Another Suicide at Guantanamo - Sad Demise of Liberty in U.S.A
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Guantanamo Bay: Caricature of morality
Swiss suicide clinics fuelling death in the name of euthanasia
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Yet another prisoner (Saudi Arabian) died of an apparent suicide at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base on Wednesday. No details about the cause of death or the identity of the dead were released which legitimately raise our eye brows. He is the fourth unfortunate detainee to die at the infamous detention camp, which opened in 2002 and holds some 380 foreign terror suspects on the U.S. naval base in southeastern Cuba.
The camp holds people suspected by the Bush administration of being al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives. The prisoners were captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world. Amnesty International and other Civil Liberty Organizations have rightly termed the camp as "a human rights scandal.'
The detainees kept at the camp were called as "illegal enemy combatants" by the Bush administration which claimed that they were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions dealing with the protection to the prisoners of war. Interestingly the U.S. Supreme Court quashed this strange interpretation to restore some of our faith in the United States legal regime on the rights accused, in June, 2006 on the petition of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, allegedly Osama bin Laden's driver in Afghanistan.
Following this, on July 7, 2006, the Department of Defense issued an internal memo stating that prisoners will in the future be entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions. Though the Supreme Court also struck down as illegal the initial tribunal system created by President Bush to try terrorism suspects at the camp yet Congress authorized a new military tribunal system last year which as a matter of fact was as flawed as the one struck down by the Supreme Court.
All kinds of tortures such as beating, denial of food, sleep deprivation, prolonged hooding, forced feeding, forced injections, sexual humiliations of highest order etc. are in use which not only shock the conscience of the civilized world but also bring more and more hatred to the United States. An FBI agent has admitted,
On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more.
US is hardly gaining anything out of this camp except ridicule and contempt from Muslims and prisoners of conscience. In spite of contrary claims by the United States, prisoners so far released from the camp have also alleged that even abuse of religion is widely prevalent at the camp which includes flushing the Quran down the toilet, defacing the Quran, tearing pages out of the Quran etc.
No one can deny that the harsh techniques of interrogation used by the US since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable. It is surprising that till date there are no trained interrogators who specialize in gleaning secrets from the suspected terrorists. Human Rights defenders were shocked to read a 2005 Harvard study which supported the selective use of 'highly coercive' techniques. It is good that at least Condoleezza Rice explicitly confessed in a lecture that some of the interrogations techniques used by the CIA are 'immoral.'
