This is the story of Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani. Each of these three men were being detained at the extra-Constitution detention facility Guantánamo Naval Base without ever having been charged with a crime, and each of the men died suddenly and violently (and almost at the same time) on June 9, 2006. The official story of the prisoners’ deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and a reconstruction of how the men died, which was the backbone of the report, was illogical and hard to believe.
Here’s a few of the more unbelievable assertions made by the reconstruction of events completed by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS):
According to the NCIS documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.
[. . .]
The fact that at least two of the prisoners also had cloth masks affixed to their faces, presumably to prevent the expulsion of the rags from their mouths, went unremarked by the NCIS, as did the fact that standard operating procedure at Camp Delta required the Navy guards on duty after midnight to “conduct a visual search” of each cell and detainee every ten minutes. The report claimed that the prisoners had hung sheets or blankets to hide their activities and shaped more sheets and pillows to look like bodies sleeping in their beds, but it did not explain where they were able to acquire so much fabric beyond their tightly controlled allotment, or why the Navy guards would allow such an obvious and immediately observable deviation from permitted behavior. Nor did the report explain how the dead men managed to hang undetected for more than two hours or why the Navy guards on duty, having for whatever reason so grievously failed in their duties, were never disciplined.
As researchers from Seton Hall University noted during their investigation into the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the three detainees at Guantanamo, nothing in the NCIS report suggests investigators secured or reviewed the duty roster, the prisoner-transfer book, the pass-on book, the records of phone and radio communications, or footage from the camera that continuously monitored activity in the hallways, all of which could have helped them authoritatively reconstruct the events of that evening. Instead of gathering evidence that may prove conclusively what happened to the three men who died at Guantanamo on June 9, 2006, investigators instead concocted their own theory on what happened, presumably to bolster the “official” story and cover up three homicides committed by U.S. personnel.
Go read the entire story; it’s well worth the time.
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