WASHINGTON, June 11: Human rights bodies on Sunday blamed prolonged and ‘lawless’ incarceration of prisoners as the cause of three suicide-deaths at the Guantanmo Bay prison camp and urged US authorities to end this practice.
The US military, however, described the suicide of three detainees on Saturday as a ‘public relations exercise’ by committed jihadis who were willing to do anything to attain ‘martyrdom for their jihad’.
Earlier on Sunday, Saudi Arabia identified the two Saudis as Mani bin Shaman bin Turki al Habradi and Yasser Talal Abdullah Yahya al Zahrani. The Saudi government has begun procedures to have their bodies sent home. The third prisoner, a Yemeni, has not yet been identified.
All three hanged themselves with clothing and bed-sheets and died before they could receive medical assistance.
Amnesty International said the apparent suicides “are the tragic results of years of arbitrary and indefinite detention” and called the prison “an indictment” of the Bush administration’s human rights record.
The Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents about 300 Guantanamo prisoners, said the detainees suffered from an “incredible level of despair” that they would never get justice, which led to these suicides. The group urged the Bush administration to take immediate steps to “remove this stain of injustice” from America’s face.
The three dead men are “heroes for those of us who believe in basic American values of justice, fairness and democracy,” William Goodman, a representative for the New York-based group told reporters.
Another US group, Human Rights Watch, said that when people are imprisoned “without trial, without being brought before independent judges, without being charged” they are forced to take desperate steps. “These people are despairing because they are being held lawlessly,” the group said.
Even a close ally like Britain urged the Bush administration to reconsider its policies towards the Guantanamo prison camp where detainees are denied the rights afforded formal prisoners of war or criminal suspects in the US justice system.
“If it’s perfectly legal and there’s nothing going wrong there - well, why don’t they have it in America and then the American court system can supervise it?” Britain’s Constitutional Affairs Minister Harriet Harman told the BBC on Sunday.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain has already called Guantánamo an “anomaly” while UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan says the camp should be closed.
The detention camp on the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay was opened in January 2002 to keep those detained in Afghanistan, Iraq and other hotspots since the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The US military says there’s no escape from this prison camp in South-east Cuba which, on one side has a mini-desert and on the other a huge expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. At first the inmates were kept in Camp X-Ray, a near shanty of metal cages. Later they were moved to Camp Delta, a newly-built complex, enclosed by three layers of barbed-wire fences.
US officials, who were already facing growing international calls to close the camp, are now striving desperately to defend Guantanamo which the rest of the world community see as a judicial black hole.
On Friday, President George W. Bush said he would “like to end Guantanamo”, adding he believed the inmates “ought to be tried in courts here in the United States”.
Mr Bush, who was spending the weekend at Camp David, expressed “serious concern” over the suicides and directed his administration to reach out diplomatically while it investigates.
The US military, however, refuses to see it as a human rights issue. Rear Admiral Harry Harris, commander of Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, described the suicides as an act of ‘asymmetric warfare’.
“This was clearly a planned event, not a spontaneous event,” he said. The admiral said all three detainees were committed jihadists captured on the battlefield. “I believe this was not an act of desperation, rather an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us,” Mr Harris said.
Before Saturday’s suicides, there had been 41 suicide attempts since the prison camp opened in January 2002, the Pentagon said.
