Harper's Scott Horton has done alot of heavy lifting to expose the legal ramifications of the Bush Administration's use of torture. While his article yesterday didn't expose the long sought smoking gun, the details more than warrant an investigation into what the Pentagon had previously called three detainees suicides by hanging at Guantanamo Bay in 2006.
Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guant�mo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guant�mo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.
As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guant�mo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guant�mo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths �suicides.� In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. �I believe this was not an act of desperation,� he said, �but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.� Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners� families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion.
Two years later, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which has primary investigative jurisdiction within the naval base, issued a report supporting the account originally advanced by Harris, now a vice-admiral in command of the Sixth Fleet. The Pentagon declined to make the NCIS report public, and only when pressed with Freedom of Information Act demands did it disclose parts of the report, some 1,700 pages of documents so heavily redacted as to be nearly incomprehensible. The NCIS report was carefully cross-referenced and deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners� deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report�a reconstruction of the events�was simply unbelievable.
Horton goes on to report on the testimony of guards who contradict the Pentagons suicide claims, the existence at Gitmo of a little known, remote compound called "Camp No" where the three men died, and that independent autopsies found evidence of homicide despite the bodies being delivered without the neck organs that could be used to prove the cause of death.
Yeah, I know - Haiti is devastated, unemployment here is over 10%, the Taliban just challenged Karzai in Kabul, and Martha Coakley is likely to lose today in Massachusetts. Tomorrow there will be another half dozen things that will occupy our attention. And the day after that there'll be another list of emergencies to be addressed.
We'll ignore Scott Horton's story because it's difficult and embarrassing and painful. It would require us all to face an uncomfortable truth; that we abandoned a set of principles we claimed fundamental to our national character. So we'll just ignore it.
It's like obsessing about a headcold when you have terminal cancer.
(Photo is a satellite photograph of the U.S. military facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba)
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