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Murders at Guantánamo: Exposing the Truth About the 2006 Suicides

by: Andy Worthington, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: electron, Tom A., dcmaster)

It's hard to know where to begin with this profoundly important story by Scott Horton, for next month's Harper's Magazine, but let's try this: The three "suicides" at Guantánamo in June 2006 were not suicides at all. The men in question were killed during interrogations in a secretive block in Guantánamo, conducted by an unknown agency, and the murders were then disguised to look like suicides. Everyone at Guantánamo knew about it. Everyone covered it up. Everyone is still covering it up.

Establishing a Case for Murder - and the Disclosure of a Secret Prison at Guantánamo

The key to the discovery of the murder of the three men - 37-year-old Salah Ahmed al-Salami, a Yemeni; 30-year-old Mani Shaman al-Utaybi, a Saudi; and 22-year-old Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, a Saudi who was just 17 when he was captured - is Army Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, a former Marine who re-enlisted in the Army National Guard after the 9/11 attacks, and was deployed to Guantánamo in March 2006 with his friend, Spc. Tony Davila. On arrival, Davila was briefed about the existence of "an unnamed and officially unacknowledged compound," outside the perimeter fence of the main prison, and explained that one theory about it was that "it was being used by some of the non-uniformed government personnel who frequently showed up in the camps and were widely thought to be CIA agents."

Hickman and Davila became fascinated by the compound - known to the soldiers as "Camp No" (as in, "No, it doesn't exist") - and Hickman was on duty in a tower on the prison's perimeter on the night the three men died, when he noticed that "a white van, dubbed the 'paddy wagon,' that Navy guards used to transport heavily manacled prisoners, one at a time, into and out of Camp Delta, [which] had no rear windows and contained a dog cage large enough to hold a single prisoner," had called three times at Camp 1, where the men were held, and had then taken them out to Camp No. All three were in Camp No by 8 PM.

At 11.30, the van returned, apparently dropping something off at the clinic, and, within half an hour the whole prison "lit up." As Horton explained:

Hickman headed to the clinic, which appeared to be the center of activity, to learn the reason for the commotion. He asked a distraught medical corpsman what had happened. She said three dead prisoners had been delivered to the clinic. Hickman recalled her saying that they had died because they had rags stuffed down their throats, and that one of them was severely bruised. Davila told me he spoke to Navy guards who said the men had died as the result of having rags stuffed down their throats.

Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/murders-guant%C3%A1namo-exposing-truth-about-2006-suicides56182