Flurry
Of Suicide Attempts
At Guantanamo
23 June, 2004
The Associated Press
Three
months after a get-tough general took command of the Guantanamo Bay
prison for terror suspects, prisoners began a flurry of suicide attempts,
according to military records. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller took over as
commander at Guantanamo in November 2002 after interrogators criticized
his predecessor for being too solicitous for the detainees' welfare.
Between January
and March 2003, 14 prisoners at Guantanamo tried to kill themselves,
according to Pentagon figures. That's more than 40 percent of the 34
suicide attempts by 21 inmates since the prison was opened in January
2002.
Miller is now in
charge of all military-run U.S. prisons in Iraq, a job he took after
news broke of beatings and sexual humiliations last fall at the Abu
Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
Miller had visited
Abu Ghraib in August and September and recommended interrogation techniques
that military lawyers said had to be modified to comply with the Geneva
Conventions on treating prisoners of war.
Human rights groups
say the suicide attempts at Guantanamo Bay may be evidence that conditions
there amounted to torture.
The Bush administration
calls the men "enemy combatants," similar to traditional prisoners
of war but not subject to the guarantees of the Geneva Conventions against
torture and other abuses. The administration contends their treatment
nevertheless is in compliance with the conventions.
"Our concern
is that the totality of the conditions at Guantanamo starting with the
prolonged detention without trial, combined with the frequent interrogation
that may have included problematic methods may have contributed to an
atmosphere that pushed people to attempt suicide," said Alistair
Hodgett of the human rights group Amnesty International.
Miller and other
military officials deny that.
"All detainees
are treated humanely," Guantanamo military spokesman Maj. David
S. Kolarik said in written response to questions from The Associated
Press.
He said all prisoners
are treated "in accordance with the principles" of the Geneva
Conventions "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military
necessity."
No Iraqi prisoners
have killed themselves since the U.S. invasion, said Lt. Col. Barry
Johnson, a spokesman for Miller in Baghdad. Nor do military records
contain accounts of prisoner suicide attempts in Iraq, he said.
In internal memos,
Bush administration lawyers have acknowledged repeatedly that "pushing
someone to the brink of suicide" would be torture.
An internal memo
from then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee in 2002 and a March 2003
report from Pentagon experts said mental torture is any procedure "calculated
to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality."
"We think that
pushing someone to the brink of suicide, particularly where the person
comes from a culture with strong taboos against suicide, and it is evidenced
by acts of self-mutilation, would be a sufficient disruption of the
personality to constitute a `profound disruption,'" Bybee, now
a federal appeals court judge, wrote to White House Counsel Alberto
Gonzales.
Islamic law prohibits
suicide. The later memo to Rumsfeld contains almost identical language,
but without the reference to a cultural taboo on suicide.
Amnesty International
is among several humanitarian groups to have raised the possibility
that conditions for terror suspects at Guantanamo and other U.S. prisons
may amount to torture.
In a rare public
statement about conditions at Guantanamo, the Red Cross expressed qualms
last fall about the suicide attempts. Representatives of the international
humanitarian organization said they had found a "worrisome deterioration"
in prisoners' mental health.
The military will
not give details about interrogation methods and some other aspects
of prisoner treatment at Guantanamo. Military officials say doing so
would help al-Qaida terrorists learn how to resist questioning by U.S.
interrogators.
In response to the
rash of suicide attempts in early 2003, the military set up a psychiatric
ward to treat Guantanamo prisoners. The ward had 20 or more patients
last year. "Approximately seven" are there now, Kolarik said,
"with illnesses ranging from psychosis to depression."
Kolarik said up
to 15 percent of detainees arrived at Guantanamo with some degree of
mental illness.
Some prisoners at
Abu Ghraib last fall were seriously mentally ill, said Maj. David Auch,
an Army Reserve physician who served at the prison then. Auch, a family
practice doctor in Watertown, S.D., said one to two dozen of the 3,500
or so prisoners then had psychological problems serious enough to require
"watching and protection for themselves."
Auch said he never
saw any evidence of suicide attempts, although one inmate would bang
his head against the door and walls of his cell.
"They had him
in a helmet to protect his head because he kept pounding it on the wall,"
Auch said. "Sometimes they flexicuffed him because he tried to
scratch his face, tried to grab anything he could to mutilate himself."
Suicide experts
say to determine whether conditions at Guantanamo caused the suicide
attempts is impossible without more information about what detainees
have experienced.
"It's not clear
that simply being imprisoned or tortured would necessarily lead to a
suicide," said Ronald W. Maris, former director of the Suicide
Center at the University of South Carolina. "On the other hand,
if you become hopeless and see no way out other than to die, you're
more likely to attempt suicide."