Remembering Guantánamo’s Dead, on the 17th Anniversary of an Implausible “Triple Suicide”
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17 years ago, on June 10, 2006, the world awoke to the shocking news that three men had died at Guantánamo, allegedly through a coordinated suicide pact. The three men were Yasser al-Zahrani, a Saudi who was just 17 years old when he was seized in Afghanistan, Mani al-Utaybi, another Saudi, who was around 30 years of age, and Ali al-Salami (also known as Ali Abdullah Ahmed), a Yemeni, who was around 23 years old.
I mark the anniversary of the deaths of these men every year, and many of us who remember that day also remember being shocked when Rear Adm. Harry Harris, the prison’s commander, told the world, “This was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare committed against us.”
However, while Harris was rightly condemned for suggesting that committing suicide — taking your own life, with no harm to others — could be considered “an act of asymmetric warfare,” not enough scrutiny has been given to the fact that there was a “war” taking place in Guantánamo, but it was not the “war” that Harris envisaged.
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.
Video: I Discuss Resistance and Creativity at Guantánamo and the Plight of Former Prisoners with Mansoor Adayfi
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Last week, I was delighted to take part in “Life After Guantánamo,” an online discussion with former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi, hosted by the Justice for Muslims Collective, which was also intended to raise funds for Mansoor, who, like the majority of former prisoners, remains haunted by the unjustifiable “taint” of Guantánamo, preventing them from getting paid work and supporting themselves.
The fundraising page is here, on Facebook, if you’re able to make a donation, although it closes in two days’ time. To date, around $5,700 has been raised towards the target of $20,000 — to cover Mansoor’s medical care, tuition fees and his work as a writer and advocate for Guantánamo’s closure.
The event, introduced by Maha Hilal, lasted for just over an hour, and the video of it is here.
Mansoor is the author, with Antonio Aiello, of the justifiably acclaimed memoir, Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo, which was published in August, and I was pleased to finally have the opportunity to talk with him about aspects of his narrative, covering the 14 years he spent in Guantánamo before his resettlement in Serbia in 2016, as well as discussing the plight of prisoners following their release.
Mansoor Adayfi’s “Don’t Forget Us Here”: A Devastating Account of Guantánamo’s Cruelty, But One Suffused with Hope, Humor and Humanity
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I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.
Imagine being seized in Afghanistan or Pakistan, being brutalized in US prisons in Afghanistan, and then being sent halfway around the world to Guantánamo, a US naval base in Cuba, where you are then imprisoned indefinitely, without charge or trial, in a prison facility that was specifically chosen to be beyond the reach of the US courts, and where all of the normal rules regarding the detention and treatment of prisoners no longer applied.
Imagine being held, for years, on and off, in solitary confinement, able only to communicate with the person in the cell next to you by lying down on the floor of your cell and shouting through small holes in the cell wall.
Imagine being punished with sometimes bone-breaking physical violence for refusing to cooperate, or for being perceived to have infringed an ever-changing set of rules designed to dehumanize you on a permanent basis, and to “soften you up” for relentless and often violent interrogations.
The 15th Anniversary of the Contentious “Triple Suicide” of Three Prisoners at Guantánamo
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There are some days that are so significant that everyone remembers what they were doing. September 11, 2001 is one such day, when planes flew into the Twin Towers in New York, and for those paying attention to the US response to the 9/11 attacks, January 11, 2002 is also significant, when the first prisoners — “detainees,” in the Bush administration’s words — arrived at Guantánamo.
Almost immediately, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized the release of photos taken by a serving US soldier — photos that showed US soldiers shouting at men who were kneeling on gravel under the burning sun at a US naval base in Cuba, half a world away from the battlefields of Afghanistan, men who were wearing orange jumpsuits, and who had their eyes, ears and mouths covered, creating the vivid impression that they were being subjected to sensory deprivation.
For US viewers, the photos were not necessarily noteworthy. Prisoners on the US mainland often wear orange, and the clearly abusive conditions captured in the photos were part of a depressingly successful narrative that the Bush administration was selling to the American people — that these men were, as Rumsfeld described it, “the worst of the worst,” terrorists so hardened and so bloodthirsty that, as General Richard E. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described it, they “would chew through a hydraulics cable to bring a C-17 [transport plane] down.”
Remembering Ibrahim Idris, the Only Guantánamo Prisoner Freed Because of Illness, Who Has Died Aged 60
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There was some sad news recently from Sudan, as Carol Rosenberg, for the New York Times, reported the death, at the age of 60, of former Guantánamo prisoner Ibrahim Idris.
Idris was repatriated from Guantánamo in December 2013, almost 12 years after he first arrived at the prison, in the first group of 20 prisoners to arrive by plane from Afghanistan in January 2002. To secure his release, his attorney Jennifer Cowan successfully argued in court that he was so mentally ill and so morbidly obese that he could not be regarded as a threat, and that the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), the law justifying imprisonment at Guantánamo, only allowed the government to hold a prisoner “for the purpose of preventing him from returning to the battlefield.”
As Cowan described Idris’s situation in her submission to Chief Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington, D.C., “Petitioner’s long-term severe mental illness and physical illnesses make it virtually impossible for him to engage in hostilities were he to be released, and both domestic law and international law of war explicitly state that if a detainee is so ill that he cannot return to the battlefield, he should be repatriated. When interpreted in accordance with domestic law and the principles of international law, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (‘AUMF’) does not permit the continued detention of Mr. Idris.”
Who's still at Guantánamo?
