The US military admitted last week that 23 prisoners at its Guantanamo jail had attempted a collective suicide by trying to hang or strangle themselves between August 18 and 26, 2003.

Ten of the attempts occurred on a single day, August 22. The prisoners were locked in tiny 6-by-8 foot metal mesh cells next to each other and able to communicate.

Vague information about the desperate protest, which has been suppressed by the Pentagon for the past 18 months, came to light last year during a casual conversation between Guantanamo Bay personnel and two journalists visiting the military prison.

Repeated media queries about the incidents finally saw the Pentagon's Southern Command release a statement on January 24. Not surprisingly, the Pentagon tried to downplay the incidents, disdainfully describing them as "manipulative, self-injurious gestures" and of little significance because they were "not successful".

Military spokesmen claimed that the detainees had sustained only "minor injuries" and officially categorized only two of the attempted suicides as "genuine". Although the names and nationalities of the prisoners involved were not revealed, the statement disclosed that seven of the men have since been released from Guantanamo.

Asked by the media why the military had not previously reported the protests, Southern Command Lieutenant Commander Chris Loundermon declared that, "a (press) release would not be made for every self-harm incident".

While Washington has officially acknowledged only 34 suicide attempts since it began incarcerating detainees in Guantanamo in January 2002, it was forced to admit last week that there had been 460 "self-harm incidents" over two years.

The attempts were a desperate response to a new wave of human rights abuses unleashed against the prisoners, particularly following the appointment of Maj-Gen Geoffrey Miller as commander of Guantanamo in November 2002.

On December 2, 2002, a month after Miller's installation, US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld approved recommendations that hooding, nakedness, dark rooms and "using detainees' individual phobias, such as fear of dogs, to induce stress", be implemented.

Between January and March 2003, 14 prisoners tried to kill themselves, including one who sustained serious brain damage. In other words, 40 percent of the 34 officially acknowledged suicide attempts since the prison opened occurred within a few months of Miller's appointment.

In May 2003, Miller wrote a "72-point matrix for stress and duress" and three months later called for the construction of an execution chamber at Guantanamo. Guantanamo Bay commanders apparently responded to the attempted suicides with extensive use of tranquilizers and other techniques to suppress the increasingly distressed inmates.

Last year the Red Cross drew attention to a "worrisome deterioration" in the prisoners' mental health, which was confirmed by British prisoners released from Guantanamo. The British detainees reported numerous cases of serious psychological disorders.

They said that at least 50 prisoners, or approximately 10 percent of inmates, were so disturbed that they were "no longer capable of rational thought or behaviour" and acted like small children.

Major David Auch, an Army Reserve physician who served at Guantanamo and later became head of the medical unit at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, has admitted that one detainee would constantly bang his head against the door and walls of his cell.

"They had him in a helmet to protect his head because he kept pounding it on the wall. Sometimes they flexicuffed him because he tried to scratch his face, tried to grab anything he could to mutilate himself."

Five days after Southern Command finally admitted the Guantanamo suicide protest, more information came to light about the illegal and depraved techniques employed at the prison.

On January 28, Associated Press published a report based on nine pages from a draft copy of Inside the Wire, a forthcoming book by Erik R. Saar, a 29-year-old former Army sergeant and Arabic translator stationed at Guantanamo between December 2002 and June 2003.

He was deeply disturbed by the sexual and religious persecution of detainees. According to the report, some female interrogators - military and civilian- wore bra and thong underwear to sexually arouse, humiliate and then break some of the more devout Muslim prisoners.

Some of the detainees were smeared with fake menstrual blood during interrogations. An extract from the leaked pages read: "The concept was to make the detainee feel that after talking to her [the interrogator] he was unclean and was unable to go before his God in prayer and gain strength."

The AP report and the revelations about the August 2003 mass suicide protest add to the mountain of evidence demonstrating that the detention and treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo is a war crime that flows inherently and inevitably from the brutal US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. -Courtesy World Socialist Website