Earlier in the day four prisoners attempted suicide, camp officials told Agence France-Presse. There have been 41 “confirmed” suicide attempts by 25 different prisoners since the camp was set up four years ago, Rear Admiral Harry Harris reported.
Since January 2002 the U.S. government has imprisoned hundreds on the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo, territory held against the will of the Cuban people. The detention camp was set up after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan the year before. Labeled “enemy combatants” by U.S. authorities, the prisoners have been denied due process. They have not been charged with any crimes or allowed any access to the outside world. Military officials report that about 460 are currently jailed at Guantánamo.
The camp guard commander, Col. Michael Baumgarner, told the media May 19 that about 100 extra military personnel were called in to restore control, the Voice of America reported. He claimed that about 10 prisoners lured a group of guards into a bunkhouse through a fake suicide attempt and then attacked them with makeshift weapons.
Baumgarner reported that the incident occurred in a medium-security section of the prison and spread to two other bunkhouses. He said prisoners destroyed cameras stationed to observe their movements.
The following day, the United Nations Committee against Torture released a report urging the U.S. government to close the Guantánamo detention camp and “permit access by the detainees to judicial process or release them as soon as possible.”
“This is a different kind of war,” U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice told Fox News Sunday May 21, justifying the Guantánamo camp as needed in the “war on terrorism.”
“We don’t want to be the world’s jailer,” Rice declared. But the indefinite detention policy at the prison camp, she said, was necessary for “making certain that people don’t return to the battlefield.”
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