As if it's not bad enough that at least one of the Guantanamo detainees who committed suicide last week didn't know he had been cleared for release, now we find out some of them didn't even know they had lawyers.

The Yemeni captive who killed himself at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had an attorney arranging to visit him in August, but did not know it when he committed suicide. One of the Saudis, Mani Shaman al Utaybi, 30, had been approved for transfer to a jail back home, but also had never been told he was cleared to depart the U.S. detention center.

The military first maintained the men who hanged themselves did not have lawyers.

by TChris

The president has a bunch of people -- "enemy combatants," he likes to call them -- at Guantanamo, and he doesn't know what to do about them (other than keeping the press away so prisoners can't benefit from "publicity stunts" like, um, suicide). He told us today that he'd "like to close Guantanamo" because reports of torture and suicide just give people an "excuse" to criticize the U.S.

We don't need an excuse to criticize your administration, Mr. President. You and your helpers provide fresh cause for alarm every week. Banning the press won't shield you or your administration from warranted criticism. Guantanamo has severely damaged the credibility of the United States, and our elected representatives need to hear us object to misdeeds that tarnish our country's reputation.

So much for freedom of the press. Journalists have been forced to leave Guantanamo in the wake of the suicides.

In the aftermath of the three suicides at the notorious Guantanamo prison facility in Cuba last Saturday, reporters with the Los Angeles Times and the Miami Herald were ordered by the office of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to leave the island today.

A third reporter and a photographer with the Charlotte Observer were given the option of staying until Saturday but, E&P has learned, were told that their access to the prison camp was now denied.

Bump and Update: Professor Denbaux writes in to say the Guardian was incorrect in reporting that he represented one of the inmates who committed suicide. Here is his e-mail to me:

Everything in your latest post about the Guantanamo detainee who committed suicide unaware that he was one of 141 detainees that the United States had scheduled to be released is correct with one exception. That detainee, Al-Utaybi, was not our client. Apparently a London newspaper reported that Al-Utaybi, was our client without talking to us. The reporter apparently misheard something on BBC. We never spoke to the reporter who started the story. Joshua checked with BBC. BBC had it right.: our client told us that he wanted to die rather than stay in Guantanamo any longer. Immediately thereafter (when we had left) something happened and he was immediately extracted and force fed. The acts which caused the guards to rush in and extract him were never described to us. Fortunately, our client is still alive.

The fact that detainee Al--Utaybi was not our client does not change the horrific loss of life--which would have been avoided if the detainee had been told that the United States government had decided to release him. By the way, none of the 141 on that list have been told that they are to be released. No reason has been given for withholding this light of hope. Joshua beleives that our client may be (he certainly should be) on that list. If so, we want him to know.

The fact that the detainee who died without knowing that the United States had authorized his release certainly destroys the claim by the Deputy Secretary of State and others that he was a dangerous person willing to die to as a publicity stunt. Such a contemptable accusation becomes even worse when it turns out that the government knew that it was false when made.

It seems the Pentagon is interfering with the Guantanamo detainees' ability to send and receive legal mail, including mail to their lawyers and Congress.

The rules guiding attorney/client correspondence at Guantánamo are frustratingly vague, lawyers for the detainees say, and the processing delays are maddening. Mail routinely arrives six months after it's been sent, if it arrives at all. "For months I sent him letters and he sent me letters and they were all just impounded," Hunt says. "Now, I think my letters get through but they take their sweet time about it."

The ostensible reason for the backlog is security. "The attorney/client communications go to a secure facility, which happens to be here in Washington," Hunt says. "And they can't leave there until the government clears it and says it's not sensitive and not classified."

The lawyers sit in a room to read the letters and then have to give them back. They can't disclose the contents of the letters.

The Saudis have released the names of two of the Guantanamo detainees who committed suicide yesterday. They are Manie bin Shaman bin Turki Al-Habardi Al-Otaibi and Yasser Talal Abdullah Yahya Al-Zahrani.

Al-Zahrani was seized and detained when he was 17 years old.

Today, a lawyer for the Saudi nationals imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay said he held United States authorities responsible for the deaths of the two Saudi prisoners. "The detainees' death reveals the mistreatment at Guantánamo and the extent human rights are breached," the lawyer, Katib al-Shimary, said in an interview with the satellite television network Al Arabiya, and monitored by Reuters.

The three Guantanamo detainees who committed suicide did so by hanging themselves with bedsheets in their cells. The AP reports:

Three Guantanamo Bay detainees hanged themselves with nooses made of sheets and clothes, the commander of the detention center said yesterday. ....Two men from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen were found dead shortly after midnight yesterday in separate cells, said the Miami-based U.S. Southern Command, which has jurisdiction over the prison. Attempts were made to revive them, but they failed.

"They hung themselves with fabricated nooses made out of clothes and bed sheets," Navy Rear Adm. Harry Harris told reporters from the U.S. base in southeastern Cuba.

All three left suicide notes. From now on, detainees will have sheets issued to them when they go to bed at night, and they will be removed in the morning. How does this prevent them from hanging themselves after lights-out? This is a band-aid, like putting a piece of tape over a hole in a flat tire, not a solution.

If Bush and Rumsfeld were hoping for a bump from al-Zarqawi's assassination, I hope this gives people a reality check. Three detainees at Guantanamo have committed suicide.

Two men from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen were found "unresponsive and not breathing in their cells" early Saturday, according to a statement from the Miami-based U.S. Southern Command, which has jurisdiction over the prison. Attempts were made to revive the prisoners, but failed.

There will be a Pentagon briefing later this afternoon. The Navy confirms the death were suicides but says an investigation has been launched.

by TChris

As a former hostage in Iraq, James Loney knows what it's like to be detained without having access to family or to a legal system that can restore the unjust deprivation of freedom. He's protesting Canada's practice of detaining five suspected foreign terrorists indefinitely.

In an interview, Loney told The Canadian Press that he feels both an obligation to, and kinship with, the Muslim men currently detained as threats to national security. He said he was especially grateful that three of the detainees wrote an open letter in early December, just days after he was kidnapped, urging his captors to free their hostages.

A protest march that began yesterday in Toronto will end June 10 in Ottawa, where protestors will stage a week-long vigil.

The number of hunger striking detainees at Guantanamo has grown to 75.

It's way past time we closed Guantanamo and sent the detainees home.

A British legal rights group asserts that 60 of the Guantanamo detainees have been children under 18.

They include at least 10 detainees still held at the US base in Cuba who were 14 or 15 when they were seized - including child soldiers who were held in solitary confinement, repeatedly interrogated and allegedly tortured.

The disclosures threaten to plunge the Bush administration into a fresh row with Britain, its closest ally in the war on terror, only days after the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, repeated his demands for the closure of the detention facility. It was, he said, a "symbol of injustice".

The AP reports:

Prisoners wielding improvised weapons clashed with guards trying to stop a detainee from committing suicide at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the military said Friday. The fight occurred Thursday in a medium-security section of the camp as guards were responding to the fourth attempted suicide that day at the detention center on the U.S. Navy base, Cmdr. Robert Durand said.

Detainees used fans, light fixtures and other improvised weapons to attack the guards as they entered a communal living area to stop a prisoner trying to hang himself, Durand said. Earlier in the day, three detainees in another part of the prison attempted suicide by swallowing prescription medicine they had been hoarding.

Time to listen to the U.N. and the wise counsel of other nations: Close Gitmo.