department said one of the three, Ali Abdullah Ahmed, was a mid- to high-level al Qaeda operative and a "close associate" of Abu Zubaydah, an al Qaeda strategist captured in 2002. Ahmed took part in a long-term hunger strike that ended in May, and has been "non-compliant and hostile" to guards, according to a Pentagon statement.
Another of the dead prisoners, Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi, was a member of a banned Saudi militant group that recruited for al Qaeda. He had been recommended for transfer to another country that was not specified, the Pentagon said.
The third prisoner, Yassar Talal al-Zahrani, was described as a "front-line" Taliban fighter who helped procure weapons for the Islamic militia that once ruled most of Afghanistan.
Al-Zahrani was captured by anti-Taliban Afghan forces and took part in the 2001 uprising at a prison in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif that left a CIA officer dead, the military said. The men were not identified by nationality.
'Ticking time bomb'
Two Democrats on the Sunday talk-show circuit called on the administration to close the prison camp. Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called Guantanamo "a ticking time bomb."
"Bottom line: We've kept people in this prison for years and years and years without a status, without any rights, and it was the wrong way to go," the California Democrat said. "We should have been organized, planned ahead."
About 90 inmates were disciplined after a May incident in which detainees staged a suicide attempt to draw guards into a room before attacking them, prison officers reported.
That month, dozens of prisoners also took part in a hunger strike to protest their conditions. (Watch a retired general call the suicides 'an act of defiance' -- 3:29)
Harman said the situation at the prison camp was another reason Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should resign. Bush has said Rumsfeld still has his confidence as head of the Pentagon.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has urged the U.S. to close the prison camp, which Amnesty International has called "a legal black hole."
A British citizen released from Guantanamo in 2004 told the AP: "This was not done as an act of martyrdom, warfare or anything else."
"If you're told day after day by the Americans that you're never going to go home or you're put into isolation, these acts are committed simply out of desperation," Shafiq Rasul, 29, told the AP.
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