Washington calls Guantánamo suicides 'PR exercise'

Three prisoners at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba–two Saudis and a Yemeni–killed themselves last weekend–the first successful suicides at the US prison camp since it opened in 2002 and the latest incident to highlight the fierce controversy over its continued existence. President Bush has defended Guantánamo Bay as a necessary means of holding men who would do "grave harm to American citizens" while an increasing number of critics believe the prison's ongoing operation and the Bush administration's refusal to place the prisoners before the courts represents a stain on the nation's reputation. The debate continued as military authorities investigated how the prisoners–Manei al-Otaibi, Yasser al-Zahrani and a third detainee whose name has not yet been made public–were able to use their clothes and sheets to hang themselves. Amnesty International said: "The US administration can no longer turn a blind eye to the cruelty of the regime that it has created in Guantánamo, now in its fifth year. President George Bush has it within his power to order an end to this human rights scandal and to ensure that detainees are either brought to fair trial or released." Details about the deaths are still emerging, but it seems clear that the men made some sort of suicide pact. The US military's Joint Task Force Guantánamo said the men had been held in Camp 1 and had previously been among the 131 prisoners who at various times have gone on hunger strike. All three left notes, but the contents have not been made public. Debate was also raging about the motivation for the suicides. Rear Admiral Harry Harris of the US Navy, the prison commander, claimed the men were "committed jihadists" who died in acts, not of desperation, but of "asymmetrical warfare against us." "The methods of hanging themselves were similar," he said. "I believe this was a coordinated attempt." The US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Colleen Graffy described the suicides as a "good PR move to draw attention." But lawyers for other prisoners said there had been clear signs of the increasing desperation felt by many detainees held without charge for more than four years–something highlighted by the Red Cross, the only independent body permitted access. "These people are despairing because they are being held lawlessly. There's no end in sight," Ken Roth, the head of Human Rights Watch, told the BBC. "They're not being brought before any independent judges. They're not being charged and convicted for any crime." Lawyers said only 10 of the more than 450 inmates at Guantánamo had been formally charged with a crime. They also pointed to a report by New Jersey's Seton Hall University that showed, based on the military's own documents, that 55 percent of the prisoners are not alleged to have committed any hostile acts against the US and that 40 percent are not accused of affiliation with al-Qaida. The same documents suggested that only eight percent of prisoners are accused of fighting for a terrorist group and that 86 percent were captured by the Northern Alliance or Pakistani authorities "at a time when the US offered large bounties for suspected terrorists." The military said one of the dead was part of a Taliban uprising at the Qala-I-Jangi prison in Afghanistan, another was a member of Jamaet al-Tableeg, an Islamic fundamentalist group the military considers terrorists, and the other was a "mid- to high-level" al-Qaida operative. But Clive Stafford Smith, a British lawyer who represents 36 men including Binyem Mohammed, a Pakistani who went to school in London and whose hearing before military lawyers has been postponed because of the suicides, said such allegations often bore little resemblance to the truth. "From what I have seen, just a little scratching of the surface proves the allegations to be false," he said. "One client of mine was alleged to be part of a British al-Qaida cell–at a time when he was 11 years old and living in Saudi Arabia." The future of Guantánamo has been in question for months, with the US seeking advice over the repatriation of 150 prisoners. UK Attorney General Lord Goldsmith has called for the prison's closure, describing its existence as "unacceptable," a view echoed on June 11 by the British Constitutional Affairs minister Harriet Harman, who said: "It is in a legal no man's land. Either it should be moved to America and then they can hold those people under the American justice system or it should be closed."