Three prisoners commit suicide in Guantánamo gulag

Two of the prisoners were Saudi nationals and the third was Yemeni, according to American officials. All three left behind suicide notes written in Arabic, although none were made public. The three men had been involved in hunger strikes over the past year carried out by detainees to protest their sadistic and illegal treatment. The hunger strikers, including the three who took their own lives, have been force-fed by their captors, who have used the brutal procedure of strapping their victims into metal chairs and shoving feeding tubes down their throats.

The triple suicide is the latest in a series of increasingly desperate actions by the Guantánamo prisoners, who have in many cases been held for more than four years, have been denied the minimum legal rights required under international conventions, and confront the prospect of spending the rest of their lives in the US prison camp.

Since the facility opened there have been 41 suicide attempts by 25 detainees, officials said, including 23 attempts during August of 2003, 10 on a single day, although these efforts were not revealed by the Pentagon until January of 2005.

There have been multiple hunger strikes in 2005 and 2006, some involving as many as a third of all the prisoners. Last fall the US Southern Command, which runs the prison, decided to begin systematic force-feeding, employing a method of insertion of the feeding tube so violent that it frequently caused internal bleeding. Under this torture, the bulk of prisoners abandoned the hunger strike, although several dozen resumed the strike earlier this year.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/guan-j12.shtml