[Winstonm]

The short version from the St. Louis Dispatch:
http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/the-platf...gitmo-suicides/

Quote

(Emphasis added)

There’s growing evidence that suggests that three detainees — two from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen — died from torture-related injuries at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in 2006. The military cover story strains credulity. A subsequent inquiry by the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service fared worse.

Methodically examined and parsed by a team from Seton Hall Law School in Newark, N.J., the Navy investigation seems to have been pursued with either inexcusable incompetence or using a massive cover-up.

The detainees — none of whom had been charged with a crime — were found dead in their cells, allegedly the result of identical suicides by hanging. The details are gruesome.

For the deaths to have occurred as Navy investigators claimed, each of the men would have had to construct a braided noose out of torn sheets or clothing, tied their feet and hands together, pushed rags down their throats, hung the nooses from the cell wall or ceiling and then climbed up on a sink, put the nooses around their necks and used their weight to suffocate themselves by strangulation.

The three supposedly were in non-adjoining cells. They would have had to coordinate activities to simultaneously evade the detection of guards for two hours. In this high-security facility in Cuba, the guards were required to make physical checks of prisoners every 10 minutes.

Autopsies were performed within an hour of the discovery of their bodies, which were returned to their families with parts of their throats missing. The removal of neck organs prevented independent forensic examination of the claimed cause of death.

The longer version from Harper's: http://harpers.org/a...01/hbc-90006368

[mike777]

Winstonm, on Jan 23 2010, 11:20 PM, said:

The short version from the St. Louis Dispatch:
http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/the-platf...gitmo-suicides/

Quote

(Emphasis added)

There’s growing evidence that suggests that three detainees — two from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen — died from torture-related injuries at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in 2006. The military cover story strains credulity. A subsequent inquiry by the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service fared worse.

Methodically examined and parsed by a team from Seton Hall Law School in Newark, N.J., the Navy investigation seems to have been pursued with either inexcusable incompetence or using a massive cover-up.

The detainees — none of whom had been charged with a crime — were found dead in their cells, allegedly the result of identical suicides by hanging. The details are gruesome.

For the deaths to have occurred as Navy investigators claimed, each of the men would have had to construct a braided noose out of torn sheets or clothing, tied their feet and hands together, pushed rags down their throats, hung the nooses from the cell wall or ceiling and then climbed up on a sink, put the nooses around their necks and used their weight to suffocate themselves by strangulation.

The three supposedly were in non-adjoining cells. They would have had to coordinate activities to simultaneously evade the detection of guards for two hours. In this high-security facility in Cuba, the guards were required to make physical checks of prisoners every 10 minutes.

Autopsies were performed within an hour of the discovery of their bodies, which were returned to their families with parts of their throats missing. The removal of neck organs prevented independent forensic examination of the claimed cause of death.

The longer version from Harper's: http://harpers.org/a...01/hbc-90006368

"no one was charged with a crime"


I have posted this for years here. War is not a crime......bombing the usa is not a crime during war.

1) are we at war?
2) was this a bombing?

[PassedOut]

Torturing someone to death is a crime, war or no war.

[Winstonm]

PassedOut, on Jan 24 2010, 09:50 AM, said:

Torturing someone to death is a crime, war or no war.

Not if all you are willing to do is look forward and not back.

[gwnn]

how sure are we that this happened like it's written in the article?

[Winstonm]

gwnn, on Jan 24 2010, 10:49 AM, said:

how sure are we that this happened like it's written in the article?

It depend on what you believe about the credibility of "Harper's" and of the author, and the Seton Hall law school, but here is the quote:

Quote

The Pentagon declined to make the NCIS report public, and only when pressed with Freedom of Information Act demands did it disclose parts of the report, some 1,700 pages of documents so heavily redacted as to be nearly incomprehensible. The NCIS documents were carefully cross-referenced and deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners’ deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report—a reconstruction of the events—was simply unbelievable.

And this from the Harper's article:

Quote

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.