Latest Guantanamo Suicide Haunts Obama's Trip to the Middle East

By Andy Worthington, Andy Worthington's Blog. Posted June 5, 2009.

Salih himself admitted that he had traveled to Afghanistan many months before the 9/11 attacks, to fight as a foot soldier for the Taliban against the Muslims of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan's long-running civil war. When the U.S. military reviewed his case at Guantánamo in 2004, he acknowledged being a member of the Taliban, but made a point of adding, "Yes, but that doesn't mean I supported Osama bin Laden."

With no information to indicate that Muhammad Salih was connected to al-Qaeda's terrorist activities, his death should serve as another important reminder that the Bush administration's policy of subjecting prisoners to arbitrary detention as "enemy combatants" has been a wretched failure. Had the former regime obeyed domestic and international laws, it would have held those regarded as terrorists as criminal suspects, to be prosecuted in federal courts, and, after adequate screening (which never took place) would have held other combatants as prisoners of war, according to the Geneva Conventions.

If this had happened, we would now be discussing whether it was feasible to imprison someone until the end of hostilities in a "war" whose supporters regard it as a struggle that might last for generations, and the answer, of course, would be no. Muhammad Salih, a foot soldier in another war, which preceded the 9/11 attacks, and had nothing to do with international terrorism, had been imprisoned for longer than the duration of the Second World War when his life ended in Guantánamo, even though the circumstances in which he was captured -- during the overthrow of the Taliban and the establishment of a new Afghan government -- came to an end no later than 3 November 2004, when Hamid Karzai was elected as President.

Although the response to Muhammad Salih's death has been muted in the West, and did not surface publicly in the Middle East during President Obama's visit, the ripples from the latest death in Guantánamo -- and, no doubt, rumors that Salih was killed, or, perhaps more convincingly, that he died as a result of years of brutal force-feeding -- surely made themselves felt behind the scenes. If Obama truly wishes to distance himself from the lawless initiatives of his predecessor, he needs to think deeply about an appropriate response, and will, I hope, reflect on the distinction between terror suspects and foot soldiers, rethink what "preventive detention" really means, and, above all, move swiftly to release more prisoners before there are any other deaths at Guantánamo.

See more stories tagged with: guantanamo, barack obama, egypt, binyam mohamed, muslim world, guantanamo suicides, lakhdar boumediene, shane kadidal, muhammad salih

Andy Worthington is a writer and historian, and author of The Guantánamo Files.

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