Wash Post on Gitmo Triple Suicide

Posted on Sun, Aug. 24, 2008
Lapses cited in 2006 triple suicide at Guantanamo Bay

By JOSH WHITE
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — As the lights flickered off above them, more than two dozen detainees began to raise their voices in prayer and other songs, a din the guards dismissed as harmless. Three detainees furtively stuffed water bottles and toilet paper under their bedsheets to create the illusion of sleeping bodies, and they each strung up walls of blue blankets in their metal mesh cells, seeking cover from their captors’ glances.

Then, with strips of white sheets, T-shirts and towels wound into nooses, the three detainees in Guantanamo Bay’s Camp 1, Block Alpha, hid behind the blankets and hanged themselves, their toes dangling inches above the floor while their bodies became blue and rigid. For hours, the guards failed to notice those first deaths at the controversial U.S. military detention facility.

The simultaneous suicides on June 10, 2006, raised claims from top U.S. military commanders that the detainees were engaging in "asymmetric warfare" against the U.S. More than two years later, a Naval Criminal Investigative Service inquiry and other documents reveal that the men took advantage of lapses in guard protocol and of lenient policies toward compliant detainees to commit what suicide notes described as an attack on the United States.

"I am informing you that I gave away the precious thing that I have in which it became very cheap, which is my own self, to lift up the oppression that is upon us through the American Government," wrote Ali Abdullah Ahmed Naser al-Sullami, of Yemen, a 26-year-old who had been on one of the longest hunger strikes at Guantanamo, ultimately earning him forced feedings through a tube. In a note neatly folded into his shirt pocket, Sullami wrote: "I did not like the tube in my mouth, now go ahead and accept the rope in my neck."

Contained in more than 3,000 pages of U.S. military investigative documents, medical records, autopsies and statements from guards and detainees is a rare view inside the detention center at Guantanamo and one of the worst episodes of its six-year history. The documents from the NCIS investigation, which will be released under the Freedom of Information Act, were obtained Friday by The Washington Post.

They make clear that Sullami as well as Saudis Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, 22, and Mana Shaman Allabard al-Tabi, 32, carefully planned their suicides. Investigators and U.S. military officials believe, according to the documents, that other detainees were aware the suicides were about to happen and at one point chanted a song called "kill them all" — used by al Qaeda and the Taliban after killing Americans — possibly to mask the sounds of death.

Investigators found that guards had become lax on certain rules because commanders wanted to reward the more compliant detainees, giving them extra T-shirts, blankets and towels. Detainees were allowed to hang such items to dry, or to provide privacy while using the toilet, but were not supposed to be able to obscure their cells while sleeping.

An internal investigation into the guards’ actions found six violations of Guantanamo’s standard operating procedures, which have since been revamped. When the bodies were found, some of the guards were "very emotional" according to the report.

"I feel that the guards and myself on Alpha block did an inadequate job monitoring the detainees that night to make sure that they were following the rules as to show some kind of skin while sleeping," said one guard, whose name was redacted from the documents. "I feel this happens with everyone on every block, everyday. We see and do the same things every day, and it gets old and boring. I wish I would have been more attentive and could have done something to save the detainees."

NCIS officials, in a statement released Friday night, said that in addition to martyrdom notes found on the bodies, they also found other written statements throughout the cellblock, suggesting more suicides could follow. Another detainee killed himself at Guantanamo a year later.

". . . there was growing concern that someone within the Camp Delta population was directing detainees to commit suicide and that additional suicides might be imminent," according to the statement.

I did not like the tube in my mouth, now go ahead and accept the rope in my neck."

Ali Abdullah Ahmed Naser al-Sullami,
who killed himself at Guantanamo Bay in June 2006