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Four US soldiers cast doubt on Gitmo ’suicides’
By Daniel Tencer Raw Story
Four members of a US military intelligence unit assigned to Guantanamo Bay are questioning the government’s official version of the deaths of three detainees in the summer of 2006.
The soldiers are offering a very different version of events than the one provided by the official report carried out by the Naval Criminal Investigation Service. Their stories suggest the three inmates may not have killed themselves — or, at least, not in the way the US military claims.
“All four soldiers say they were ordered by their commanding officer not to speak out, and all four soldiers provide evidence that authorities initiated a cover-up within hours of the prisoners’ deaths,” reports Scott Horton at Harper’s magazine.
According to the US Navy, Gitmo detainees Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani were found hanged in their cells on June 9. 2006. The US military initially described their deaths as “asymmetrical warfare” against the United States, before finally declaring that the deaths were suicides that the inmates coordinated among themselves.
But a report from Seton Hall University Law School, released last fall, cast doubt on almost every element of the US military’s story. It questioned, for example, how it would have been possible for the three detainees to have stuffed rags down their throats and then, while choking, managed to raise themselves up to a noose and hang themselves.
Read more at Raw Story
Short URL: http://www.veteranstoday.com/?p=11065
Posted by Bob Higgins on Jan 18 2010, Filed under 9/11. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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If absolutely nothing else comes out of the Afghanistan-Iraq-terror war experience, if we can simply force our government to be transparent and truthful to us all the time, all of the dead and maimed will have won a great victory.
The first rule of journalism, in fact of citizenship, should be “Remember that government, business, and power always lie.”
Maybe if at the “end” of this eternal war, if the large majority of the population learns that “first rule” we may have made progress, but at a what a terrible cost for such a cheap civics lesson.