THREE SIMULTANEOUS ACROBATIC SUICIDES at GUANTANAMO

May 23, 2014, Global Day Of Action To Close Guantanamo. Now.  And For Good.

THE YEAR 2009 was the year ICE first discovered that someone by the name of Tanveer Ahmad—a Pakistani taxi driver as it turned out—had disappeared somewhere in the U.S. immigrant detention dungeons (see http://labloga.blogspot.com/2010/05/jean-blum-finger-in-goliaths-eye-part.html). But 2006 was the year three perfectly good, healthy people managed to disappear in the indefinite detention system at Guantanamo Bay. Their names need to be remembered: Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, Salah Ahmed al-Salami, and Mani Shaman al-Utaybi.

Oh, it took some time to notice. People with outlandish names wearing orange jumpsuits don’t usually make celebrity news. But murder will out as they say, and in 2012, when it began to leak, damage control at Guantanamo accused the departed of having waged asymmetrical warfare against the commanding forces at Guantanamo by committing concerted suicide. A charge as it turns out that was perfectly justified. How else would they have committed suicide with their feet tied, and their hands bound behind their backs? But over their years marking indefinite time at Gitmo, they must have trained in acrobatics and learned to levitate, proof that imprisonment and torture produce spiritual values—just like the Boy Scouts—because that’s how they were found.

Just one year ago today, the chief Commander-in-Chief pledged to close Gitmo, and to lift his imperial decree against any transfers out to the pissant country of Yemen although more than half the poor sods at Gitmo happen to come from there. But not one single Yemeni has left Gitmo alive since those noble words were spoken. (If you want to put a face on some of the Yemenis who were imprisoned at Gitmo while they were still children and who, although innocent have yet to be released, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsAw0KCIP3o&feature=youtu.be)

But just yesterday Common Dreams reported new and explosive evidence including pages from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service including an eye-witness account that suggests that Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, Salah Ahmed al-Salami, and Mani Shaman al-Utaybi may have died of asymmetrical torture, and not asymmetrical suicide as the base commander initially claimed. Scott Horton, who in 2010 first raised questions, reporting for Harper’s Magazine, has just uncovered new details of what happened when the men were dragged that night in 2006 down Penny Lane to Camp No!  Scott Horton spills the sickening beans on at

http://www.commondreams.org/video/2014//05/21-0, including the words the base commander spoke that night asking the medics “is al-Zahrani dead yet?”

Several more deaths by asymmetric suicide have been reported by Truthout in March of 2012 (see

http://www.truthout.org/recently-released-autopsy-reports-heighten-guantanamo-suicides-mystery/1330542864).

Today is Gitmo Global Day Of Action. Demonstrations are being held throughout the world calling for the shut down of Guantanamo, the U.S. Penal Colony located on an island so distant the US can conduct its terror program out of sight.

Close Guantanamo. Now. For Good.