Three deaths at Gitmo
By Sean Aqui | Related entries in Breaking News, Foreign Policy, Law, Military, News, The War On Terrorism, WarAfter four years of being jailed without charge, and multiple attempts by various prisoners, three inmates at Gitmo finally succeeded in hanging themselves over the weekend.
That might be controversial enough; I’ll get into the basic implications of the deaths a little later. But the U.S. stoked the flames of world outrage by dismissing the suicides as a “good PR move.”
The suicides by hanging of the three men, two Saudis and one Yemeni, on Saturday sparked renewed calls from foreign governments and human rights groups for the military facility to be closed or moved.
About 465 foreign nationals are being held there without charge, some for almost four years. Yesterday, however, Colleen Graffy, a senior State Department official, dismissed the suicides as a “good PR move to draw attention� and “a tactic to further the jihadi cause�.
The camp commander described the men as dangerous extremists would go to any lengths to become martyrs. “They are smart, they are creative, they are committed,� Rear Admiral Harry Harris said. “This was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.�
I cannot imagine a dumber thing for us to say. There may be a kernel of truth there, the idea that some extremists are willing to die in order to advance their cause. But all the suicides do is call renewed attention to the embarassment that is Gitmo. The real damage is that the “They died? Oh well” response suggests to the world that we couldn’t care less about prisoner rights or safety. It suggest that we follow certain guidelines for prisoner treatment not out of conviction but because we are expected to.
To our credit — though too late — cooler heads quickly backpedaled from those initial remarks:
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs Cully Stimson, speaking to BBC radio, distanced himself from the statements.
“I wouldn’t characterize 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,” he said.
In the aftermath of the earlier statements, Stimson’s remarks sound like so much spin.
On the one hand, it’s possible to read too much into the “PR stunt” line: that defense was offered by relatively junior officials, and then contradicted by more senior officials.
But it reveals an attitude held by at least some of the people responsible for guarding and protecting prisoners and waging the fight against terrorists. It also seems to expose a curious laissez-faire attitude on the part of the Bush administration’s publicity machine. When something as momentous as three prisoner deaths occur, why did they leave the response to such junior officials? Especially junior officials who had apparently not been briefed on what to say? Where was Bush? Where was Rice? Where was Rumsfeld?
Other than the damage done by such rhetorical foot-shooting, what do the deaths mean? Well, I’ve long said that Gitmo is an indefensible legal and moral catastrophe, and argued that the prisoners either need to be charged with crimes, labeled as POWs or released. I’ve also said that the existence of Gitmo does us more harm than good, and should be shuttered for that reason alone.
The deaths don’t change that. They may highlight the unAmerican injustice going on there; they may speak to the increasing hopelessness of the prisoners; they may have fueled renewed outrage and pressure to close the facility. But Gitmo should never have been opened for the reasons it was, or operated in the manner it has been. No amount of “humane treatment” makes up for creating a deliberate legal limbo in which human beings can disappear for years at a time. No amount of “administrative review” makes up for such clear proof that the rule of law is only for those people that we say it’s for, rather than a deeply held principle that we apply to everyone accused of wrongdoing.
The deaths don’t change the debate. They simply point out, in ever starker terms, what made Gitmo a bad idea in the first place.
Shut it down.
This entry was posted on Monday, June 12th, 2006 and is filed under Breaking News, Foreign Policy, Law, Military, News, The War On Terrorism, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
June 12th, 2006 at 4:24 pm
Now that we’ve decided to jail irregular fighters rather than shoot them on the spot, we need to figure out how we’re going to deal with their cases. Although it’s perfectly legal, incarcerating them indefinitely is probably not a valid long-term strategy.
June 12th, 2006 at 5:16 pm
Might I note that it is prohibited to commit suicide in Islam so how they managed to call this an act of ‘extremism’ I will never know. Just shows how much crap these guys churn out.
June 12th, 2006 at 5:25 pm
[...] Pointed to at Donklephant which in turn led to “The Times Online.” [...]
June 12th, 2006 at 7:37 pm
Ah yes, Gitmo, that horrible place of torture. The temperature is a freezing 68 degrees, the main courses are rice pilaf and orange chicken, the inmates get their own rugs and get to face Mecca to pray every day.
Truly this place is horrendoes, why, it is torture that these people do not get their own sleep number beds and heram girls.
3 nutbars decded to hang themselves. Good riddance to bad rubbish, just like Zarqawi. This is just a stunt to rally more jihad, and quite frankly I’m just happy that they killed themselves by rope and not explosives.
June 12th, 2006 at 7:56 pm
Did you ever think that maybe, since the Admiral has been dealing with these folks for a while, his take of the reason for the suicides is an accurate reflection of the attitudes displayed by the prisoners on a daily basis? Or tell me, do you think that sitting here in the US and maybe reading a few articles in a newspaper or blog makes someone more of an expert? I believe the Admiral hands down.
I keep hearing all this moralizing by a certain side of the political debate about how horrible we treat POWs or how awful and unjust the Iraq war is and blah blah blah. Or as in this post, how we’re violating “deeply held” principles. But then in the same breath, many on that certain side say it’s just fine and dandy to kill unborn babies.
Unborn babies are completely innocent, but we’ve allowed millions to be terminated, undoubtedly a significant percentage for simply a matter of inconvenience. What ever happened to our “deeply” held principles? Do they not apply on the other side of the birth canal?
Those dudes at Gitmo are not innocent. They were captured as enemy combatants during a freaking war. I have absolutely no sympathy for them. But I offer a compromise – treat them with the same level of respect as we give unborn children. That way we can claim to the world we treat our POW’s just like (unborn) babies.
June 12th, 2006 at 8:44 pm
I don’t think the comments are out of line considering Islamist use suicide bombing as a military tactic. It might not be true, but it isn’t unreasonable.
June 12th, 2006 at 10:18 pm
This is one of the most inane posts I’ve read. But it does provide an opportunity: Gitmo is friggin’ paradise compared to the supermax prison that numbnuts Moussaoui is going to.
These foreign nationals enemy-combatants are treated WAY better at Gitmo. Like BrianMA points out, they aren’t isolated. Every time I see a picture of Gitmo, I see orange-suited prisoners yacking-it-up through open fence. In the Supermax, you get not visitors, NO HUMAN INTERACTION AT ALL!!! 23 hrs a day, in a tiny cell, fed through a hole. 1 hr. in a tiny pen. These ad seg units are the Orwellian definition of prolonged mental torture. Can you really…I mean really…understand YEARS of no communication with another human being and No hope, at all, for the rest of your life, of ever communicating, meaningfully or otherwise, with another human being? Absolutely hopelessness. Buried alive. Now under those conditions, yes, suicide would be rational option for the sane and insane alike.
But Gitmo. Come on. From the looks of it, I’d say an open-aired Carribean gen pop at your standard state pen with more competent guards, better food AND a relatively homogenous population that it isn’t particularly interested in having butt sex with you. In fact, 99.99% chance that the guy next to you is in complete spiritual & cultural unity with you.
Doesn’t the fact that three of them committed suicide simulteanously king of support this. There haven’t been a series of individual suicides, randomly effecting the prison like one would expect if it was depression based. What, did all of these guys have the same mental breakdown at the same time and chose to kill themselves by the same means by chance, hell no. It was organized and concerted, a suicide pac and suicide pacs are different.
I had more sympathy for the detainees at Gitmo BEFORE these dumbasses killed themselves.
I try to put myself in the shoes of the wrongfully detaineed. “Okay, this sucks. It really sucks. I’m a farmer in the wrong place at the wrong time and now I’m stuck on this island. I’m going to get out someday. I’m obviously not in a bamboo cage in a jungle. The Americans — well, thank God I didn’t get renditioned off to Egypt. That would REALLY suck. The Egyptians know how to torture. Americans look like little girls trying to put a worm on their fishing hook when it comes to torture. Thank God, I’m not in Turkey. I’d be whallering around in my own feces and getting stabbed in the ass. If you have to get captured in battle, get captured by the Americans. Don’t try to face Mecca and give Allah his props in a Chinese re-education camp. The Americans provide me with my with my own Koran and religiously appropriate food. America is a democracy and the world is watching.”
If you have an argument that Gitmo is legally wrong – hey, I understand. I think there are unresolved grey areas of the law and I’ll swap legal theories all day long. But moralizing over Gitmo smells like bullshit to me.
June 13th, 2006 at 4:08 am
I’m not sure closing Gitmo would solve anything – the problem just lies in the lack of any sort of due process that Bush Admin takes a dump on whenever they get a chance.
I also don’t think the three suicide are a sign of conditions there. The place may suck, but three suicides in a day sounds like a coordinated effort, and exactly what this was originally called: a PR stunt. If the suicides were spread out over a month, or even a week, I’d have considered that this was indicative of conditions there. But all together? It smells of PR.
June 13th, 2006 at 9:37 am
Unborn Fetuses Lewis, unborn fetuses. And that has nothing at all to do with this.
June 13th, 2006 at 9:42 am
Dos, In SuperMax you are convicted of a crime. Gitmo does not have that. That is the problem. People who are against Gitmo, are rarely speaking out against the treatment as much as the circumstances. Not every single person in there belongs there, you can not convince me of that, being that in a number of cases, they were receiving prisoners from locals and other forces on little more than face value. Charge them with a crime.
June 13th, 2006 at 3:03 pm
[...] [...]
June 13th, 2006 at 3:04 pm
“Might I note that it is prohibited to commit suicide in Islam so how they managed to call this an act of ‘extremism’ I will never know. Just shows how much crap these guys churn out.”
You can’t be serious. Suicide is prohibited in Islam as is murder, but that hasn’t stopped practicing Muslims from strapping explosives to their waists and walking into crowded markets. If that’s not what you call extremism, then you’ve said far more against Islam than any State Department official or Naval officer has ever said.
June 13th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
Dos: What John said. I have not said that we’re torturing prisoners, or peeing on their Korans, or anything like that. It’s a deflection to go there.
I simply think that imprisoning people for four years, without either charging them or treating them as POWs, is wrong. And we deliberately set up Gitmo to that end.
Yes, nonuniformed fighters can be shot out of hand. But we didn’t do much of that even in Vietnam. Guerrilla wars just don’t lend themselves to neat distinctions like that. And many of those held at Gitmo were related to the Taliban in some way. That entitles them to more than being thrown in a hole without any legal status whatsoever.
More to the point, Gitmo is a PR disaster. It’s harming our cause more than it’s helping it.
And that’s the vein my criticism of the “PR stunt” line was in. It may be plausible. It may even be true. But there was no way to know that without at least some sort of investigation. And it was simply a dumb thing to say. To have that be the first reaction out of U.S. officials just screams “dismissal”.
Contrast that to how Israel handled the recent explosion on the Gaza beach: they didn’t start out with a denial or a dismissal. They expressed regret for the deaths immediately, even while stressing that they were still investigating what happened. They did not get defensive; they did not jump to conclusions.
The suicides may or may not have been a ploy; they may nor may not have been caused by the hopelessness engendered by four years of imprisonment, with no end in sight. But that’s irrelevant. As I wrote in my post, the main effect of the deaths is to call renewed attention to the embarassment that is Gitmo. The “PR stunt” defense was simply an additional level of stupid.
June 13th, 2006 at 4:42 pm
TO: Colleen.Graffy@pepperdine.edu
Dear Ms. Graffy:
I am writing to you to remark upon the incredibly ignorant statement you made regarding the three recent suicides at Gitmo. The lack of knowledge about the causes of suicide which you demonstrated in your profoundly stupid remarks leaves me breathless for the sheer lack of understanding of an issue which is the 11th leading cause of death among Americans. (Anderson RN, Smith BL. Deaths: leading causes for 2001. National Vital Statistics Report 2003;52(9):1-86.), not to mention what incarceration without hope of release for charges unknown must do to a person. How would you like to be locked up without any knowledge of charges against you, in a land not your own, without any sense whether or not you would ever leave alive? Perhaps you should try it.
Annual rates of suicide in this country are over 30,000 per year, more than 650,000 Americans are hospitalized each year following suicide attempts, and over 116,000 are treated in hospital emergency departments for same. Among US males, suicide is the 8th leading cause of death for all US men and males are four more times likely to die from suicide than females. And this is not even beginning to quote numbers related to female and teen deaths. But don’t take it from me, Ms. Graffy, check out the website of one of your fellow-governmental agencies, the CDC–that’s the Centers for Disease Control in case you had failed to note its existence– http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/factsheets/suifacts.htm . There you will see a tidy introduction to a subject in which you are woefully ignorant and which all your degrees have obviously not prepared you to understand or speak about.
I come from a family which, in the last one hundred years, has experienced over a dozen suicides in its ranks. So, yeh, I tend to be rather sensitive to the issue. We are what you would call patriotic Americans, as a whole, and have done more than our share to contribute to the life of the nation in ways very big and small. To see you liken suicide as an act of warfare against the US would be funny if it were not so cruel and unfeeling. But then, cruel and unfeeling is probably how you have risen to the position you presently enjoy at State.
Do us all a favor, Ms. Graffy, and shut your mouth about subjects for which you are woefully under-qualified and under-experienced to comment. Step outside of your fishbowl of an office and limited circle of acquaintances, take a drive sometime and see the world beyond the Beltway. Touch base with reality. You are in many ways as imprisoned as the people you are verbally abusing at Gitmo.
Very Truly Yours,
Robert Pell-deChame
June 13th, 2006 at 6:23 pm
Might I note that it is prohibited to commit suicide in Islam so how they managed to call this an act of ‘extremism’ I will never know. Just shows how much crap these guys churn out.
So, how do you explain suicide bombers then?
June 13th, 2006 at 7:03 pm
john: its unborn babies/children. “fetus” is a greek word, so it should either be italicized or you should use the English equivalent. I know its tough to call it what it is and I know I “fear ambiguity”, but quite frankly there is nothing ambiguous about being dead or alive. You either are or you aren’t, and diverting to the comatose is a non-sequiter for those who try that route.
Yes, some people are in Gitmo because of a mistake by the military. We also have innocent people serving jail time right now for crimes they didn’t commit, but never have I heard a sensible person crusade to end the prison system just because there are a few misjudged cases.
June 14th, 2006 at 7:44 am
Brian,
Most all english words are derivatives of other languages, and to try to gain sympathy by semantics is ridiculous. Fetus is in the english dictionary and a commonly used word in the english language. there is a difference between a fetus and a child. You can not make that argument sorry sport.
And going back to the innocents in Gitmo and the innocents in american prison, again they were convicted of a crime. The people at Gitmo aren’t even charged. The argument falls back to my original point that these people should be charged and prosecuted if we plan to hold them indefinitely.
June 14th, 2006 at 9:13 am
Thank goodness when these fanatics martyred themselves they didn’t take anyone else with them.
Their thankfully meaningless deaths were a victory in the War on Terror, and the Guantanimo Bay prison was instrumental in winning that victory: without Gitmo to separate the suicidal Jihadis from the rest of us who knows how many of us would have died when these terrorists exercised unrestricted discretion in their choice of time, place, and manner of death?
I guarantee you that without Gitmo it wouldn’t have been hanging. A belt of C4 covered with metal pellets soaked in rat poison would be far more likely.
It is in the nature of suicidal terrorists to commit suicide. The central problem for the rest of us is whether they will do so safely. Gitmo solves that problem. Why would we ever consider shutting it down when it is doing its job with such obvious efficacy?
June 14th, 2006 at 10:41 am
Laika,
I certainly hope that your post was meant to be facetious, although I suspect it wasn’t. Your biggest mistake, of course, is in assuming that all people at Gitmo are fanatical, suicidal terrorists. But, the most disturbing part of your post is that you seem to be glad, if not excited, that people have died.
Brian and Dos,
The point is not whether Gitmo is the worst detainment facility on earth. The point is that people are being held indefinitely without being charged. And, since it is apparently unnecessary for the government to prove anything with regard to an individual’s alleged criminal activity before casting them into Gitmo, it is unlikely that any of these people will be investigated further to either prove or disprove whether they have done anything. No one has mentioned it yet, so I will ask what if these weren’t suicides at all? Our government won’t even let the UN come in to talk with the prisoners or fully inspect the facilities. What have we got to hide? Isn’t that the line that the government uses about wire-tapping and other such Fourth Amendment violations? If you are all law-abiding citizens, and you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t be worried about us searching your detainment facility.
Lewis,
What is your stance on the death penalty? Since you’re all about being the inconsistency police, you better say that you are totally against it in all circumstances. I’ll bet you’re not though. Seriously, this issue has nothing to do with abortion. And, I’ll tell you something. You have NO idea whether the people in Gitmo are or are not innocent. They were not captured as enemy combatants in a war. They were rounded up mostly from their homes and businesses here in the United States because they were “persons of interest” to the government. Why? We don’t know because the government doesn’t have to tell us, and they are not required to prove anything they suspect anyway. Even Brian has admitted that some of the people are in Gitmo because of mistakes by our military.
June 19th, 2006 at 2:10 am
>I certainly hope that your post was meant to be facetious, although I suspect it wasn’t.
I could never top the self-parody of all the hand-wringing and soul-searching when suspected would-be suicide bombers commit suicide. It’s like blaming society when an alcoholic picks the lock on the liquor cabinet. It is almost impossible to prevent people from doing what it is in their nature to do.
>Your biggest mistake, of course, is in assuming that all people at Gitmo are fanatical, suicidal terrorists.
They’re certainly suicidal, aren’t they?
> But, the most disturbing part of your post is that you seem to be glad, if not excited, that people have died.
That these brave martyrs sent themselves to paradise without flying planes loaded with fuel and hostages into buildings makes me downright giddy. In the magnanimous spirit of generosity I do wish these brave men all the best; hell, give ‘em 73 virgins. I’m feeling generous.
To be completely serious here, our opponent is a thinking opponent, human in every detail including cunning, intelligence, and passion. They will find a way to fulfill their holy mission … some of the time. We should be thankful that this time they weren’t able to take anyone else out with them. We have Gitmo to thank.