While they lay rotting without prison straw…
Navy Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, commander of Joint Task Force-Guantanamo suggests of the latest suicide at the detention camp, ""That's something we're obviously going to learn from and we will modify our procedure accordingly, if required, to prevent it from occurring again."
The Associated Press and Forbes magazine, failing to attribute their source when describing "
Abdul Rahman Maadha al-Amry, as a Taliban foot soldier, say the Saudi man died at the U.S. military base in southeastern Cuba on May 30, 2007. Buzby's reaction is better than Colleen Graffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy. She and other military officials
called the 2006 suicides of three detainees "a tactic to further the jihadi cause" and a "good PR move to draw attention." It takes an exquisite measure of depravity to construe multiple suicides as a “good PR move.” Those men, two Saudis and a Yemeni, hanged themselves with sheets and clothing. According to the Department of Defense, one of the dead would have been transferred eventually to Saudi Arabia. Had the deceased been apprised of this flicker of hope? Did he have any reason in the world to believe his captors?
The journey of many of the Guantanamo detainees began after being rounded up by Afghan warlords. They profited on the sale of human beings to U.S. forces, the military paying for prisoners by the head. Four prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have taken their own lives. They lived their last days among those herded, tortured, and then kenneled at the U.S. prison camp in Cuba. One had arrived at Guantanamo as a teenager.
Did thoughts run through their heads in their mother language, “Give me liberty or give me death.” For those of us who reject newspeak, doublethink, and every other propaganda effort from the Bush administration, we call the prisoner’s acts simply suicides. Suicide is indicative of profound, morbid depression. The Tipton Three, former Guantanamo detainees, say a substantial number of prisoners are on anti-depressants. The Tipton Three also shed light on the haphazard methods of rounding up the terrorists. The warlords weren't conducting interviews. No, they were amassing human cattle to trade for cash.
During Alexander Solzhenitsyn imprisonment in the Gulags, his great epiphany was “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts.” A lovely, magnificent, and ponderous notion.
The prisoners at Guantanamo, the four now dead, can offer us a few things in their passing. The human spirit has a breaking point. That point is: there are far worse things than death. Being stripped naked for spectacle (men from a culture of modesty); sexual humiliation, Lynndie England style, attack dogs lunging for exposed genitals and faces, arms and legs shackled to the floor for hours on end while crouching. Food depravation. The sensation of suffocating. The sensation of drowning. Hour upon hour upon hour of deafening music. Twenty hours of interrogations at the hands of the CIA, British Intelligence, and the like. Your Holy book urinated on by soldiers.
For the four, life at Guantanamo must have been no life at all. In spite of the seriousness and permanence of suicide, regardless that Islam considers suicide sinful, the four, trapped in American-sanctioned, intolerable, and inhumane conditions, voluntarily gave up their ghosts.
Perhaps, they felt their God would forgive, given the United States of America had taken from them lives that could be lived meaningfully. Maybe they thought God would not forgive and chose the lesser evil: an Islamic hell over an American one. Maybe they lost faith--torture, isolation, and despair can render one to a condition of hopelessness. After all, their attempts at a hunger strike were met with force-feeding with oversize tubes.
Remember Gandhi’s story and his hunger strikes? Communities, religions, and nations were moved. Guantanamo hunger strikes moved no one to action except oath-breaking medical professionals and a military operating from a handbook without ethics.
If only the four had--like Solzhenitsyn--been rotting on prison straw and could accumulate contraband like the Russian writer did…paper and pencils to document the experience--Instead the detainees were walled in steel and concrete, when they weren’t kenneled in the blistering elements.
Rear Admiral Harry Harris, once the commander of the Guantanamo Joint Task Force, characterized last year's suicides as an act of warfare waged against the U.S. military. I fully expect Harris has been promoted handsomely being so void of a conscience.
President Bush says of course, "We would like to end the Guantanamo--we'd like it to be empty." Doublethink. That’s as legitimate as the Washington Post outing CIA torture prison sites in Europe, then the CIA closing them down before Secretary Rice flies across the ocean and says there are no prison cites in Europe. Doublethink. President Bush and his lot have stacked lie upon lie to the extent, that no rational person can or should believe anything put forth by the administration or those they directly control.
The President, the Department of Justice, the Pentagon, the NSA, and FBI have trumped in the name of security, have asserted a contrived “unitary” theory of presidential power: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized, The Fourth Amendment. These ideas have been abandoned, negated, and betrayed. This administration does not preserve liberties. They squander, exploit, and contradict them. They do not promote the general welfare. They promote corporations and wealthy people. They do not represent America.
Solzhenitsyn talks about the line of good and evil oscillating within hearts. Yet, this administration and its treacheries go unchecked by "we the people" who are supposed to be in charge. Token punishments are administered to the torturers pacifying the few who are outraged enough to demand change. The President’s lawyers who dismissed the congressionally ratified Geneva Conventions as passé is now U.S. Attorney General, the boss of Justice. ”Just Us” must be their interpretation. Alberto Gonzales, the man we learn also accosted his predecessor on his sick bed, trying to further the cause of illegal wiretapping/eavesdropping in America. And we musn't forget our legislators who banned torture only for the President to sign with a caveat excluding himself and those who would actually do the torturing.
Hearts are where they are.
Four deemed enemy combatants lost hope and killed themselves. We the People read the headlines and do nothing. Some of our own hope dies with those in Guantanamo. From the pages of history, Dr. Martin Luther King’s idea that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” yearns to prick a national conscience. Meanwhile, a calculated, soft-peddled tyranny congeals.
If Solzhenitsyn were to write an epitaph for the four in Guantanamo, what would the wise man say? The Russian writer was able to write secretly while he was jailed. He was positioned in the outer circles of the labor camps at times where his mind could be engaged. He had cancer; he was treated for it. An American attorney representing one detainee says her client went untreated for TB and Hepatitis B. To the four detainees suffering as they did under horrendous physical and psychological of our super-gulag…maybe it would be:
Their self-determined path to freedom, their escape from a hell “Made in America,” their ultimate affirmation of life and liberty, was to choose death. Those last moments of exercising autonomy might have been a glimpse of heaven.
Remember, remember the fifth of November,
“We are all Nintendo warriors today. Remember that game, that electronic game, a few years ago, push buttons zim, zam, boom and it was all over with? That is not the way you fight war, although we as a society have grown to believe that.” — Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) during debate on an amendment to a bill providing for defense authorization.