DYING TO LEAVE

HELL OR SOMETHING close to it burns on this earth. Its residents are so anxious to leave they go to the most extreme means, most recently in the most notable of ways [story]

. . .  when Dossari did not return, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan knocked on the cell door, calling out his client's name. When he did not hear a response, Colangelo-Bryan stepped inside and saw a three-foot pool of blood on the floor. Numb, the lawyer looked up to see Dossari hanging unconscious from a noose tied to the ceiling, his eyes rolled back, his tongue and lips bulging, blood pouring from a gash in his right arm.

DOSSARI IS A DETAINEE at Guantanamo.  His suicide is unusual for the fact it occurred in the presence of his lawyer, not his guards.  The Joint Task Force at Guantanamo admits there have been at least thirtysix suicide attempts by twenty two detainees.  Not hard to tell some have tried more than once. This has been going on for some time.  A cluster of suicide attempts in 2003 highlighted the problem much earlier on. [WaPo/March 2, 2003]

The cluster of attempts has renewed criticism from human rights organizations, which have long faulted the government's decision to hold the prisoners as "unlawful combatants," without charges or protections under international prisoner of war statutes.

"As far as they know, they're going to be there forever," said Michael Ratner, president of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights. "It must give people a sense of desperation. . . . This is like a Devil's Island."

UN REPRESENTATIVES ON HUMAN RIGHTS have finally been invited to the prison. However, the United States says no detainees will be allowed to be interiewed alone. [story]

"They said they have nothing to hide," Manfred Nowak, U.N. special rapporteur on torture, said yesterday at a news conference in New York. "If they have nothing to hide, why should we not be able to talk to detainees in private?"

WHY INDEED?  Only the devil knows.

RECOMMENDED ADDITIONAL READING
HANGING TOGETHER [AP/January 24, 2005] Twenty-three terror suspects tried to hang or strangle themselves during a week-long protest orchestrated in 2003 to disrupt operations and unnerve new guards at the U.S. military camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the U.S. military said Monday.

Officials hadn't previously reported the incidents, which the military called "self-injurious behavior" aimed at getting attention rather than serious suicide attempts.

The coordinated attempts were among 350 "self-harm" incidents that year, including 120 so-called "hanging gestures," at the secretive prison that opened after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to Lt. Col. Leon Sumpter, a spokesman for the detention mission.

In the Aug. 18-26, 2003, protest, nearly two dozen prisoners tried to hang or strangle themselves with clothing and other items in their cells, demonstrating "self-injurious behavior," the U.S. Southern Command in Miami said in a statement. Ten detainees made a mass attempt on Aug. 22 alone.

THE HERETIK NOTES 120 so-called "hanging gestures" suggests the US government’s numbers don’t add up.

A GESTURE OF WHAT? [al Jazeera/January 25, 2005] The incident occurred in the same year in which Major-General Geoffrey Miller had taken command of the prison with the authorised mandate of obtaining more information from the detainees.  . . . The U.S. Southern Command described it as "a co-ordinated effort to disrupt camp operations and challenge a new group of security guards from the just-completed unit rotation". . . . .Alistair Hodgett, at the Washington office of Amnesty International, said: "When you have suicide attempts or so-called self-harm incidents, it shows the type of impact indefinite detention can have, but it also points to the extreme measures the Pentagon is taking to cover up things that have happened in Guantanamo. What we've seen is that it wasn't simply a rotation of forces but an attempt to toughen up the interrogation techniques and processes."

According to Guantanamo officials they differentiated between a suicide attempt in which a detainee could have died without intervention, and a "gesture" which they deemed was only aimed at getting attention.

THE HERETIK MUST ASK what kind of attention detainees received before their gestures for attention.  And what kind of attention after?

ADDITIONAL RELATED READING
BETTER DEAD THAN ALIVE? [The Age] Hicks told Englishman Martin Mubanga, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, he had been taken from the ship by helicopter to an unidentified place, thought to be Pakistan or Afghanistan.

The United States has been accused of using the practice of rendition with Guantanamo Bay detainees, where it takes prisoners to another country to be tortured rather than doing it on US soil. . . . . Hicks' father, Terry, confirmed that the abuse had involved sexually embarrassing things and that they involved Americans.

"He had two, 10-hour beatings from the Americans and I said to David, 'Sure they were Americans?' (because) he said he had a bag over his head and he said, 'Oh look ... I know their accents, they were definitely American'," Mr Hicks told Four Corners.

"Some pretty horrific things ... were done to him."

The program reported the abuse had included Hicks being injected and then penetrated anally with various objects.

AND WHAT MORAL ROT DOES THE ABOVE REVEAL? [Digby] Is this some sort of American sexual panic or is it official policy that sexual violence is the best way to "interrogate" prisoners?

Every time I read this stuff it makes my stomach churn. What is being described is depraved sexual violence--- rape. And I wonder about the men and women who are perpetrating these horrifying acts. This is a license to unleash the darkness which I assume exists to some extent or another in most people --- and then they are going to come back into society and we are going to expect them to behave like decent people. [via Suburban Guerrilla]

TIME AND AGAIN THE HERETIK DEPLORES not just the great damage done to the victims, but also the damage inflicted on torturers to themselves and to  this country’s soul.  For as The Heretik has noted before, as Digby does here, our citizen soldier torturers and their CIA counterparts at some time come home to our country.  And when these whom we claim do the best for us do return to the home of the brave and the land of the free, these soul savaged torturers establish a new, indeed more base line for what conduct is acceptable and normal. Some such torturers will come home, plop down on the couch, click on the remote, and cheer some Monday Night Football.

THE HERETIK IS STRUCK AGAIN by the banality of evil, Arendt’s observation of the all too ordinary aspect of evil, made more horrible by its everyday and casual cruelty.

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[Linkmeister]

I don't recognize my country anymore.

[Neil Shakespeare]

More damn horrors. Every day a Halloween.