Second anniversary of triple suicide at Guantánamo

10.6.08

Eleven days ago, I wrote a brief article in remembrance of Abdul Rahman al-Amri, a Saudi prisoner at Guantánamo, and a long-term hunger striker, who died on May 30, 2007, apparently by committing suicide. Today is another bleak and overlooked anniversary, as it was exactly two years ago that the news was announced that the first three prisoners had died at Guantánamo.

Yasser al-ZahraniUnlike the death of al-Amri, which went almost unremarked at the time, the deaths of Ali al-Salami, Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser al-Zahrani (photo, left) — who, like al-Amri, were also long-term hunger strikers, and appeared to have taken the only form of protest available to them (although the suicide notes they reportedly left have never been released) — sparked international outrage after Rear Admiral Harry Harris, the commander of Guantánamo, said, “I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare committed against us,” and Colleen Graffy, the deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, described the suicides as a “good PR move to draw attention.”

The administration soon assumed a more placatory role, as Cully Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, was pushed forward to say, “I wouldn’t characterize it as a good PR move. What I would say is that we are always concerned when someone takes his own life, because as Americans, we value life, even the lives of violent terrorists who are captured waging war against our country.” However, as I explain in my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, the administration soon resumed the offensive, issuing claims about the men — as with al-Amri a year later — which were not only extraordinarily insensitive, but also undeniably contentious, given that all three men had, like al-Amri, died without having had the opportunity to test the allegations against them in a court of law:

In an attempt to stifle further dissent, and to bolster their view that the three men were hardened terrorists, the Pentagon released details of the allegations against them, which served only to highlight almost everything that was wrong with the system at Guantánamo … [A]l-Zahrani was accused of being a Taliban fighter who “facilitated weapons purchases,” but it was apparent that he was only 17 years old at the time of his capture [in Afghanistan], and that this scenario was highly unlikely. In al-Utaybi’s case, the only “evidence” that he was an “enemy combatant” was his involvement with Jamaat-al-Tablighi, the vast [and apolitical] worldwide missionary organization whose alleged connection to terrorism was duly exaggerated by the Pentagon, which had the effrontery to describe it as “an al-Qaeda 2nd tier recruitment organization.” Heartless to the last, the administration also admitted that he had actually been approved for “transfer to the custody of another country” in November 2005, although Navy Commander Robert Durand said he “did not know whether al-Utaybi had been informed about the transfer recommendation before he killed himself.” In the case of al-Salami, the Pentagon alleged that he was “a mid- to high-level al-Qaeda operative who had key ties to principal facilitators and senior members of the group.”

Although none of the men had taken part in any tribunals, more detailed allegations against al-Salami surfaced in the “evidence” for his CSRT [Combatant Status Review Tribunal, the military reviews convened to rubber-stamp the prisoners’ prior designation as “enemy combatants” without rights], although a close inspection of the allegations reveals that they were mostly made by unidentified “members” of al-Qaeda, either in Guantánamo or in other secret prisons: “a senior al-Qaeda facilitator” identified him, another senior al-Qaeda figure — a “lieutenant” — identified him as being “associated with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” the “al-Qaeda weapons trainer from Tora Bora” identified him from his time in Kabul and at Khaldan [a military training camp in Afghanistan], and he was also identified as “an al-Qaeda courier,” and as someone who “worked directly for Osama bin Laden’s family.”

Shorn of these allegations — which summon up images of various “significant” prisoners being shown the “family album” [of prisoner mugshots, which was shown to all the prisoners in interrogations] in painful circumstances — the only other allegation was that the “Issa” guest house [in Faisalabad, where he was seized with 17 other prisoners, who are all still in Guantánamo, even though the majority have made viable claims that they were students, seized by mistake], received the equivalent of jihadi junk mail: apparently, the residents of the house “routinely received endorsement letters from a well-known al-Qaeda operative” to attend the Khaldan camp.

Ali al-SalamiAlthough the deaths of Ali al-Salami (photo, left), Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser al-Zahrani — and of al-Amri a year later — encouraged the Saudi government to apply increased leverage on the US administration in an attempt to secure the return of the remaining Saudi prisoners that was ultimately successful — 93 were repatriated from June 2006 (two weeks after the deaths) to December 2007, and only 13 now remain — the repercussions for the majority of the prisoners were truly dreadful. After riots broke out in Camp IV — the only part of the prison that bore any resemblance to conditions stipulated by the Geneva Conventions, where prisoners shared dormitories and were allowed a fair degree of social interaction — the military shelved plans to open up communal areas in a new block, Camp VI, which opened in December 2006, and instead held the camp’s relocated prisoners — including a number from Camp IV, and even the majority of prisoners who had, like Mani al-Utaybi, been cleared for release after military reviews — in strict solitary confinement for 22 or 23 hours a day. This intolerable situation prevails to this day, as Human Rights Watch conclude this week, in a detailed report, Locked Up Alone: Detention Conditions and Mental Health at Guantánamo, which profiles the sometimes chronic mental health problems of a number of prisoners. Two years on from the deaths of Ali al-Salami, Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser al-Zahrani, and the US administration’s unprincipled response, the conditions in which the majority of the 273 prisoners still in Guantánamo are held is a complete disgrace. At the very least, the administration should immediately move the 70 or so prisoners who have been cleared for release in to Camp IV, and should also reflect if it can find a valid explanation for holding the rest of the prisoners in conditions of such cruel and barbaric isolation that they are literally losing their minds.

Camp VI at Guantanamo

A photo of Camp VI, showing the communal areas that have never been used.

The great irony is that those put forward for trial by Military Commission at Guantánamo — as seen in last week’s arraignment of self-confessed 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others accused of plotting and facilitating the 9/11 attacks — at least have the opportunity to speak in public, whereas those who have been cleared of wrongdoing — but who cannot be repatriated because of international treaties preventing the repatriation of foreign nationals to countries where they face the risk of torture — and those who, bizarrely, the administration regards as too dangerous to be released, but not dangerous enough to be charged, remain completely isolated from the outside world, slowly losing their sanity while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the few other prisoners facing trial by Military Commission who openly admit their allegiance to al-Qaeda, are rewarded with the opportunity to challenge the legitimacy of their detention — merrily reconfiguring the trial system as a circus, and defiantly celebrating their desire for martyrdom — in the full glare of the world’s media. How much longer, I wonder, before another of these hidden, forgotten prisoners — one of the many innocent men, or one of the purported “minor threats” — takes his own life, joining Ali al-Salami, Mani al-Utaybi, Yasser al-Zahrani and Abdul Rahman al-Amri in an action that, though proscribed in Islam, is perceived as the only escape from indefinite imprisonment without charge, without trial, and without hope?

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

As published on the Huffington Post and Antiwar.com.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the hunger strikes at Guantánamo, see Shaker Aamer, A South London Man in Guantánamo: The Children Speak (July 2007), Guantánamo: al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj fears that he will die (September 2007), The long suffering of Mohammed al-Amin, a Mauritanian teenager sent home from Guantánamo (October 2007), Guantánamo suicides: so who’s telling the truth? (October 2007), Innocents and Foot Soldiers: The Stories of the 14 Saudis Just Released From Guantánamo (Yousef al-Shehri and Murtadha Makram) (November 2007), A letter from Guantánamo (by Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj) (January 2008), A Chinese Muslim’s desperate plea from Guantánamo (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), The forgotten anniversary of a Guantánamo suicide (May 2008), Binyam Mohamed embarks on hunger strike to protest Guantánamo charges (June 2008), Guantánamo Suicide Report: Truth or Travesty? (August 2008), Seven Years Of Guantánamo, And A Call For Justice At Bagram (January 2009), British torture victim Binyam Mohamed to be released from Guantánamo (January 2009), Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), Obama’s “Humane” Guantánamo Is A Bitter Joke (February 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), Guantánamo’s Long-Term Hunger Striker Should Be Sent Home (March 2009). Also see the following online chapters of The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras 2 (Ahmed Kuman, Mohammed Haidel), Website Extras 3 (Abdullah al-Yafi, Abdul Rahman Shalabi), Website Extras 4 (Bakri al-Samiri, Murtadha Makram), Website Extras 5 (Ali Mohsen Salih, Ali Yahya al-Raimi, Abu Bakr Alahdal, Tarek Baada, Abdul al-Razzaq Salih).

5 Responses

  1. Forgotten: The Second Anniversary Of A Guantánamo Suicide by Andy Worthington « Dandelion Salad says...

    […] two years since with several articles about the other prisoners who have died in Guantánamo: the three men who died in June 2006 — Ali al-Salami, Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser al-Zahrani — and the belated and inadequate results […]

  2. Yemeni Prisoner Muhammad Salih Dies At Guantánamo by Andy Worthington « Dandelion Salad says...

    […] of Abdul Rahman al-Amri, a Saudi prisoner who died on May 30, 2007 — and just eight days before the third anniversary of the deaths of three other prisoners — Ali al-Salami, Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser al-Zahrani — who died on June 10, 2006, and it must […]

  3. Guantánamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics of Starvation by Andy Worthington « Dandelion Salad says...

    […] is the third anniversary of the deaths in Guantánamo of three prisoners, Ali al-Salami, Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser […]

  4. Andy Worthington Discusses Murders at Guantánamo and Bagram’s “Ghost Prisoners” on Antiwar Radio « Dandelion Salad says...

    […] is available a compelling article for Harper’s Magazine by Scott Horton (the law professor), that the three men who died at Guantánamo in June 2006 were killed, and that the suicide story was manufactured as a cover-up (which I also wrote about […]

  5. Yasir al-Zahrani « Lost Bedouin says...

    […] information can be found on the old Cageprisoners site and in this article by Andy […]

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Andy Worthington

Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker. Also, photo-journalist (The State of London), and singer and songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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