Is there no heinous lie, prevarication, or Orwellian falsehood too great for these Bush Motherfuckers to invent?

Three prisoners commit suicide in Guantánamo gulag

By Patrick Martin
12 June 2006

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In an act of desperation that underscores the monstrous conditions at the US concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay, three prisoners committed suicide early Saturday morning, hanging themselves with primitive nooses made from bed sheets. The deaths were the first among Guantánamo prisoners to be confirmed by US authorities.

Two of the prisoners were Saudi nationals and the third was Yemeni, according to American officials. All three left behind suicide notes written in Arabic, although none were made public. The three men had been involved in hunger strikes over the past year carried out by detainees to protest their sadistic and illegal treatment. The hunger strikers, including the three who took their own lives, have been force-fed by their captors, who have used the brutal procedure of strapping their victims into metal chairs and shoving feeding tubes down their throats.

The triple suicide is the latest in a series of increasingly desperate actions by the Guantánamo prisoners, who have in many cases been held for more than four years, have been denied the minimum legal rights required under international conventions, and confront the prospect of spending the rest of their lives in the US prison camp.

Since the facility opened there have been 41 suicide attempts by 25 detainees, officials said, including 23 attempts during August of 2003, 10 on a single day, although these efforts were not revealed by the Pentagon until January of 2005.

(The US response to the suicides has come under international criticism.

Base commander Rear Adm Harry Harris described them as an "act of asymmetric warfare waged against us", while deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Colleen Graffy told the BBC the deaths were "a good PR move".

She described them as "a tactic to further the jihadi cause".)

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