Detainee suicides rock Gitmo, White House

MIAMI: The Guantanamo Bay prison camp for ‘war on terror’ suspects faced renewed scrutiny and criticism on Sunday after three inmates hanged themselves. The triple suicide on Saturday represents a new challenge for President George W Bush’s administration, which is under increasing pressure to close the camp from critics that include the United Nations, international human rights organisations, European governments and Britain’s top legal advisor.

The deaths, which also came amid a prisoner hunger strike, were the first successful suicide bids after repeated attempts by inmates in the camp, located on a US naval base on the southeastern tip of Cuba. Rear Admiral Harry Harris, the camp’s commander, described the suicides as an act of warfare.

“They are smart, they are creative, they are committed,” he said of the prisoners. “They have no regard to life, neither ours nor their own. And I believe this was not an act of desperation, rather an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us.”

The first victim was found early Saturday by an “alert” prison guard who had noticed “something out of the ordinary” in the cell, Harris said in a telephone press conference. “When it was apparent that the detainee had hung himself, the guard force and medical teams reacted quickly to attempt to save the detainee’s life,” Harris said.

Two other inmates were also found hanging in their cells after guards checked on other prisoners, he said. They had used clothes and sheets to hang themselves, he told reporters.

Medical teams tried to save all three — a Yemeni and two Saudis — but they were pronounced dead “after all life-saving measures were exhausted,” he said.

There have been 41 suicide attempts by about 25 individual detainees but in the previous cases, US medical personnel were able to save them, according to The Washington Post. Some 460 prisoners are being held at the military-run prison. Only 10 have been formally charged since the camp opened in early ’02, and none has gone on trial.

Lawyers with the Centre for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based advocacy group that represents some 200 inmates and helps private attorneys representing other inmates, were saddened but not surprised at hearing about the suicides. “These deaths reflect the desperation for a basic human need — a need for justice, a need to have someone hear what they have to say,” said the Centre’s legal director, William Goodman.

Katherine Newell Bierman, a counterterrorism counsel for Human Rights Watch, said the suicide attempts would likely continue if the United States did not move to give the detainees a fair trial. “It is only going to get worse,” she told The Los Angeles Times.

“They need to close it, and they need to close it responsibly. You need to prosecute the people who may have committed crimes, and the rest of them need to be sent home and need an apology.”

The names of the dead were not released, so the attorneys said they did not know if they were among their clients. A US military statement said the names would not be released.

The Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, which is part of the Miami-based US Southern Command and runs the camp, said the State Department talked to Saudi Arabian and Yemeni government officials about the incident.

The statement added that the men held at Guantanamo “are dangerous and continue to pose a threat to the US and our allies. They have expressed a commitment to kill Americans and our friends if released.

“These are not common criminals, they are enemy combatants being detained because they have waged war against our nation and they continue to pose a threat.”

On June 4 Guantanamo officials said the number of prisoners on a hunger strike had fallen sharply to 18, from a peak of 89 on June 1.