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Three foreign prisoners being held at the U.S.
navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, died on Saturday in apparent
suicides, the first since it started to be used as a prison in January
2002, the U.S. military said.
"Two Saudis and one Yemeni, each
located in Camp 1, were found unresponsive and not breathing in their
cells by guards," U.S. Southern Command said in a statement. An Interior Ministry statement identified the two Saudis as Manei
al-Otaibi and Yasser al-Zahrani but gave no further details about them. The
military said attempts to resuscitate the detainees failed and they
were pronounced dead by a physician at Guantanamo.
These men did not even have a lawyer, so they were completely
removed from the rule of law and the scrutiny of the outside world. The suicides threw a fresh
spotlight on the camp that has drawn widespread criticism against the
Bush administration from foreign countries, including some allies, and
human rights advocates. Facing indefinite detention with none of
the rights afforded formal prisoners of war, or criminal suspects in
the U.S. justice system, dozens of the detainees have undertaken hunger
strikes. Several have also attempted suicide while alledgedly, (according to the US military) at least one
suicide attempt was staged recently to trick prison guards into
going into a cell where detainees intended to ambush them. The names of the deceased were not released. The U.S. military said the bodies were being treated "with the utmost respect." An investigation had begun, it said. A White House spokeswoman said President George W. Bush, who is spending the weekend at Camp David, had been informed.
Bush has said he would like to close the detention center and spoke of
Guantanamo on Friday at a joint news conference with Danish Prime
Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who raised concerns about it with the
U.S. president. "We'd like it to be empty," Bush said. "And we're now in the process of working with countries to repatriate people."
Joshua Denbeaux, an attorney for two Guantanamo detainees -- not those
who were among the apparent suicides -- said in an interview with CNN
that the suicides represent the U.S. government's "absolute worst
nightmare." "These people have been trying to kill themselves, or many of these
prisoners have been trying to kill themselves, for months, if not
years," Denbeaux said.
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The National Coalition 
