Guantanamo Suicides Trigger Closure Calls

"The Americans know that this situation considerably undermines their authority in the world," Manfred Nowak, the United Nations rapporteur on torture, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

"It is up to the EU to help them find a diplomatic exit for closing down the camp."

The UN official suggested that the US-EU summit on June 21 "would be an excellent opportunity to demand, and to facilitate, an immediate closing."

He said that mounting international pressure to close Guantanamo will be accelerated by the suicides.

The Pentagon announced Saturday, June9 , that three detainees hanged themselves using clothes.

It later identified them as Saudis Mani bin Shaman bin Turki al-Habardi,30 , and Yasser Talal Abdulah Yahya al-Zahrani, 22 , and Yemeni Ali Abdullah Ahmed,33 .

A lawyer acting for the families of Saudi nationals held in Guantanamo, however, questioned the US military's suicide account.

"We have great doubts over the US version of the story because they were being held in extraordinary circumstances and were under24 -hour surveillance," Saudi lawyer Kateb al-Shimmari told AFP on Sunday.

According to a Pentagon count, there have been41 suicide attempts at the detention center since it was opened in January2002 .

Desperate prisoners staged earlier this months a fake suicide bid to lure US guards into a trap and then attacked them with fan blades and other improvised weapons.

Under Islam, committing suicide is a major sin and is explicitly prohibited in the Qur'an.

Home Pressure

A senior Senate Democrat, Jack Reed, called Sunday, June11 , for the detention camp to be permanently shuttered.

"They should as quickly as possible try to close the facility," said Reed, a leading Democrat on military matters.

"There has to be a good procedure that balances the need to keep these people off the street with the need to find out who in fact is a terrorist. That hasn't been done yet by the administration," he charged.

Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also criticized the policy of prolonged detentions of hundreds of suspects without trial at the Cuba facility.

"There are tribunals established... Where we have evidence they ought to be tried, and if convicted they ought to be sentenced," said Specter Sunday.

The senator has insisted that some detainees have been held based on "the flimsiest sort of hearsay."

Former US presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Britain's Attorney General Lord Goldsmith have already urged the Bush administration to close the camp.

"Truly Desperate"

The UN rapporteur on torture said the detainees at the Guantanamo prison camp "truly are desperate."

"The suicides express the despair of the people, some of them innocent, imprisoned for up to four-and-a-half years without having the least idea of the length of their 'sentence' and without being able to defend themselves before a judge," he maintained.

Nowak, who authored a UN report released in February sharply critical of the Bush administration's handling of prisoners at Guantanamo, said more than the harsh conditions of their detention, this uncertainty "is what breaks the prisoners at Guantanamo."

"The standard US response -- that they will be freed when the war on terrorism is over -- is the height of cynicism."

In his UN report, Nowak concluded that "the general conditions of detention, in particular the uncertainty about the length of detention and prolonged solitary confinement, amount to inhuman treatment and to a violation of the right to health as well as a violation of the right of detainees ... to be treated with humanity."

The lawyer of the only Australian held at Guantanamo said Monday that his client is desperate for human contact.

Major Michael Mori said David Hicks, who has been in the detention center for more than four years, was in poor health, suffering weight loss and continuing signs of depression.

"I found him very desperate for human contact," said Mori, who visited Hicks last week.

"You could just tell when I first got to see him he was just so hungry to interact with another human being," he told Australian radio.

Up to 90 detainees are staging an open-ended hunger strike in protest at their deplorable conditions.

Lawlessness

Amnesty International on Sunday renewed its call for the US to "end the lawlessness" of its detention facility.

"The news that three detainees in Guantanamo have died as a result of apparent suicide is a further tragic reminder that the USA must end the lawlessness of the facility," it said in a statement.

The group reiterated its call for the US-run camp in Cuba to be shut and for Washington to disclose fully all other prisoners detained as part of the so-called "war on terror".

It also renewed its appeal for a full, independent commission of inquiry into all aspects of US detention and interrogation policies and practices with security suspects.

Amnesty had dismissed Guantanamo as "a symbol of abuse and represents a system of detention that is betraying the best US values and undermines international standards."

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