Thursday, January 21, 2010

Murder at Gitmo

HARPER'S MAGAZINE has a frightening report by Scott Horton, titled 'The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle'. According to Scott, the interrogation of 3 prisoners resulted in death by asphyxiation. The U.S. media has been ignoring the problem, but it's not going away, and it's going to turn into one hell of a spicy meatball:

Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the George W. Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

Late on the evening of June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.

So far, Slate has picked it up, and a growing number of independent US bloggers, as well as the European press. The cover-up reads like a bad Murder She Wrote script. Meanwhile, Omar sits there . . .

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