Suicide or death through torture at Gitmo?

Brown Bomber

In 2010 Human Rights Lawyer and University lecturer Scott Horton write an award winning article in 2010 for Harpers Magazine posing some serious questions about the deaths of three Guantanomo prisoners who the military categorically stated were three seperate suicides.

This is the military's version:

According to the NCIS documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

The full article is here and offers a better background than I ever could hope to.

Or if you don't like reading, Horton discusses his article here with Keith Olberman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SyJefNU2iQ

Horton's story was revisited this week by Almerindo Ojeda director of the Study of Human Rights in the Americas and professor at UC Davis. Ojeda had been troubled by inconsistencies in the official account.
His article is here http://www.truthout.com/death-guantanamo-suicide-or-dryboarding/1320182714

(the links below are to a NCIS investigation obtained by a Freedom of Information request.

• Why did the prisoners have their hands tied when they were found hanging in their cells? (NCIS185, NCIS950, NCIS1012, NCIS958, AUTO693-1)
• Is it possible to tie one's own hands?
• Why were the prisoners gagged with cloth? They were already going to kill themselves by silent suffocation through hanging; why suffocate themselves silently twice? (NCIS966, NCIS975, NCIS1073f, NCIS1079, NCIS1091)
• Why did all three prisoners have masks - or mask-like contraptions - on their faces as they hanged? (AUTO693-1, NCIS950, NCIS990f)
• Is it physically possible to hang yourself bound, masked and gagged?
• Why was there a bloody T-shirt around the neck of one of the prisoners found hanging in his cell? (NCIS1113)
• Rigor mortis had begun to set in on the prisoners when they were discovered. Consequently, they had to have been hanging for two hours before they were discovered. According to Standard Operating Procedures, each of the prisoners had to be visually inspected every ten minutes. That means six inspections per prisoner per hour, or 36 inspections overall. How could the guards have missed the hangings in 36 visual inspections? (NCIS1025, NCIS1070, NCIS1078f, AUTO693-8, AUTO588-7)
• Why were the neck organs (the larynx, the hyoid bone and the thyroid cartillage) removed from one of the corpses? According to subsequent autopsies done privately, these would be essential in establishing whether or not hanging was the cause of death (AUT693-5)
• Why is there a page missing from a log book begun on the day the deaths were discovered and recording the entries and exits to the cell block where the suicides took place? (NCIS1354)

And was reminded of this when he read of the case in The Post and Courier and of Ali Saleh Al-Marri, who was held in a Naval base in the US and the Navy wanted to move to Guantanamo and allegedly had been subjected to torture.

Al-Marri later told his attorneys that interrogators stuffed a sock in his mouth and taped his lips shut with duct tape. Al-Marri said he loosened the tape; theinterrogatorstaped it more tightly. When he started to choke, theinterrogators ripped off the tape. Al-Marri's attorney in Charleston, Andy Savage, calls this technique "dryboarding."

ShakeyShakey

Murder I'd say.

Brown Bomber

Warning. Shocking Content. The US was lying.

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/5/21/the_guantanamo_suicides_revisited_did_cia