Three Guantanamo Detainees Die Reportedly of Suicides On June 10, 2006
On June 10, 2006 the three prisoners Mani al-Utaybi, Yasser al-Zahrani, and Ali Abdullah Ahmed died in the Guantanamo Bay detainment camps.
According to Pentagon they "killed themselves in an apparent suicide pact". Prison commander Rear Admiral Harry Harris has stated: "This was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare committed against us." Harris also stated that the Guantanamo detainees were: "dangerous, committed to killing Americans.". He claimed that there was a myth among the detainees that if three detainees were known to have died in the camps the DoD would be pressured to send the rest of the detainees home.
President George Bush expressed "serious concern."
Colleen Graffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, called the suicides, "a good PR move" -- and, "a tactic to further the jihadi cause".
On June 12, 2006, in a statement that The Scotsman characterized as an attempt "..to pull back from the earlier comments about public relations and 'asymmetric warfare'," Cully Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, said:
- "I wouldn't characterise it as a good PR move. What I would say is that we are always concerned when someone takes his own life, because as Americans, we value life, even the lives of violent terrorists who are captured waging war against our country."
Sean McCormack, spokesman for the United States State Department also said that "I would not say that it was a PR stunt". The men were apparently unaware that one of them was due to be released. Joshua Denbeaux, a lawyer who volunteered to represent Guantanamo prisoners through the Center for Constitutional Rights, and one of the principal authors of a methodical academic analysis that examined, in detail, what the DoD said about the prisoners' identities, has said that prison authorities were withholding this information because "US officials had not decided which country he would be sent to."
Colonel Michael Bumgarner, the commander of the camp's guard force, reacted to the suicides by telling his officers: "The trust level is gone. They have shown time and time again that we can't trust them any farther than we can throw them. There is not a trustworthy son of a ... in the entire bunch."
Read more about this topic: Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp Suicide Attempts
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