U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretery of State for Public "Diplomacy" Colleen Graffy today called the first three successful Guantanamo Bay suicides a PR move. She said the two Saudis and one Yemeni did not value their lives. She said the detainees had access to lawyers, received mail, and had the ability to write to their families, and so could not understand why they would want to kill themselves in Camp One, the highest security section of the prison. She said they had other means of making protests.
Let's set aside the fact of her horrifying heartlessness signifying that the administration is surely the Fourth Reich for a moment to point out that she's lying. Lying, lying, lying. The prisoners did not have the ability to petition for a trial. The prisoners were not allowed to write to families; it was their lawyers who disobeyed the wishes of the military by smuggling the letters out by hand.
Dozens of suicides have been attempted at Gitmo; these three are the first to succeed. The most previous suicides were aborted as fellow prisoners tried to waylay the guards with slicks of urine and projectiles of feces. The military later tried to tell the public that the attempted suicides were just a means of luring the guards into a "trap".
After the U.N. gets Gitmo shut down, we the public will have to find out where they moved it. God, this sucks.
