Suicides staged to cover up torture at Guantanamo

It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood
- Macbeth, Act 3, Sc4. 121.


Part I - Background

Research conducted by Human Rights Watch investigator John Sifton and the ACLU have determined that at least 100 persons have, "died during interrogations, some who were clearly tortured to death."  Retired US Army General Barry McCaffrey has said, "We probably murdered dozens of [detainees] during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A." 

The American public cannot claim ignorance about the festering myasis that has become normative behavior amongst intelligence gathering agencies and the US military this past decade.  Reports published as early as 2002 in both the NY Times and Washington Post, describe the beating deaths of Afghan detainees by US troops and CIA field contractors.  Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker magazine exposed the truculent grandstanding by Rumsfeld's all too willing "rotten apples," when orders for the gloves to come off at Abu Ghraib were made.  Extraordinary rendition, CIA black-site torture camps, civilian massacres by mercenary forces, Bush's torture memos authorizing -if necessary- genital mutilation, regular doses of water-boarding against Al Qaeda high-value operatives, and Guantanamo's Muslim concentration camp are all piece-and-parcel of the Bush junta's Global War on Terrorism that were on public display. 

A review of homicide cases, however, shows that few detainee deaths have been properly investigated. Many were not investigated at all. And no official investigation has looked into the connection between detainee deaths and the interrogation policies promulgated by the Bush administration.

Gen. Antonio Taguba, after investigating the Abu Ghraib abuses, said that "there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

In spite of the obvious facts, the false narrative offered by both the government and their accomplices, is that torture (otherwise stated as 'enhanced interrogation' in the MSM) is limited to those "ticking time-bomb" cases and even when used, is innocuous and not permanent and therefore justifiable.  The following case proves the complete opposite is true.

Part II - Cover Up of Guantanamo Homicides

Scott Horton at Harper's magazine has unfolded another horror story at Guantanamo, that includes the staged suicide of three detainees and the subsequent cover up by the military and Department of Justice officials under both Bush and Obama administrations.

According to the NCIS documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

The article presents the accounts of military officers who were stationed at Guantanamo at the time, which indicate that each of the three detainees were subject to torture at a classified sub-site at 'Gitmo' referred to as Camp "No" (i.e. "no" it doesn't exist) and returned to their cells in the dead of night.  Horton claims that a concerted effort was subsequently made by military brass to paint the deaths as a publicity stunt coordinated by the inmates in order to tarnish American image.  Government investigators dismissed the purported suicides as nothing more than 'asymmetric warfare' by the enemy. 

Andrew Sullivan interjects that further investigation is warranted and that no one in government can be trusted to handle the truth:

This case deserves a thorough and complete and exhaustive inquiry and investigation. I no longer believe that any entity in the US government can be trusted with such a task. The investigation must be able to go right to the very top of the torture program and do so with no political influence whatsoever.