I am feeling as though I’m in shock after reading “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides,'” an article by Scott Horton that appears in the March 2010 edition of Harper’s Magazine (available online only to subscribers). The official story offered by the United States government is that these three prisoners, who occupied non-adjacent cells, simultaneously committed suicide on June 9, 2006.

According to the NCI as documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s 8-foot high steel mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat area we are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his wash basin, slipped his head through the news, tightened it, and left from the wash basin to hang until he asphyxiated.

Horton’s incredible article names names and provides details with regard to all of the following:

• The United States appears to have murdered at least three of the prisoners at Guantánamo. None of these three men had been charged with any crime. Two of these men were set to be released. There is no credible evidence that any of them were terrorists. Evidence strongly suggests that they were beaten and then further tortured through waterboarding on the night they were killed.
• The United States has worked furiously to cover up these murders, spewing countless lies in the process.
• The United States maintained a special torture building (“a black site”) far from the main prison camp at Guantánamo, and those who worked at Guantánamo were told to not ask any questions about it. It was called “Camp No,” and those who have come forward at considerable risk have reported hearing screaming from that building.
• After the three prisoners were apparently murdered, those in charge of Guantánamo viciously attacked the dead men, arguing to the press that “They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own.”
• In the process of “investigating the suicides,” the U.S. government seized all written communications possessed by the other Guantánamo prisoners, including communications clearly constituting attorney-client privilege.
• When presented with the facts presented in Horton’s article, the Bush administration and the Obama administration’s both refused to conduct any meaningful investigation. Both administrations actively suppressed the truth.
• The Obama administration would simply rather not have to deal with the criminal actions of the Bush administration.

I’m sure that many Americans are disgusted, as I am, that the United States has engaged in this sort of behavior.  I’m also sure that millions of Americans would be outraged that Horton would dare to accuse the United States of anything improper; these sorts of people (I’ve met some of them and I’ve heard many on television) don’t care whether the Guantanamo prisoners were really terrorists and don’t care whether they were tortured.  It’s disturbing on many levels.   It all makes you wonder what has become of us.

The following is from a related article from yesterday’s NYT, where it is reported that the Obama Administration is upset that a British Court released U.S. information indicating that U.S. treatment of prisoners “violated legal prohibitions against torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners.”  You’d think that Mr. Obama would abide by his campaign promise to be an open book, but he’s doing the opposite:

A spokesman for President Obama expressed “deep disappointment” in the court’s decision, which might have been shocking except that Mr. Obama has refused to support any real investigation of Mr. Bush’s lawless detention policies. His lawyers have tried to shut down court cases filed by victims of those policies, with the same extravagant claims of state secrets and executive power that Mr. Bush made.

In another a related matter, Dick Cheney reminded the world yesterday that he has long been a big fan of A) waterboarding and B) telling his lawyers what to tell him.