Flurry of suicide attempts at Guantanamo came after new general took charge

http://www.canada.com/montreal/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=de07d7f5-f76d-487b-b6b4-fa7e3a6cc552

Flurry of suicide attempts at Guantanamo came after new general took charge
 
Matt Kelley
Canadian Press
Tuesday, June 22, 2004

Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller. (AP)
 
WASHINGTON (AP) - Three months after a get-tough general took command of 
the Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects, prisoners began a flurry 
of suicide attempts.

U.S. Maj.-Gen. Geoffrey Miller took over as commander at Guantanamo in 
November 2002 after interrogators criticized his predecessor for being 
too solicitous for the detainees' welfare.

Between January and March 2003, 14 prisoners at Guantanamo tried to kill 
themselves, according to Pentagon figures. That's more than 40 per cent 
of the 34 suicide attempts by 21 inmates since the prison was opened in 
January 2002.

Miller is now in charge of all military-run U.S. prisons in Iraq, a job 
he took after news broke of beatings and sexual humiliations last fall 
at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

Miller had visited Abu Ghraib in August and September and recommended 
interrogation techniques that military lawyers said had to be modified 
to comply with the Geneva Convention on treating prisoners of war.

Human rights groups say the suicide attempts at Guantanamo Bay may be 
evidence that conditions there amounted to torture.

The U.S. administration calls the men "enemy combatants," similar to 
traditional prisoners of war but argues they have no right to the 
guarantees of the Geneva Convention against torture and other abuses. 
The administration contends their treatment nevertheless is humane.

"Our concern is that the totality of the conditions at Guantanamo - 
starting with the prolonged detention without trial, combined with the 
frequent interrogation that may have included problematic methods, may 
have contributed to an atmosphere that pushed people to attempt 
suicide," said Alistair Hodgett of the human rights group Amnesty 
International.

Miller and other military officials deny that.

"All detainees are treated humanely," Guantanamo military spokesman Maj. 
David Kolarik said in written response to questions from The Associated 
Press.

He said all prisoners are treated "in accordance with the principles" of 
the Geneva Convention "to the extent appropriate and consistent with 
military necessity."

No Iraqi prisoners have killed themselves since the U.S. invasion, said 
Lt.-Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for Miller in Baghdad. Nor do 
military records contain accounts of prisoner suicide attempts in Iraq, 
he said.

In internal memos, Bush administration lawyers have acknowledged 
repeatedly that "pushing someone to the brink of suicide" would be torture.

An internal memo from then-assistant attorney general Jay Bybee in 2002 
and a March 2003 report from Pentagon experts said mental torture is any 
procedure "calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality."

"We think that pushing someone to the brink of suicide, particularly 
where the person comes from a culture with strong taboos against 
suicide, and it is evidenced by acts of self-mutilation, would be a 
sufficient disruption of the personality to constitute a 'profound 
disruption,"' Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge, wrote to White 
House Counsel Alberto Gonzales.

Islamic law prohibits suicide. The later memo to Rumsfeld contains 
almost identical language, but without the reference to a cultural taboo 
on suicide.

Amnesty International is among several humanitarian groups to have 
raised the possibility that conditions for terror suspects at Guantanamo 
and other U.S. prisons may amount to torture.

In a rare public statement about conditions at Guantanamo, the Red Cross 
expressed qualms last fall about the suicide attempts. Representatives 
of the international humanitarian organization said they had found a 
"worrisome deterioration" in prisoners' mental health.

The military will not give details about interrogation methods and some 
other aspects of prisoner treatment at Guantanamo. Military officials 
say doing so would help al-Qaida terrorists learn how to resist 
questioning by U.S. interrogators.

In response to the rash of suicide attempts in early 2003, the military 
set up a psychiatric ward to treat Guantanamo prisoners. The ward had 20 
or more patients last year. "Approximately seven" are there now, Kolarik 
said, "with illnesses ranging from psychosis to depression."

Kolarik said up to 15 per cent of detainees arrived at Guantanamo with 
some degree of mental illness.

Some prisoners at Abu Ghraib last fall were seriously mentally ill, said 
Maj. David Auch, an army reserve physician who served at the prison 
then. Auch, a family practice doctor in Watertown, S.D., said one to two 
dozen of the 3,500 or so prisoners then had psychological problems 
serious enough to require "watching and protection for themselves."

Auch said he never saw any evidence of suicide attempts, although one 
inmate would bang his head against the door and walls of his cell.

"They had him in a helmet to protect his head because he kept pounding 
it on the wall," Auch said. "Sometimes they flexicuffed him because he 
tried to scratch his face, tried to grab anything he could to mutilate 
himself."

Suicide experts say to determine whether conditions at Guantanamo caused 
the suicide attempts is impossible without more information about what 
detainees have experienced.

"It's not clear that simply being imprisoned or tortured would 
necessarily lead to a suicide," said Ronald Maris, former director of 
the Suicide Center at the University of South Carolina. "On the other 
hand, if you become hopeless and see no way out other than to die, 
you're more likely to attempt suicide."

© The Canadian Press 2004
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