Gitmo Inmate Cuts Throat, but Survives

[Newsjock]

Source: Associated Press

A Guantanamo Bay prisoner slashed his throat with a sharpened fingernail last month, spilling a lot of blood but surviving, a U.S. military commander said Tuesday.

Guards administered first-aid and took the prisoner to the prison clinic, said Navy Cmdr. Andrew Haynes, the deputy commander in charge of the guard force.

"There was an impressive effusion of blood," Haynes told reporters visiting the base. He would not disclose the man's name or nationality. A medical officer, who could not be identified under military rules for journalists, said the prisoner received several stitches and spent a week under psychiatric observation.

... Haynes said he doubted the latest incident was a real suicide attempt, and characterized it instead as an act of "self-harm."

The incident occurred while the man was taking his daily five-minute shower in early November, around the time when more than two dozen journalists were visiting Guantanamo for a military court hearing.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/12/04/international/i153657S20.DTL&tsp=1

[samq79]

1. Gitmo? That's still open and functioning?

I'm gonna be honest here and say that it's been so long since I've heard anything about Gitmo, that I pretty much forgot that we even still were keeping people there. Seriously...I'm sad that this is the case. I pride myself on keeping up with the latest outrages in the world, and the travesty that is Guantanamo Bay has been in a similar state for so long that the media is tired of even thinking of broadcasting the outrage.

Now I'm depressed all over again!

[Swagman]

2. I tend to forget as well..but this is horrible and who can blame the

poor bloke.

It doesn't matter whether someone is guilty, innocent or somewhere in between. The very idea of incarcerating people without end or hope, without access to lawyers-not allowed to see evidence..just so inhumane.

I'm surprised others haven't tried. Perhaps they have simply gone barking mad..who wouldn't ?>

[Mnemosyne]

4. They have tried and succeeded. Last year three hung themselves.

Check out the story in the thread I link to in post 3.

This continues and I believe we just do not hear about any but the extreme attempts.

Remember "they do this as an act of terror"! :grr:

[Mnemosyne]

3. The ONLY way they could die was slowly.

I posted this in response to a thread started by cal04 last year, nothing has changed apparently.

>>>>>>>>>>>>

According to Guantanamo's rules, a six-person team of military police should have been patrolling constantly, and as usual the bright neon lights stayed on. A guard should have passed each detainee's cell EVERY THIRTY SECONDS. 'From the landing, you can see right into every cell,' said Rasul. 'They don't have doors, just gates made from wide-spaced mesh. There's no privacy. If you hang up a towel because you want to go to the toilet, they make you take it down.'

snip>

The high degree of surveillance HAS FOILED DOZENS of previous attempts by prisoners to take their own lives. 'It happened in front of me several times. The soldiers would see what was happening and they were in the cell in seconds,' Rasul said. But somehow, in circumstances that the Pentagon has succeeded in keeping totally obscure, late on Friday, 9 June, three detainees, all weak and emaciated after months on hunger strike and being force-fed, managed to tease bedsheets through their cells' mesh walls, tie them into nooses and hang themselves. With the cells little taller than the height of a man, they stood NO CHANCE of breaking their necks: THE ONLY WAY THEY COULD DIE WAS SLOWLY, by hypoxia.


'That would take at least FOUR OR FIVE MINUTES, PROBABLY LONGER', said Dr David Nicholl, consultant neurologist at Birmingham's Queen Elizabeth Hospital, who has been co-ordinating international opposition to Guantanamo by physicians. 'It's very difficult to see how, if the landing was being properly patrolled, they could have managed to accomplish it.'

snip>

All three men, Gordon said, had been dedicated terrorists: 'These guys were fanatics like the Nazis, Hitlerites, or the Ku Klux Klan, the people they tried at Nuremberg.'

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=103&topic_id=217685&mesg_id=217834



How US hid the suicide secrets of Guantanamo

OP by cal04

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x217685

[Judi Lynn]

5. Thanks for your article, and to DU'er "vickiss" for adding links.

There would have been far more suicides if they hadn't found a way to overpower the prisoners quickly, disable them, throw them into restraint chairs, and slam tubes into them in order to keep them from starving themselves to death, ripping tubes out of prisoners and pounding them into other men without cleaning them first.

Any man determined enough to try to escape this sadistic hell by clawing his flesh open is NOT someone just trying to call attention to himself. It's an act of extreme desperation.

[gratuitous]

6. Didn't like his lemon chicken? Wrong wine served with dinner?

What preposterous excuse will the Nazi Republicans (yeah, I said it, this is nothing more than a concentration camp redux) come up with to justify this? I am so ashamed of our country and its leadership.