Scott Horton's piece in Harpers provides context and corroboration to the recent Seton Hall report by Mark Denbeaux on those three Gitmo "suicides" that occurred in 2006 and were immediately dubbed an act of "asymmetrical warfare" by Rear Admiral Harry Harris. Harris' turn of phrase became the preferred idiom for describing the deaths, as though they were al-Qaeda's version of a suicide bombing in captivity.
Except it doesn't appear to be the slightest bit true. According to Horton, who secures the on-the-record observations of Guantanamo prison guard Joe Hickman, the three men may have been killed at a Gitmo black site referred to by Horton as "Camp No." The prisoners appear not to have died by hanging, but were suffocated with cloth. The three men, Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, were all cleared for release, which calls into question the notion that they were hardened terrorists ready to die for their cause. Their bodies were returned to their families with their throats missing--which makes corroborating the conclusions of the military pathologists who concluded the deaths were suicides impossible. One military official, Army Colonel Michael Bumgarner, was suspended after he inadvertently revealed to the press that the prisoners were found with cloth stuffed in their mouths--a detail that had been left out of the official report of the "hanging."
Horton's story is a case study in how a lawless system breaks down: The three men were captured through the haphazard practice of the U.S. offering bounties for terrorists--but why go through the dangerous work of capturing an actual terrorist when some harmless foreigner will do? In Horton's account, there were marks on the men's bodies that suggests they been tortured prior to their deaths -- which suggests the three were undergoing "enhanced interrogations." But of course, since they don't seem to have actually been terrorists or connected to al-Qaeda, there was nothing to learn. The government's disregard for basic human rights standards led to deaths that needed to be justified publicly and then illegally covered up, because it's still necessary to make it appear as though we are living in a society of laws that doesn't allow people to get away with the murder of prisoners in American custody.
One of Horton's most disturbing conclusions though, is the possibility that the Obama administration, confronted with the evidence of foul play involved in the three deaths, decided to paper over them -- perhaps in an effort to avoid upsetting the Beltway consensus that the laws of the United States do not apply to powerful elites. The Obama administration policy, "look forward," makes a mockery of the law: All crimes occur in past, tense, that's why they are crimes, as opposed to "thoughts." But under Obama and Bush, we have adopted a warped view of due process under which we punish people for crimes they haven't committed yet and refuse to punish people for crimes we know they have. You fall in the former category if the U.S. government believes you to be an enemy, and the latter if you happen to be an agent of the U.S. government.
That's not the "rule of law." That's called "might makes right."
-- A. Serwer