No Way Out

[This is a feature from Democracy Now!, the nationally syndicated radio and television program. Host Amy Goodman is interviewing lawyer Joshua Colangelo-Bryan about a recent visit to the U.S. Military's Guantanamo Bay Prison. This is an edited transcript of the radio program.]

The Bush administration has decided not to allow human rights investigators from the United Nations to meet with any detainees being held at the Guantanamo Bay prison. For three years, UN investigators have been trying to visit the prison camp. A breakthrough appeared to have occurred last week when the Pentagon invited three UN experts to visit Guantanamo, but the invitation was on the condition that they had no access to the detainees. United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, said it now makes no sense to send UN experts to Guantanamo under these conditions. He said, "They said they have nothing to hide. If they have nothing to hide, why should we not be able to talk to detainees in private?"

Until now, the detainees have been largely held incommunicado from the outside world with the exception of occasional visits by attorneys. We speak with one of these attorneys -- Joshua Colangelo-Bryan. He represents six men from Bahrain who have been held without charges at Guantanamo. Two weeks ago, he witnessed one of his clients, Jumah Dossari trying to commit suicide. More than twenty other detainees have also tried to commit suicide, but this is believed to be the first such event witnessed by an outsider at the prison. Lawyers and human rights advocates say this highlights the growing desperation among the more than 500 detainees there.

AMY GOODMAN: We reached Joshua Colangelo-Bryan Tuesday in Ecuador. I asked him to explain who his clients are and what he saw when he visited them.

JOSHUA COLANGELO-BRYAN: My law firm has represented six citizens of Bahrain who have been detained at Guantanamo for the past several years. We initiated our representation in the summer of 2004 and since then have been down to Guantanamo a number of times to meet with our clients. In October of this year, I was at Guantanamo visiting with each of our six clients, including Jumah al-Dossari. Jumah is a 32-year-old divorced father of a ten-year-old daughter. He is generally a very affable person, very personable. We have quite informal conversations about a range of subjects and certainly have developed a certain understanding and closeness over the course of my visits.

On October 15th in the afternoon, I was meeting with him when he needed to use the bathroom, and without describing in elaborate detail the procedures at Guantanamo, that requires my calling M.P.s to come and move him from our meeting area to a small adjacent cell where there's a toilet. The M.P.s arrived. I left the room. Several minutes later, the M.P.s came out after having moved Jumah into the cell. After a few moments, I decided that I should check and see whether he was finished, so that I could come in and speak with him again.

I opened the door to the room that houses both the meeting area and the cell. The first thing I saw was a pool of blood on the floor, and strangely in that first moment, my initial thought was that he had made himself vomit blood because this is a symptom that he has complained about, and I had the strange thought that maybe he was trying to convince me that it was a genuine symptom and not something that he had made up. A second later, I looked towards the area of the cell, however, and saw Jumah hanging by his neck from the top of a mesh metal wall that encloses the cell. He also had what appeared to be a very serious gash on the inside of his right arm, which was causing him to bleed on himself and also on the floor.

I immediately yelled for M.P.s, who arrived quickly. I called Jumah's name several times, but he did not respond, and as best I could tell, appeared to be unconscious. The M.P.s arrived, cut him down from the noose that was holding him and put him on the floor. Still didn't seem that he was conscious, and I also didn't see him bleeding at all. Within a moment or so, I was asked to leave the room, or ordered to leave the room might be more accurate, and as I did I saw Jumah seeming to gasp, which at least struck me as a good sign.