Suicides found at Guantanamo
WASHINGTON – Three suspected terrorists at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba hanged themselves with clothing and bed sheets Saturday, becoming the first detainees to die at the camp since hundreds were rounded up in America’s war on terrorism.
The suicides of two Saudi citizens and a Yemeni man are likely to increase international pressure on the Bush administration to close the controversial camp, opened in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The deaths come just weeks after a brawl and four attempted suicides at the center, where some have been held without charges for as many as four-and-a-half years.
The three dead men were all being held at Camp 1, the highest maximum security prison at the center, and were participants in a wave of hunger strikes staged to protest conditions at the camp. Military officials said the Yemeni detainee had just ended his long hunger strike.
All three left suicide notes written in Arabic, but military officials refused to divulge their contents, noting that the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service has opened an investigation to determine the cause and manner of death.
The United States is holding about 460 enemy combatants at the remote Navy base in southeast Cuba. Just 10 of them have been charged as alleged war criminals before President Bush’s Military Commissions. Bush has rebuffed calls from across the globe to close the camp, saying he’s waiting for the Supreme Court to determine whether his military commissions are constitutional.
Saturday night, President Bush expressed “serious concern” over the deaths and asked his Cabinet to take diplomatic steps to assure critics that the matter is being fully investigated.
But the commander of prison operations at the camp called the suicides, “not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”
“We have men here in Guantanamo who are committed jihadists, al-Qaida and Taliban,” said Navy Rear Adm. Harry Harris Jr., in a telephone conference call. “They’re continuing to fight against us here. These are dangerous men who will do anything they can to gain support for their cause.”
He said the men were in the same cell block but not adjacent to each other, but that the suicides appeared to have been coordinated, noting that the “methods of hanging were similar.”
According to Harris, an alert guard noticed one of the men had hanged himself in his cell, shortly after midnight. The prisoner was “unresponsive and not breathing.” He said the guard tried to help the man and guards checked on the other detainees, finding the two others.
Medical teams tried to revive the men, Harris said, but were unsuccessful and the three were pronounced dead by a physician.
Harris said the three men have not been charged and do not have attorneys, but are classified as “enemy combatants.”
He classified one of the men as a “mid- to high-level operative in al-Qaida” and said another was part of an uprising in Afghanistan. “These are dangerous men, not here by accident or happenstance,” Harris said.
The deaths are likely to rekindle a debate over the future of the camp, which the Bush administration routinely defends as critical to the war on terrorism. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, two of Bush’s closest European allies, have called for the Guantanamo camp to be closed, as did the United Nations Committee Against Torture.