MIAMI, 13 June 2006 — Pressure mounted yesterday within the United States and from abroad to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison camp following the suicides of three “enemy combatant” detainees over the weekend.
The suicides of three Arab detainees at Guantanamo show that the US prison camp should be closed, the European Union said on yesterday.
Two Saudis and a Yemeni hanged themselves with clothes and bed sheets in maximum security cells on Saturday — the first prisoners to die at Guantanamo since the United States began sending suspected Al-Qaeda and Taleban captives to the prison on the island of Cuba in 2002.
“Guantanamo should be closed. This is an occasion to reiterate that statement,” EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner told reporters on arrival at a meeting of the bloc’s foreign ministers in Luxemborg.
Luxemborg’s foreign minister criticized a statement by a US official on Sunday that the suicides were a “PR move.” “It’s hard to understand why when three people kill themselves, that is an attack on America. Something has to change in the American mentality,” Jean Asselborn told reporters.
Colleen Graffy, US deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, told the BBC World Service the suicides were a “good PR (public relations) move to draw attention.” But another senior US official rowed back from this remark yesterday.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs Cully Stimson, speaking to BBC radio, said: “I wouldn’t characterize it as a good PR move. What I would say is that we are always concerned when someone takes his own life. Because as Americans, we value life, even the lives of violent terrorists who are captured waging war against our country.” The prison at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay holds about 460 foreigners captured during the US-led war to oust Al-Qaeda from Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks. They are held indefinitely without trial or the right to family visits.
Last month, the foreign minister of the EU’s Austrian Presidency, Ursula Plassnik, said Guantanamo was “an anomaly” and should be closed as quickly as possible. The European Parliament has also called for the camp’s closure.
A senior senator from President George W. Bush’s Republican party criticized the policy of prolonged detentions of hundreds of terror suspects without trial at the US naval facility on Cuba’s southeastern tip.
“Those people have to be tried,” Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Sunday. “There are tribunals established.... Where we have evidence they ought to be tried, and if convicted they ought to be sentenced,” said Specter, who said some inmates have been detained based on “the flimsiest sort of hearsay.” A senior Senate Democrat, Jack Reed, called for the prison 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 said.
The suicides Saturday pose a new challenge for President George W. Bush’s administration, already under strong pressure to close the camp from critics that include the United Nations, international human rights organizations, European governments and Britain’s top legal advisor.
