Law School Study Finds Evidence Of Cover-Up After Three Alleged Suicides At Guantanamo In 2006By Scott Horton, special to the Huffington Post On the night of June 9-10 in 2006, three prisoners held at the Guantánamo prison's Camp Delta died under...
On the night of June 9-10 in 2006, three prisoners held at the Guantánamo prison's Camp Delta died under mysterious circumstances. Military authorities responded by quickly ordering media representatives off the island and blocking lawyers from meeting with their clients. The first official military statements declared the deaths not just suicides -- but actually went so far as to describe them as acts of "asymmetrical warfare" against the United States.
Now a 58-page study prepared by law faculty and students at Seton Hall University in New Jersey starkly challenges the Pentagon's claims. It notes serious and unresolved contradictions within a Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) report -- which was publicly released only in fragmentary form, two years after the fact -- and declares the military's internal investigation an obvious cover-up. The only question is: of what?
Law Professor Mark Denbeaux, who directed the study, said in an interview that "there are two possibilities here. Either the investigation is a cover-up of gross dereliction of duty, or it is a cover-up of something far more chilling. More than three years later we do not know what really happened." (Read a Q&A with Denbeaux: "'The Most Innocent Explanation Is That This Is Gitmo Meets Lord Of The Flies'".)
The new study exposes how the NCIS report purports that all three prisoners on the prison's Alpha Block did the following to commit suicide:
• Braided a noose by tearing up their sheets and/or clothing.
• Made mannequins of themselves so it would appear to the guards they were asleep in their cells.
• Hung sheets to block the view into the cells.
• Stuffed rags down their own throats well past a point which would have induced involuntary gagging.
• Tied their own feet together.
• Tied their own hands together.
• Hung the noose from the metal mesh of the cell wall and/or ceiling.
• Climbed up on to the sink, put the noose around their necks and release their weight, resulting in death by strangulation.
The study also notes that there has never been any explanation of how the three bodies could have hung in the cells, undiscovered, for at least two hours, when the cells were supposed to be under constant supervision by roving guards and video cameras.
Disturbingly, these facts were collected within the NCIS report -- but without discussion or any effort to make conclusions based on them. Was that because the facts did not fit the conclusions that military leaders had already offered the public and that the investigators were therefore struggling to support -- namely that the prisoners committed suicide? It is not even clear that it would be physically possible for the prisoners to commit suicide consistent with these facts.
Story continues at http://tinyurl.com/yfang9o
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