Maine Owl

I was taken in myself

From Deep Blade Journal, June 10th, 2006:

This is sad beyond belief. After four years of vicious US assault at the Guantánamo Bay camp on living, caged human beings–-subjected to the cruelest, most maniacal, most hideously efficacious methods of psychological torture ever invented–-three of the prisoners have finally succeeded in killing themselves.

This ruination of life and soul gives me a gut-wrenching sickness. My country has committed unconscionable acts against these helpless detainees that no notion of revenge can justify. Every rule designed to protect prisoners of war or criminal defendants has been denied them, or only weakly restored after monumental legal struggles. Most of them were rounded up after their names were sold by bounty hunters, not necessarily on anything resembling a "battlefield." But only a few have had any opportunity to challenge their detention in something other than a military monkey court.

So, it is incredible that a high-ranking US military officer would describe these same helpless detainees who killed themselves as some sort of dangerous enemy attacking him. But that is exactly what the commander of Joint Task Force-Guantánamo did.

Rear Adm. Harry Harris: "They are smart. They are creative. They are committed. They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own… I believe this was not an act of desperation, but rather an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."

Turns out there is reason to believe that these were not suicides. Evidence has been uncovered by Scott Horton and published in Harpers Magazine that the "asymmetrical warfare" of which Rear Admiral Harris spoke really was a case of murder by torture. Horton appeared on Democracy Now!:


Casting Doubt on US Claims of Suicide, Attorney Scott Horton Reveals 3 Gitmo Prisoners Died After Torture at Secret Site

SCOTT HORTON:[W]e were able to see how [NCIS, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service] had concluded the suicides occurred. And they state that these three prisoners bound their feet, bound their hands with cloth, stuffed cloth down their throats, in some cases, at least, put masks over their faces to hold the cloth in place, fashioned mannequins of themselves to put in their beds to deceive the guards, put up cloth to obstruct the view of cameras, fashioned a noose which they attached at the top of an eight-foot wire wall, stepped up as their hands and feet are bound and they’re gagging on cloth, stepped up on top of a wash basin, put their head through the noose, tightened it, and jumped off—and moreover, that these prisoners, in non-adjacent cells, did all of these things absolutely simultaneously, in a clockwork-like fashion. So the story is just simply incredible and simply not believable, I should stress.

And then we began looking at autopsy evidence, all sorts of other evidence, which strongly suggested that there was something seriously inappropriate here. We talked with pathologists and so on, who told us they had rarely seen something quite as irregular as what was going on here. And then, ultimately, I was approached by Sergeant Hickman, who gave me his account. And it’s not just Sergeant Hickman, actually; it’s almost his entire unit who was on duty that night and the perimeter guards. Four other soldiers provided aspects of corroboration. There’s not a single element of Sergeant Hickman’s story that is not in fact corroborated by others, based on the their own eyewitness testimony.

And I should say, the things they observed are the things they were required to observe. It was their duty. These were the perimeter guards. They were supposed to keep close count of everything that happened, and particularly who went in and out of the base that evening. And what they tell us is that three prisoners were removed from that cellblock that evening between 7:00 and 8:00 and taken to the secret facility, Camp No.

ANJALI KAMAT: Explain what Camp No is. Why is it called Camp No?

SCOTT HORTON: Well, they call it Camp No because “No, it does not exist” was an answer that they were supposed to give if there were inquiries about it. In their first weeks on the job there in March 2006, they had come across it when they were doing perimeter patrols. In fact, two of the soldiers here were PIs, and they decided sort of to sharpen their skills. They were going to monitor and keep an eye on Camp No, which they did. And they largely believed that this was a facility that was being used by the CIA, or certainly by Intelligence Service agents. They noted un-uniformed government personnel from other government agencies who seemed to be involved with or connected with this facility.

In February 2009 one of these soldiers, Staff Sergeant Joe Hickman, who was on duty June 9th, 2006, had come forward with some very troubling observations he made during that night. But the Justice Department under President Obama was not interested in pursuing the case.

The implication is obvious. Despite the propaganda bath constantly promoting American righteousness, the United States even under Obama may in fact be a deceitful criminal tyranny with no regard for the life and limb of those under its thumb. And it looks like our military officers will tell the the most egregious lies in order to cover that up. So, why is it that they hate us again?

Update: Mytwords at NPR Check (who was not taken in by the reported "suicides" in the first place) has up an outstanding piece on the detainee deaths--and NPR's failure of skepticism and lack of interest in actual reporting on this incident along with torture and detainee murder in general.