Harper's Magazine: The Guantánamo “Suicides”

The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

By Scott Horton

...Late on the evening of June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.

As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners’ families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion...

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Hanging Death of Census Worker Ruled Suicide

It would appear that census worker Bill Sparkman faked his own murder. Truly excellent thread here* on this subject with great arguments and tons of links. Multiple law agencies agree he staged this, taping his hands shoulder length apart so he could complete the plan, wrote from the bottom to the top, taped his glasses to his face, was able to stand, and had just taken out two large accidental death insurance policies on himself. And there was no other DNA or other forensic evidence at the scene than his.

There are a few conspiracy grumbles but without massive collusion between several different crime labs, police forces, etc. on what they knew was going to be a closely watched case none of them holds up. Sometimes desperate people do really desperate things.

The only thing this negates about my rant on this subject is the name of the person killed/building bombed. More awful things will happen spurred on by the vast right wing echo box.

The original story has gone from scary to sad. I guess that's an improvement?

*Thanks, John.