Posted on 05/30/2007 8:29:17 PM PDT by Omega Man II
Guantanamo Saudi 'kills himself'
Reuters | Thursday, 31 May 2007
A Saudi Arabian prisoner has died of an apparent suicide at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, the US military said.
"The detainee was found unresponsive and not breathing in his cell by guards. The detainee was pronounced dead by a physician after all lifesaving measures had been exhausted," the US Southern Command in Miami said in a statement.
The military did not indicate how the prisoner died nor release his name.
He is the fourth detainee to die of apparent suicide at the detention camp, which opened in January 2002 and holds about 380 foreign terrorist suspects on the US naval base in southeastern Cuba.
Three other prisoners – two Saudis and a Yemeni – hanged themselves with clothing and bedding in their cells last June and their deaths are still under investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
"The remains of the deceased detainee are being treated with the utmost respect. A cultural advisor is assisting the Joint Task Force to ensure that the remains are handled in a culturally sensitive and religiously appropriate manner," the Southern Command said.
It said the Naval Criminal Investigative Service had begun an investigation.
In Washington, Amnesty International advocacy director Jumana Musa said news of another suicide at the detention camp was not surprising.
"When you look at the conditions that people are in, so many people are in isolation so many people held without any kind of certainty. It's a really extreme result of what's a really extreme situation," she said.
"I don't know how many more indications need to be there that Guantanamo is not a good idea."
The latest death comes eight days after a new commander took over the military task force that runs the controversial detention centre. Rear Adm. Mark Buzby took command of the prison camp last week, replacing Rear Adm. Harry Harris, who was new to the job when the previous suicides took place.
The United States has faced persistent criticism over its indefinite detention at Guantanamo of men it considers "unlawful enemy combatants" not entitled to the protections granted prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.
It opened the prison camp shortly after the September 11 attacks that killed 3,000 people in 2001, and says the prison is needed to prevent dangerous al Qaeda and Taliban fighters from returning to the battlefield, and to extract information that could help prevent future attacks.
Human rights activists, who have urged Washington to close the prison, denounced the earlier deaths as a sign of desperation while the US military said they were acts of "asymmetrical warfare."
"In the last year, the conditions at Guantanamo have become even more bleak: the military has increasingly held people in solitary confinement and continued to refuse to allow independent psychological evaluations. The United States government is responsible for this man's death and must be held accountable," Wells Dixon, staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, said in a statement.
A military tribunal was scheduled to convene on Monday at Guantanamo to arraign two prisoners on war crimes. The earlier suicides also occurred days before a war crimes tribunal was to convene and forced a postponement of those hearings.
The man who died was not one of those charged in the tribunals, an official said.
The two captives scheduled for arraignment on Monday are Omar Khadr, a Canadian accused of murdering a US soldier in a firefight in Afghanistan, and Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who was Osama bin Laden's driver in Afghanistan and who won a landmark US Supreme Court ruling in June last year.
In that decision, the Supreme Court struck down as illegal the initial tribunal system created by President George W. Bush to try terrorism suspects at Guantanamo. Congress authorized a new military tribunal system last year but defence lawyers said it was as flawed as the old one.
Khadr, who was allowed for the first time last week to see a Canadian lawyer, fired his US military and civilian lawyers on Wednesday.
"He is very distrustful of American lawyers, I think with good reason, because the system is unfair," said the dismissed military lawyer, Marine Lt. Col. Colby Vokey.
Damn! He owed me $20.
Could this be the start of an epidemic?
Exactly. Each meal should come with six feet of rope- for flossing, of course.
So...
Word to “human rights advocates”: Under the law or land warfare, the U.S. has a perfect right to shoot each and every one of these bastards.
Go cry in your yogurt.
Ok, I tried to gin up some sympathy but it seems, as the country song says, my give a damn is busted.
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