Gitmo Guards' Lapses Cited in Detainee Suicides'

[kpete]

Guards' Lapses Cited in Detainee Suicides
Probe Also Faults Lenient Policies At Guantanamo
In 2006, suicide notes written by detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said that their acts were attacks against the United States.

By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 23, 2008; Page A01

As the lights flickered off above them, more than two dozen detainees began to raise their voices in prayer and other songs, a din the guards dismissed as harmless. Three of the detainees furtively stuffed water bottles and toilet paper under their bedsheets to create the illusion of sleeping bodies, and they each strung up walls of blue blankets in their metal-mesh cells, seeking cover from their captors' glances.

Then, with strips of white sheets, T-shirts and towels wound into nooses, the three detainees in Guantanamo Bay's Camp 1, Block Alpha, hid behind the blankets and hanged themselves, their toes dangling inches above the floor while their bodies became blue and rigid. For hours, the guards failed to notice the first deaths to occur at the controversial U.S. military detention facility.

The simultaneous suicides on June 10, 2006, raised claims from top U.S. military commanders that the detainees were engaging in "asymmetric warfare" against the United States. More than two years later, a Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) probe and other documents reveal that the men took advantage of lapses in guard protocol and of lenient policies toward compliant detainees to commit what suicide notes described as an attack on the United States.

"I am informing you that I gave away the precious thing that I have in which it became very cheap, which is my own self, to lift up the oppression that is upon us through the American Government," wrote Ali Abdullah Ahmed Naser al-Sullami, of Yemen, a 26-year-old detainee who had been on one of the longest hunger strikes at Guantanamo, ultimately earning him forced feedings through a tube. In a note neatly folded into his shirt pocket, Sullami wrote: "I did not like the tube in my mouth, now go ahead and accept the rope in my neck."

more at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/22/AR2008082203083.html?wpisrc=newsletter

[grannie4peace]

1. they are probably doing that to get rid of them

:cry: :cry: :cry:

[trthnd4jstc]

2. Liberty and Justice for All. We have Failed in Our Society.

I become very disturbed when I consider this illegal war, the inept method of handling Afghanistan, and our illegal detentions of these Taliban, Al-Qaida, and the other prisoners, and terrorist that our in our custody. Why did we ever step out of the Army Field Manual? Why is Dick Cheney not Impeached? Why have we tortured these prisoners? Why is not George Bush Impeached?

We are supposed to be the shining light on the hill. Unfortunately, when I was younger I was involved in an illegal war in a certain Central American country, and we killed almost 150 innocent people, because we had bad intel. I changed from being a Republican to a Democrat on that day. I am not happy that the Democratic Party as a whole does not continually battle injustice as a whole. Thank God for the few Democrats, and the even smaller number of Republicans, and others, who are against injustice, for international law, and for the US to behave as we ought to.

G-d Bless us all. I understand a need to detain prisoners. I do not understand our usage of such crummy methods for dealing with our enemies.

Golden Rule: Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you. Why not?

We have made so many more enemies with BushCo's policies, than we had before: The ratio is nearly 100 to 1. Cheney and Bush wanted to create more enemies, they want horror, and chaos. They are guilty of WAR CRIMES!