SAN JUAN (AP):
"STENCH of despair" hangs over the Guantanamo Bay prison where three detainees committed suicide this weekend, said a defence lawyer who recently visited the base in Cuba.
No additional detainees have tried to kill themselves since U.S. military guards found two Saudis and one Yemeni prisoner hanging by nooses made from sheets and clothing early Saturday, Army Lt. Col. Lora Tucker told The Associated Press yesterday.
U.S. military guards were trying to prevent more suicides with measures such as allowing detainees to have sheets only when they're going to sleep. But human rights groups and defence attorneys fear the three suicides - the first detainee deaths at Guantanamo Bay - were just the beginning.
Mark Denbeaux, a law professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, who represents two Tunisians at Guantanamo, said he was frightened by the level of depression he saw in his client Mohammed Abdul Rahman, whom he visited on June 2 at the detention centre, which sits on arid hills above the Caribbean Sea.
Rahman, Denbeaux said, "is trying to kill himself" by participating in a hunger strike.
COLOSSALLY DEPRESSED
"He is normally a gentle, quiet, shy person," Denbeaux said late Saturday. "He sat there in a subdued state that was almost inert. He was colossally depressed."
Denbeaux said he had intended to cheer Rahman up by showing him a newspaper article quoting U.S. President George W. Bush as saying he wanted to close the detention centre. Bush on Friday repeated the sentiment, but added that some detainees, if freed, "would create grave harm to American citizens and other citizens of the world" and should be tried by U.S. courts.
Before Denbeaux met with Rahman, military guards confiscated the newspaper article because detainees are barred from seeing news of current events, Denbeaux said.
"We wanted to say, 'We have some hope for you,"' Denbeaux said. "They wouldn't let us give him some hope."
That afternoon, Rahman was force-fed, the lawyer recounted. Force feeding involves strapping a hunger striker into a "restraint chair" and feeding him through a tube inserted into the nose.
Many of the 460 detainees held on suspicion of links to al-Qaida and the Taliban claim they are innocent or were low-level Taliban members who never intended to harm the United States. The United States has classified them as enemy combatants.
