Is it any wonder there was a riot at Guantanamo yesterday, as reported by
AP?
Prisoners wielding improvised weapons clashed with guards trying to stop a detainee from committing suicide at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the military said Friday.
The fight occurred Thursday in a medium-security section of the camp as guards were responding to the fourth attempted suicide that day at the detention center on the U.S. Navy base, said Cmdr. Robert Durand.
Detainees used fans, light fixtures and other improvised weapons to attack the guards as they entered a communal living area to stop a prisoner who was trying to hang himself, Durand said.
Got that? Four suicide attempts in one day.
This comes on the heels of a couple of interesting reports from yesterday, including this one from Reuters:
GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE (Reuters) - Only about one-fourth of the prisoners held at the Guantanamo naval base are interrogated regularly because there are not enough translators and interrogators to question them all, the U.S. admiral in charge of the detention operation said on Thursday.
..."It's about around 25 percent of the population that we are actively interrogating," Harris told visiting journalists.... The rest are not ignored completely, he said. But asked if some prisoners might have gone years without being questioned, he replied, "I would think there are, but I just don't know."
Meanwhile, Rumsfeld revealed that officials are in the midst of an internal debate still - even after McCain's torture amendment - over whether the "unlawful combatants" at Gitmo and elsewhere are covered under the Geneva Conventions, according to a separate AP article:
The debate hinges on whether suspected terrorists or other insurgents can be treated more severely than captured members of an enemy army.
..."There is a debate over the difference between a prisoner of war under the Geneva Convention and an unlawful combatant in a situation that is different from the situation envisioned by the Geneva Convention," Rumsfeld told the Senate Appropriations Committee's defense subcommittee.
Emphasis is added here to show the criminal absurdity of this position. "Suspects" picked up may be subject to torture, whereas clearly uniformed enemies picked up on a battlefield are not. Suspects, mind you, who not only have been denied counsel, due process or official charges, but suspects who may not have even been questioned in years. Interrogators can pull out the waterboard, get down to brass tacks and begin turning the screw on someone whose information is ... not exactly fresh - if there was ever any pertinent information to be had in the first place.
In light of just these kinds of suspensions of justice and use of torture, the UN yesterday issued a report advising Gitmo should be shut down, according to the New York Times:
The United States "should cease to detain any person at Guantanamo Bay and close this detention facility, permit access by the detainees to the judicial process or release them as soon as possible," the report said.
My guess is the prisoners who tried to kill themselves yesterday - and those detainees desperate enough to use fans and light fixtures to attack guards trying to stop a suicide hanging - have about as much faith in the United States taking UN advice as we do. While I'm not advocating letting people kill themselves on our watch, there is a level of desperation in these acts that screams of hopelessness, and rationally so.
There is, you see, no exit. Not even death, in the rules set under this one-party Republican state.