Sunday, June 11, 2006; Posted: 11:31 p.m. EDT (03:31 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The suicides of
three inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp has spurred renewed calls for changes at the facility, with one Republican senator urging the Bush administration to try suspected terrorists held there.
"Where we have evidence, they ought to be tried, and if convicted, they ought to be sentenced," Sen. Arlen Specter (REPUBLICAN), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told CNN's "Late Edition."
Authorities at the prison camp, located on a Navy base in Cuba, reported Saturday that two Saudis and one Yemeni were found dead in their cells after using clothing and bedsheets to hang themselves.
The Pentagon identified the three prisoners late Sunday, describing one as a mid-ranking operative with close ties to a top al Qaeda figure.
Rear Adm. Harry Harris, commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, told reporters the men had been "determined to take their own lives." He said prisoners at the camp are "dangerous, committed to killing Americans."
But the arrests of most of the roughly 500 prisoners held there were based on "the flimsiest sort of hearsay," Specter said.
The Pennsylvania Republican told reporters the administration faces "a tough situation," since some of those held might return to their homelands to carry out attacks on Americans.
"But too many have been detained for too long," he said.
"There is the overtone that quite a number of them will be tried, that there is tangible evidence," he said. "As to a great many others, there is not evidence which could be brought into a court of law."
The Bush administration has declared the prisoners to be "enemy combatants," but does not consider them prisoners of war who must be accorded the rights spelled out by the Geneva Conventions.
But detention without charges runs counter to established human-rights law, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that prisoners could challenge their detention in U.S. courts.
There have been more than 40 suicide attempts at Guantanamo Bay, but the inmates found dead over the weekend were the first to succeed, the government said. (Watch commanders explain how guards discovered the men -- 5:09)
Center for Constitutional Rights lawyers, who defend 200 of the detainees, said the suicides were acts of desperation carried out by people who had not been charged and have no hope of getting their day in court.
The human rights group Amnesty International blamed the Bush administration's policies for the deaths.
But Harris said the suicides were an act of "asymmetric warfare" aimed at getting the prison closed. He said a "mythical belief" had spread among inmates that the camp would be shut if three detainees were to die.
The Defense Department said one of the three, Ali Abdullah Ahmed, was a mid- to high-level al Qaeda operative and a "close associate" of Abu Zubaydah, an al Qaeda strategist captured in 2002. Ahmed took part in a long-term hunger strike that ended in May, and has been "non-compliant and hostile" to guards, according to a Pentagon statement.
Another of the dead prisoners, Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi, was a member of a banned Saudi militant group that recruited for al Qaeda. He had been recommended for transfer to another country that was not specified, the Pentagon said.
The third prisoner, Yassar Talal al-Zahrani, was described as a "front-line" Taliban fighter who helped procure weapons for the Islamic militia that once ruled most of Afghanistan.
Al-Zahrani was captured by anti-Taliban Afghan forces and took part in the 2001 uprising at a prison in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif that left a CIA officer dead, the military said.
The men were not identified by nationality.
'Ticking time bomb'
Two Democrats on the Sunday talk-show circuit called on the administration to close the prison camp. Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called Guantanamo "a ticking time bomb."
"Bottom line: We've kept people in this prison for years and years and years without a status, without any rights, and it was the wrong way to go," the California Democrat said. "We should have been organized, planned ahead."
About 90 inmates were disciplined after a May incident in which detainees staged a suicide attempt to draw guards into a room before attacking them, prison officers reported.
That month, dozens of prisoners also took part in a hunger strike to protest their conditions. (Watch a retired general call the suicides 'an act of defiance' -- 3:29)
Harman said the situation at the prison camp was another reason Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should resign. Bush has said Rumsfeld still has his confidence as head of the Pentagon.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called on the United States to close the prison camp, which Amnesty International has called "a legal black hole."
But Sen. Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, told CNN that "We just can't turn them loose."
"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," said Reed, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
A U.S. ally, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told CNN that the United States and its allies are "fighting for the rule of law" against terrorism, and Guantanamo has become "a weakness in this fight."
"Seen from that perspective, I think it would be to the benefit of our course and our fight for freedom and against terrorism if the facilities at Guantanamo were closed down," he said.
Swedish Foreign Minister Jan Eliasson told The Associated Press the suicides highlighted the need to shut the prison and either try the captives or free them, adding that the 25-nation European Union favors closure of the camp.
But former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a possible Republican presidential candidate, said U.S. troops would have the same problems "wherever else you put it."
"We maybe have people who hate us so much that we can never release them," Gingrich told reporters. "Now if you're never, ever going to release them, you're going to have psychological problems" among the prisoners.
A British citizen released from Guantanamo in 2004 told the AP, "This was not done as an act of martyrdom, warfare or anything else."
"If you're told day after day by the Americans that you're never going to go home or you're put into isolation, these acts are committed simply out of desperation," Shafiq Rasul, 29, told the AP.
Rasul has previously accused the United States and Britain of humiliating and abusive treatment. (Full story)
Among the cases to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court before the end of its current term is a major test of presidential authority over planned military tribunals for suspected foreign terrorists.
Fewer than a dozen of the Guantanamo prisoners would face military review of alleged war crimes.
Those trials have yet to begin, and the high court has been asked to lay out clear procedures to ensure the defendants are treated within constitutional and international norms.
Copyright 2006 CNN. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press contributed to this report.
View Profile
View Forum Posts
Private Message
View Blog Entries
View Articles
Originally Posted by WH Press Sec. Tony Snow
Reply With Quote
Visit Homepage
Bookmarks