New calls to close Guantanamo

[SoulTrainOz]

The suicides of three Arab prisoners at Guantanamo have ignited new calls for the US to shut down the detention camp and find a better way to deal with captured terrorist suspects.

Advocates for the prisoners blamed the Bush administration for the deaths, which they said would inflame the global Muslim community.

Two Saudis and a Yemeni hanged themselves with clothes and bedsheets in maximum security cells yesterday -- the first captives to die at Guantanamo since the US began sending suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban captives there in 2002.

Saudi Arabia's interior ministry identified the two Saudis as Manei al-Otaibi and Yasser al-Zahrani but gave no further details. Pentagon documents show Zahrani was 21, meaning he was sent to Guantanamo as a teenager.

Saudi Arabia, a staunch US ally, asked for the return of the bodies, and said it was stepping up efforts to repatriate more than 100 Saudis held at the prison on a US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"Each Saudi has to be brought home, where he can face up to charges he is accused of based on our laws and regulations," said an interior ministry spokesman.

Guantanamo holds about 460 foreigners, including Australian David Hicks, captured during the US-led war to oust al-Qaeda from Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks.

The US administration calls them dangerous men who would launch deadly attacks on America and its allies if released. But President George W Bush said on Friday he would like to empty Guantanamo and is working to repatriate many of the detainees.

Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, said the US must find another way to keep the Guantanamo prisoners off the streets.

"There are some ruthless and fanatical terrorists that are in our custody and we just can't turn them loose," Reed told CNN's Late Edition. But he said: "We should recognise that as long as Guantanamo exists, it is a source of international attention and concern."

Prisoners have for years staged coordinated suicide attempts that human rights advocates called evidence of despair and isolation. Before yesterday, 23 prisoners had tried to kill themselves in 41 suicide attempts at the camp.

They have been held for more than four years, most without charges and face indefinite detention with none of the rights afforded prisoners of war or criminal suspects in the US justice system.

Shafiq Rasul, a British former Guantanamo prisoner who won a US Supreme Court case upholding the inmates' now-curtailed right to challenge their detention in the US courts in 2004, said he witnessed suicide attempts while held there.

"There were individuals who had just had enough, couldn't take any more, were going crazy, who would attempt to kill themselves," he told Sky Television.

Britain, Germany and other US allies have joined a chorus of rights groups that have urged Washington to close the camp.

"If it is perfectly legal and there is nothing going wrong there, why don't they have it in America?" Britain's Constitutional Affairs Minister, Harriet Harman, said on BBC television.

Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the indefinite detention of prisoners without legal proceedings contradicts the rule of law.

"I think it would be to the benefit of our cause and our fight for freedom and against terrorism if the facilities at Guantanamo were closed down," he told the CNN program Late Edition.

Cageprisoners.com, a website that draws attention to the cases of detained Muslims, posted a news release blaming the Bush administration for the deaths.

"They have constructively killed them by creating an atmosphere which, for all intents and purposes, had already taken their lives," it said. "Their blood is on the hands of the Bush regime and their deaths will fuel the anger of the global Muslim community."

The US Supreme Court is expected to rule this month on the legitimacy of special military tribunals set up to try those charged with war crimes, and to clarify what rights the prisoners have in US courts.

Pretrial hearings had been scheduled at Guantanamo this week for one of the 10 men charged so far before the tribunals, but the hearings were were cancelled due to the suicides.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald
www.smh.com.au/news/world/new-calls-to-close-guantanamo/2006/06/12/1149964437084.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

[marion]

Suicides spur Guantanamo criticism

Detainee deaths bring renewed calls for change, prison closure

Monday, June 12, 2006 Posted: 0331 GMT (1131 HKT)



WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The suicides of three inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp has spurred renewed calls for changes at the facility, with one Republican senator urging the Bush administration to try suspected terrorists held there.

"Where we have evidence, they ought to be tried, and if convicted, they ought to be sentenced," Sen. Arlen Specter, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told CNN's "Late Edition."

Authorities at the prison camp, located on a Navy base in Cuba, reported Saturday that two Saudis and one Yemeni were found dead in their cells after using clothing and bedsheets to hang themselves.

The Pentagon identified the three prisoners late Sunday, describing one as a mid-ranking operative with close ties to a top al Qaeda figure.

Rear Adm. Harry Harris, commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, told reporters the men had been "determined to take their own lives." He said prisoners at the camp are "dangerous, committed to killing Americans."

But the arrests of most of the roughly 500 prisoners held there were based on "the flimsiest sort of hearsay," Specter said.

The Pennsylvania Republican told reporters the administration faces "a tough situation," since some of those held might return to their homelands to carry out attacks on Americans. "But too many have been detained for too long," he said.

"There is the overtone that quite a number of them will be tried, that there is tangible evidence," he said. "As to a great many others, there is not evidence which could be brought into a court of law."

The Bush administration has declared the prisoners to be "enemy combatants," but does not consider them prisoners of war who must be accorded the rights spelled out by the Geneva Conventions.

But detention without charges runs counter to established human-rights law, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that prisoners could challenge their detention in U.S. courts.

There have been more than 40 suicide attempts at Guantanamo Bay, but the inmates found dead over the weekend were the first to succeed, the government said.

Center for Constitutional Rights lawyers, who defend 200 of the detainees, said the suicides were acts of desperation carried out by people who had not been charged and have no hope of getting their day in court.

The human rights group Amnesty International blamed the Bush administration's policies for the deaths.

But Harris said the suicides were an act of "asymmetric warfare" aimed at getting the prison closed. He said a "mythical belief" had spread among inmates that the camp would be shut if three detainees were to die.

The Defense Department said one of the three, Ali Abdullah Ahmed, was a mid- to high-level al Qaeda operative and a "close associate" of Abu Zubaydah, an al Qaeda strategist captured in 2002. Ahmed took part in a long-term hunger strike that ended in May, and has been "non-compliant and hostile" to guards, according to a Pentagon statement.

Another of the dead prisoners, Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi, was a member of a banned Saudi militant group that recruited for al Qaeda. He had been recommended for transfer to another country that was not specified, the Pentagon said.

The third prisoner, Yassar Talal al-Zahrani, was described as a "front-line" Taliban fighter who helped procure weapons for the Islamic militia that once ruled most of Afghanistan.

Al-Zahrani was captured by anti-Taliban Afghan forces and took part in the 2001 uprising at a prison in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif that left a CIA officer dead, the military said.

The men were not identified by nationality.

'Ticking time bomb'

Two Democrats on the Sunday talk-show circuit called on the administration to close the prison camp. Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called Guantanamo "a ticking time bomb."

"Bottom line: We've kept people in this prison for years and years and years without a status, without any rights, and it was the wrong way to go," the California Democrat said. "We should have been organized, planned ahead."

About 90 inmates were disciplined after a May incident in which detainees staged a suicide attempt to draw guards into a room before attacking them, prison officers reported.

That month, dozens of prisoners also took part in a hunger strike to protest their conditions.

Harman said the situation at the prison camp was another reason Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should resign. Bush has said Rumsfeld still has his confidence as head of the Pentagon.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called on the United States to close the prison camp, which Amnesty International has called "a legal black hole."

But Sen. Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, told CNN that "We just can't turn them loose."

"There has to be a good procedure that balances the need to keep these people off the street with the need to find out who in fact is a terrorist," said Reed, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

A U.S. ally, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told CNN that the United States and its allies are "fighting for the rule of law" against terrorism, and Guantanamo has become "a weakness in this fight."

"Seen from that perspective, I think it would be to the benefit of our course and our fight for freedom and against terrorism if the facilities at Guantanamo were closed down," he said.

Swedish Foreign Minister Jan Eliasson told The Associated Press the suicides highlighted the need to shut the prison and either try the captives or free them, adding that the 25-nation European Union favors closure of the camp.

But former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a possible Republican presidential candidate, said U.S. troops would have the same problems "wherever else you put it."

"We maybe have people who hate us so much that we can never release them," Gingrich told reporters. "Now if you're never, ever going to release them, you're going to have psychological problems" among the prisoners.

A British citizen released from Guantanamo in 2004 told the AP, "This was not done as an act of martyrdom, warfare or anything else."

"If you're told day after day by the Americans that you're never going to go home or you're put into isolation, these acts are committed simply out of desperation," Shafiq Rasul, 29, told the AP.

Rasul has previously accused the United States and Britain of humiliating and abusive treatment.

Among the cases to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court before the end of its current term is a major test of presidential authority over planned military tribunals for suspected foreign terrorists.

Fewer than a dozen of the Guantanamo prisoners would face military review of alleged war crimes.

Those trials have yet to begin, and the high court has been asked to lay out clear procedures to ensure the defendants are treated within constitutional and international norms.

[marion]

When Suicide becomes Resistance

By Mike Whitney

06/12/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- The only positive thing about Guantanamo is that no one seems particularly mystified by what Bush is doing. He’s tip-toed around the law by erecting his state-of-the-art concentration camp where the compliant Supreme Court won’t shut him down. That’s allowed Rumsfeld to skirt the niggling issues of habeas corpus and due process and establish a neocon haven for permanent detention.

Still, no one is really taken in by the White House public relations campaign. The prison has only increased the recruiting efforts of groups like Al Qaida and fueled anti-American hatred around the world. It’s done nothing to fight terrorism, as all the recent polls clearly indicate. Instead, it’s just added another black stain to the already sullied reputation of the waning superpower.

By most accounts, the inmates at Guantanamo are generally low-level militants or tribesman who were scooped up by the warlords and delivered to the US for the $1,000 bounty. The al Qaida kingpins have all been bundled off to torture-friendly allies who are more skilled in the dark art.

The real purpose of Bush’s premier-gulag is to familiarize the American people with the tectonic shift in American justice. By shoving Guantanamo under their noses, the public is forced to accept this new and strange reality. “Everything has changed”; principles have been abandoned, commitments discarded, liberties forsaken. America will no longer play by the rules. There are no more guarantees on personal freedom; the law is being reshaped to meet the requirements of new world order.

That’s alot to absorb.

Bush has shown that he has no intention of honoring any of the conventions or treaties that restrict the behavior of the state. Prisoners at Guantanamo have been deprived of the most basic civil liberties even the right to know why they are being detained. Bush asserts that he has absolute power over the lives of anyone he designates as an “enemy combatant”. This puts him squarely above the law.

“There’s nothing wrong with a dictatorship, as long as I am the dictator,” Bush proclaimed.

Americans are unaccustomed to their leaders boasting of their despotic ambitions. They are not used to hearing their president promote indefinite detention without judicial process. Guantanamo violates our most deeply held convictions and the fundamental principles which underscore the constitution. It is a vision of tyranny writ large by men who stand well outside of our traditions and our devotion to individual freedom. Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney are not really Americans at all, but “globalists” with a world view that is essentially elitist and autocratic.

After 4 years of imprisonment, isolation and torture; we shouldn’t be surprised that 3 inmates finally succeeded in killing themselves at Guantanamo. Their suicides are a triumph over a system that is entirely designed to maximize human suffering. Each of these men had been exposed to the dehumanizing abuse and mistreatment which was authorized at the highest levels of government and which has been widely reported in the media. Whether it was “sensory deprivation or self-inflicted pain”, they’ve all been used as “lab-rats” in Bush’s Nazi-like experimentation on the human psyche.

How much screeching music can a man take? How long can we keep someone in a dark room before he cracks? What are the effects of simulating suffocation with a wet towel over the face?

This is how our tax dollars are being spent by the twisted, sadistic leadership at the Pentagon.

For the victims, the only way to preserve their tattered dignity, was to take their own lives; a choice that demonstrates the depth of their hopelessness. Their deaths should be seen for what they are; a final act of resistance against a manifestly cruel and unjust system.

Amnesty International issued a statement after the deaths were confirmed. They said, “These apparent suicides … are the tragic results of years of arbitrary and indefinite detention.”

Bush’s solitary achievement in his 6 years in office has been to spread misery and despair among blameless Muslims.

The unfortunate deaths of the three young men will undoubtedly draw more attention to Bush’s concentration camp at Guantanamo. The administration has already endured the withering criticism of the EU, the United Nations, the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and numerous other human rights and religious organizations. Still, Bush refuses to budge. He will undoubtedly defend his torture-chamber until the bitter end.
Guantanamo is the face of America under Bush. It has changed how we are perceived in the world and it has eroded our moral authority. We should be grateful to the 3 men who sacrificed their lives in the struggle against barbarity and cynicism. They have nudged us ever-closer to the day when Bush and company will be held accountable for their crimes. Maybe then we can tear down the gun-towers and block walls at Guantanamo and erect a monument to the countless victims of this vile and vicious regime.