Gitmo suicides

Rear Adm. Harry Harris: ``An act of warfare waged against us''




Broken (CCR image)

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.

Of course! These animals want to kill themselves just to hurt us.

See what you think you might do yourself, dear reader, if you experienced the kind of treatment men like Adm. Harris issued to the 100% innocent Tipton detainees, released in 2004, described in testimony from a document found at the Center for Constitutional Rights:

I started to suffer what I believe was a break down. I couldn’t take it any more. I asked to speak to a psychologist but all they said was that I should be given Prozac which I didn’t want to have. The other prisoners who had this were just like zombies and put on loads of weight. I was having flash backs and nightmares about the containers and couldn’t sleep at night. I was in this block for 3 months. While I was there I was interrogated three times. I kept telling the interrogator that I was about to crack up and I’m sure it was obvious that I was in a bad way. All he would say to me was that I should `behave on the blocks' which made it clear to me that they had thought carefully about the best way to punish me and break me and decided that as I am quite sociable and like talking I should be kept with people I couldn’t communicate with. I began to behave in the way they wanted. I would not make jokes in the interrogation and just answered their questions. At the end of my third interview the interrogator told me to ‘hang in there’ because he could see how distressed I was. I was moved from the Chinese block three weeks later...

...the ERF team would come into the cell, place us face down on the ground then putting our arms behind our backs and our legs bending backwards they would shackle us and hold us down restrained in that position whilst somebody from the medical corps pulled up my sleeve and injected me in the arm. They left the chains on me and then left. The injection seemed to have the effect of making me feel very drowsy. I was left like that for a few hours with my legs and arms shackled behind me. If I tried to move my legs to get in a more comfortable position it would hurt. Eventually the ERF team came back and simply removed the shackles. I have no idea why they were giving us these injections. It happened perhaps a dozen times altogether and I believe it still goes on at the camp. You are not allowed to refuse it and you don’t know what it is for.

Now, imagine doubling the time the Tipton detainees suffered in this dungeon. Is there a chance your mind might break down too?

Update (22:35): I knew Zeynep at Under the Same Sun would blog on this topic. Check it out. She picks out the term Adm. Harris uses--``asymmetrical warfare''. How odd that the overlord of Gitmo, with total domination over his prisoners, would suggest that the power of the suicides is so unbalanced, so ``asymmetrical'', over him. Zeynep has it right, ``Everything is warfare against us. We do nothing. We are victims of everything.'' Maybe the quivering shell of a child whose body a US grenade smashed is ``warfare against us'' too. Fascists view themselves as victims of those they dominate.