Wed Jun 03, 2009 at 00:23:29 AM EDT
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or "self-injurious behavior" if you prefer. Most of us know it by its real name: suicide. At Guantanamo.
A Yemeni detainee at Guantánamo Bay who had been on a long hunger strike apparently committed suicide late Monday, military officials said Tuesday.
The death was the first at the prison since President Obama took office, and detainees' lawyers said it would focus new attention on conditions at the detention camp.
The detainee, 31, was identified as Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh al Hanashi, who has been imprisoned since 2002 at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Pentagon officials said he was a Taliban fighter who claimed at the camp that he had never killed anyone.
A terse announcement from the Pentagon described the death as an "apparent suicide" and said guards "found the detainee unresponsive and not breathing" while doing routine checks. It did not disclose a specific cause of death but said lifesaving measures had failed. |
| vox humana :: Another Act of Asymmetrical Warfare |
| This is the fifth "successful" suicide at Guantanamo, with three in 2006 and one in 2007. There was also one attempt in 2003 that left the man permanently brain damaged:
The psychological ordeal that befell some detainees at Guantanamo, where most have been held as "enemy combatants" for nearly four years without charges, is noted with clinical precision in some of the accounts prepared by the US military.
Mishal Awad Sayaf Alhabiri, who attempted suicide at the prison on Jan. 16, 2003, is considered for release in one document because he suffered "significant brain injury due to oxygen loss."
"He will need to be in some assisted living situation, though he can follow simple concrete directions," the report to a panel reviewing his case said.
Suicides? From the Yemeni Times in 2006, this bizarre report:
Apparently, Al-Salami's family and friends don't accept the claim that he committed suicide. "U.S. soldiers killed my son!" his father Ali Abdullah repeated. However, this has yet to be proven by U.S. doctors assigned to examine Al-Salami's body and decide the cause of death in their report, said to be produced on June 30.
On another front, Dr. Patrice Mangin, head of the five-member medical delegation that volunteered to cross-examine the body, said in a conference organized by the National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedoms (HOOD) last Thursday that the deceased's throat is missing and the delegation will need to request it from U.S. authorities in order to clarify if Al-Salami hung [sic] himself or was killed.
As far as the most recent death is concerned:
David H. Remes, a lawyer who represents 16 other Yemeni prisoners at Guantánamo, said that Mr. Hanashi had been one of seven prisoners kept in a psychiatric ward at the prison and that he had been force-fed in a restraint chair. Mr. Remes said all the detainees in the psychiatric ward were kept under sedation. Guantánamo records show that Mr. Hanashi's weight at one point fell to 87 pounds.
Furthermore:
Shayana Kadidal, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has coordinated Guantánamo cases, said the death of a psychiatric patient raised questions about the quality of care and would increase pressure on President Obama, who has said he would close the prison by January.
"Every day that passes makes it more likely that people will die in detention on President Obama's watch," Mr. Kadidal said.
Obama administration officials have said that the camp is now a well-run prison that complies with international standards. But detainees' lawyers and human rights groups say that conditions there remain bleak, with many detainees held in solitary confinement.
The suicide happened on the first of this month. Apparently, journalists at Guantanamo at the time were not allowed to file reports until they left Cuba.
Please continue to hope for change you can believe in.
crossposted at My Left Wing |
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