2006 Guantanamo Triple "Suicide" Back In The News

On April 25, 2011, after the Wikileaks Guantanamo publication, the charming Michelle Malkin wrote a column entitled The Suicide Stunts At Gitmo Revisited. There you can link to three pieces Malkin wrote at the time: The Gitmo suicide was staged; The Gitmo suicide stunt; and Gitmo suicide pact, boo-freaking-hoo part deux. You can also click here for video of Michelle giving her opinion at the time.

Her "Suicide Stunts Revisited" post was in response to an article in the New York Times dated April 24, 2011, by Charlie Savage, entitled As Acts of War or Despair, Suicides Rattle a Prison. The article contains one reference to the possibility that the three had been murdered: "The three deaths have gained particular notoriety among prison critics, with some skeptics even saying that they may have been homicides." The phrase "some skeptics" links to an article in Harper's Magazine by Scott Horton dated January 18, 2010, entitled The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle.

Other than that one sentence, the Times article calls the events "suicide" and presents the U.S. military's version of what happened. As Horton says in his Harper's article: "The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths 'suicides'. In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. 'I believe this was not an act of desperation', he said, 'but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.'”

I recently posted an item entitled "A Few Bad Men": Murders, Lies, And Coverup At Guantanamo Bay that includes quotations from and links to Horton's article. An excerpt:

"According to the NCIS [U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service] documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously."

I highly recommend that you read my post (if only because it includes Jack Nicholson's awesome "You can't handle the truth" clip!), the articles in Harper's and the Times, and Malkin's "suicide stunt" material. Compare the two views and see what you think. "An act of symmetrical warfare"? Or a triple homicide?