Suicides are merely the tip of the iceberg

How damnably inconsiderate were the three Guantanamo detainees who hanged themselves last week just so that they could make their jailers look bad? At least that's US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Colleen Graffy's theory. She described the suicides as "a good PR move to draw attention".

It couldn't be the two Saudis and a Yemeni were despairing of years spent in cages with little hope of release when they chose to wrap their bedsheets around their necks. It couldn't be they felt their lives, punctuated with interrogations, stress positions, strobe lights, insults, humiliation, or worse, were no longer worth living.

It couldn't be that month after month of solitary confinement was perceived by those men as death on earth.

No, the termination of their existence was carried out solely to embarrass the White House, the supremely callous Ms Graffy believes. What a pity they can't be dragged back from the grave and thrown to the army's salivating Alsatians.

The commander of the Cuba-based gulag, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, has referred to the suicides as "an act of asymmetrical warfare". And all this time I thought warfare entailed the killing of others. Next time countries declare hostilities, they won't need fighter planes or tanks. Citizens can simply top themselves, saving the enemy the trouble and expense.

Thank goodness the 23 previous attempted suicides were prevented in time as they would have added further grist to the mill of Gitmo's detractors, who just don't get it.

The US was attacked five years ago and as long as these former goatherders and shopkeepers, turned dastardly fiends, are incarcerated America's tall buildings are safe.

Of comparable nuisance value are Guantanamo's hunger strikers in search of a way out of their misery. But at least they can be force-fed in the most painful way possible with tubes thrust down their noses into their stomachs. That'll teach them.

Never mind the liberal chatter of human rights groups. After all, the camp's 460 inmates are some of the world's most brutal terrorists. Only 10 have ever been charged or tried, but so what. The all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing Bush administration that piously leads the free world by its nose cannot be wrong.

Perhaps I should rephrase that. Their actual dastardliness depends on the colour of their passports. The Brits have all been sent home where they keep busy writing their memoirs, being interviewed on TV and making movies. Those with only British resident status, however, are still considered blood thirsty and dangerous.

The Australian David Hicks appears to have been abandoned by his Washington-sycophantic government and his father believes he may be the next to exit at the end of a rope. He says his son is suffering from depression and has lost all desire to eat, tired of being confined to his cell for 22 hours each day.

Legal right

Hicks has the legal right to a British passport but although government officials, including the attorney-general, has called for the camp's closure, they're not about to upset their pals across the pond.

The sole American "Taliban" John Walker Lindh was tried on US soil in a proper court with the benefit of high-profile lawyers, which just goes to show that American-born "terrorists" are a notch up on the social scale. Lindh wasn't a nasty foreign evildoer; just a naughty young man who lost his way.

The American president has expressed his concern over the deaths, according to Bush's new spokesman Tony Snow, who was recently promoted from Fox News.

Bush wants to ensure that the three corpses are treated "humanely and with cultural sensitivity", he said. Perhaps if those men had been treated such while blood still flowed through their veins they would still be here. It looks as though the deaths may have finally jolted America's allies out of their apathy. A Saudi spokesman for the Ministry of Interior says his country wants its nationals so they can be tried "based on our laws and regulations". Saudi and Yemeni human rights organisation have called for an international investigation as to how the men died.

An Associated Press report reads, "many Saudis have denounced the suicide claim as a fabrication" while "some have accused the US of complicity in the inmates' deaths".

Whatever the truth, Guantanamo is an ugly scar on Liberty's cheek. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel's direct appeal to Bush for its closure was ignored.

Britain's Constitutional Affairs Minister Harriet Harman is equally disturbed. "If it [Guantanamo] is perfectly legal and there is nothing going wrong there, why don't they have it in America?" she recently told the BBC.

In one way the surviving inmates are lucky. Their plight is now high up on the international radar screen and the likelihood is the US will be pressured into slamming its doors shut sooner rather than later.

The problem is those unfortunates are merely the tip of the iceberg. There are more than 600 detainees in Afghanistan's Bagram Airport facility and hundreds if not thousands estimated to be held in America's secret jails around the world.

In the meantime, the US State Department is "deeply concerned" about the arrest of activists in Egypt and has urged the Egyptian authorities to "investigate the matter and punish those involved". If nothing else, Washington surely deserves kudos for bare-faced nerve.

Linda S. Heard is a specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She can be contacted at lheard@gulfnews.com.