The 16th Anniversary of the Implausible “Triple Suicide” at Guantánamo

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16 years ago, three men died at Guantánamo, and today I ask you to join me in what has become an annual act of remembrance for these men: Yasser al-Zahrani, Mani al-Utaybi and Ali al-Salami, who, according to the US authorities, committed suicide, more or less simultaneously, on the night of June 9, 2006, even though it appeared then — and still appears now — to have been almost impossible to commit suicide in a facility in which the prisoners were kept under almost permanent surveillance, and even if it were somehow plausible that the men in question could have hoarded enough sheets to tie their hands behind their backs, stuff rags down their own throats, and hang themselves.

I engage in this act of remembrance because these men have largely been forgotten, swallowed up by the black hole of secrecy that is Guantánamo, or, even worse, by its official narratives that seek to dismiss, however risibly, grave concerns about how, over the years, prisoners have been treated at Guantánamo, even when, as in the case of these three men, that has led to their deaths.

The three men were not significant prisoners in terms of any alleged involvement with Al-Qaeda. At most, they had been low-level foot soldiers helping the Taliban fight the Northern Alliance, in a long-running inter-Muslim civil war that suddenly changed after 9/11 and the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, when they were rounded up, sent to Guantánamo as “terrorists,” and brutalized and held for years without charge or trial.

Al-Zahrani, a Saudi, was just 17 when he surrendered in northern Afghanistan with hundreds of other fighters, and was one of perhaps 70 of that number who survived a subsequent massacre in the Qala-i-Janghi fort, after they had staged an uprising, fearing that they had been betrayed, and were to be executed. Al-Utaybi, in his mid-20s, who claimed to be a missionary, was seized in Pakistan with four other men wearing burkas to try and avoid capture, while al-Salami, also in his 20s, had been captured in a house raid in Pakistan on the night that Abu Zubaydah, for whom the CIA’s torture program was subsequently developed, was also captured.

Two of the three, al-Zahrani and al-Utaybi, were so insignificant that they had actually been approved for release at the time of their deaths, but all three had been noteworthy at Guantánamo for other reasons; namely, as hunger strikers who had resisted the injustice of their long confinement without charge or trial, not only through refusing food but also through repeated non-compliance, and who had, therefore, become a thorn in the side of the authorities — perhaps to the extent that some other part of the opaque collection of different agencies operating at Guantánamo had wanted rid of them in other, more final ways.

An official report into the men’s deaths concluded, in 2008, that they had indeed committed suicide, but in a facility shrouded in secrecy, in which brutality was rife, why should anyone presume that the official account was accurate? Moreover, in the years that followed, researchers at the Seton Hall School of Law examined the available documentation, and discovered that it was full of glaring holes and contradictions, and then, in 2010, a former Staff Sergeant, Joseph Hickman, and some of his colleagues, who had been manning the prison’s gun towers on the night of the deaths, delivered explosive testimony suggesting that vehicle movements on the night indicated that the men had been taken to a remote location off-site, where something horrendous took place, and then brought back again for their alleged “suicides” to be announced.

Perhaps this sounds fanciful, but although the story, reported in Harper’s Magazine by Scott Horton, sent shockwaves around the world, and was later revisited by Hickman in a book, Murder at Camp Delta, the investigation was never revived, even after other suspicious deaths took place at Guantánamo, which also involved persistent hunger strikers and resisters of injustice: Abdul Rahman al-Amri, who died in May 2007, Muhammad Salih, who died in May 2009, and Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, who died in September 2012 (and please see Jeffrey Kaye’s book about the deaths of al-Amri and Salih, and additional documents here).

Last year, when former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi’s memoir, Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo, was published, the threads of non-compliance tying all these men together were exposed in Mansoor’s vivid and brutal descriptions of the non-compliance undertaken by himself and a group other prisoners — mainly young Yemenis — that he called the ‘Redeyes’, persistent resisters of injustice, through hunger strikes and incessant non-compliance, who were repeatedly dealt with violently, and who spent much of their time in isolation cells.

There were around a dozen ‘Redeyes’, and as Mansoor explained, they included not just Yasser al-Zahrani, Mani al-Utaybi and Ali al-Salami, but also Muhammad Salih and Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif.

I was deeply shocked when I read Mansoor’s account, and realized how many of the alleged suicides at Guantánamo had involved his friends and fellow ‘Red-Eyes.’

Could it be a coincidence? Perhaps, you’re thinking, these men who fought so hard against the injustice of their imprisonment without charge or trial were exactly the kind of men who would, eventually, break down and commit suicide. Perhaps, but all the anecdotal evidence suggests the opposite. The ‘Redeyes’ were committed to the struggle, and, in any case, no one who was there has suggested that they saw any signs of despair from the three men.

In his memoir, Mansoor, for example, noted that, just before the men’s deaths, which “was the first time in a long time that they had put so many ‘Redeyes’ together in one block” (including Yasser, Mani and Ali), Yasser, who “had a beautiful voice, one of the most beautiful in the camp,” “sang a little,” which is not what you would expect from someone who was about to take their own life.

He was not the only prisoner to contradict the official narrative. In 2013, Ahmed Errachidi, a Moroccan chef who was released in 2007, wrote in his memoir The General, published in 2013, ”Those three had been amongst the finest. They were always ready to help their fellows and they were brave as well. They were men of the highest morale: in the forefront of every protest, they weren’t given to despair. In fact, they kept on smiling even in the most difficult circumstances.”

As I also explained in an article in 2010, in immediate response to the deaths, in June 2006, nine British former prisoners “recalled the men’s indefatigable spirit, and cast doubt on the US military’s claims.” As they stated, The prisoners in Guantánamo knew [Mani al-Utaybi] as someone who recited the Qur’an and poetry with a beautiful voice. He was of high moral character and was loved and respected amongst the prisoners, as was Yasser. They both came from wealthy backgrounds and had everything to live for. They were often involved in protests and hunger strikes, which meant that they were always given ‘level four’ statuses. That means the only items they would be allowed in the cell were a mat, and a blanket (only at night). They didn’t have toilet paper, let alone bed sheets that could be easily constructed into a noose, or even a pen and paper with which to write a suicide note.”

In addition, as Mansoor explained in his memoir, it appears that, on the night of the deaths, the other prisoners were drugged, the inference being that this was to hide the staging of the suicides. “I remember thinking how unusual it was that the block was so quiet and how all the brothers were tired and falling asleep,” Mansoor wrote, adding that he slept unusually deeply, and without the usual disturbance of people coming and going, until he was woken by a female guard screaming, soon followed by the news that the three men were dead.

Will we ever know the truth about what happened in Guantánamo on the night of June 9, 2006? Perhaps not, but I hope that one day — perhaps only when the prison has finally closed — there will be a proper investigation to match the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA’s torture program, conducted so thoroughly by Daniel Jones and his colleagues. In the meantime, I can only urge former prisoners to take inspiration from Mansoor’s memoir, and to tell their stories of what happened in Guantánamo over the long and brutal years of their imprisonment, to prevent this black hole of secrecy from so persistently swallowing, or even erasing the truth.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — continues.

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