World

Guantanamo "Suicides"? Maybe Not As Originally Claimed

by nanute | January 19, 2010 at 01:21 pm

115 views | 36 Recommendations | 1 comment

According to the NCIS, 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.

In June of 2006 it was reported in various news media outlets that 3 suspected terrorist detainees at Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay had committed suicide. Now comes word that 4 military personnel, one a decorated Marine named Joe Hickman, and 3 others have told a different story to Sott Horton a contributor to Harper's Magazine, a New York attorney and lecturer at Columbia University.

Hickman and the other military enlisted men are claiming that a secret detention facility at Guantanamo called Camp No, played a role in the deaths of the detainees in question. At the time of the incident, commander, Rear Admiral Harry Harris called the deaths suicide and a form of "asymmetrical warfare." Initially, lawyers for the detainees believed the deaths were suicide, but the victims families insisted that it could not be the case.