Fatal Desperation at Guantanamo
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After 40 official and numerous unrecorded suicide attempts in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, three detainees were finally successful in taking their lives. Detainees Yasser Talal Al Zahrani, 22, (imprisoned when he was 17), Mana Shaman Allabardi Al Otaibi, 30, and Ahmed Abdullah, 33, hung themselves with clothing and bed sheets late Friday night, allegedly concealing their bodies from guards with laundry hung from the ceiling to dry and arranging their beds to appear as though they were still sleeping.
For the lawyers who represent some of the 465 people currently held in the naval base, the news came as no surprise. Officially, there have been over 40 suicide attempts since the detention facility opened. But as anyone with access to the detainees knows this deflated number is as fictitious as the claims of evidence against those being held without official charge. In a May 2005 interview, former military linguist Erik Saar said that suicide attempts occurred weekly when he was stationed at Guantanamo. He noted,
The detainees felt that their situation was hopeless. Many of them thought that they were eventually going to be executed. Those who were hardened, who we did start to see some intelligence from, were more likely to remain true to their cause and not attempt to kill themselves. They believed that this was an inevitable outcome of their decision to fight jihad. But the Pentagon thought it was just something the detainees were doing to get attention. They labeled some of those suicide attempts "self-injurious manipulative behavior."Though innumerable lawyers and military figures stationed at Guantanamo have attested to the physical and psychological neglect the detainees continue to endure, officials have responded to the suicides with Herculean efforts to paint the deaths as a form of offensive attack.
One of our clients was forcibly extracted during our interview day because he was attempting suicide and required force-feeding. He said that he would rather die than stay in Guantanamo … Our client Mohammad Rahman actually has serious health conditions that they will not address. When he was 32 he had a pacemaker installed, and he had a heart valve replaced. The valve seems to be leaking again. We have tried to obtain his medical records to no avail, and to obtain real medical assistance for his heart and other his serious health problems. They provide nothing -- but they will interrupt our client interview to "protect his health and life" by force-feeding him. This was the worst three days of my life. There is a great deal more. Now we hear the government's strident characterizations of these suicides.Widespread hunger strikes at the camp suggest that the suicides are not a bid for attention, but rather a desperate belief that death is the only way out of a nightmarish imprisonment. This past September, 131 detainees were believed to be participating in a hunger strike. Many more participants, however, were slowly starving themselves to death but went unreported. That's because many detainees were accepting one out of every nine meals that they are served in order to escape the technical definition of "hunger strike" -- and subsequently avoiding the violent nasal force-feeding administered to those who skip nine meals in a row.
I am dying here every day, mentally and physically. This is happening to all of us. We have been ignored, locked up in the middle of the ocean for four years. Rather than humiliate myself … I would rather hurry up a process that is going to happen anyway … I would just like to die quietly by myself … I want to make it easy on everyone. I want no feeding, no forced tubes, no "help," no "intensive assisted feeding" This is my legal right.In a recently declassified suicide note from a failed attempt in October 2005, Jumah Al Dossari wrote,
I hope you will always remember that you met and sat with a "human being" called "Jumah" who suffered too much and was abused in his belief, self, in his dignity and also in his humanity. He was imprisoned, tortured and deprived from his homeland, his family and his young daughter who is in the most need for him for four years … with no reason or crime committed. Remember that there are hundreds of detainees in Guantanamo -- Cuba -- they are in the same situation of suffering and misfortune. They were captured, tortured and detained with no offense or reason. Their lives might end like mine.While all these documents and accounts have been made available to the public through organizations like the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, Bush administration officials have short memories and attention spans. Despite the fact that no detainees have been afforded a fair trial, or been allowed to legally contest their status as "enemy combatants," Colleen Graffy claims that "detainees had access to lawyers, received mail and had the ability to write to families, so had other means of making protests," and wondered "why the men had not protested about their situation."
Onnesha Roychoudhuri is a former assistant editor of AlterNet.
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