Three detainees hang themselves at Guantanamo

The suicides are likely to increase international pressure to close the facility.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
WASHINGTON -- Three captives at the Guantanamo Bay Navy Base detention center in Cuba hanged themselves with nooses fashioned from clothing and bed sheets Saturday, the U.S. military said, becoming the first detainee deaths at the prison camp since it opened.
The suicides of two Saudi citizens and a Yemeni man are likely to increase international pressure on the Bush administration to close the controversial camp, opened in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The deaths come just weeks after a brawl and four attempted suicides at the center, where some have been held without charges for as many as 41/2 years.
Maximum security
The three dead men were all being held at Camp 1, the highest maximum security prison at the center, and were participants in a wave of hunger strikes staged to protest conditions at the camp. Military officials said the Yemeni detainee had just ended his long hunger strike.
All three left suicide notes written in Arabic, but military officials refused to divulge their contents, noting that the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service has opened an investigation to determine the cause and manner of death.
The United States is holding about 465 enemy combatants at the remote Navy base in southeast Cuba. Just 10 of them have been charged as alleged war criminals before President Bush's Military Commissions. Bush has rebuffed calls from across the globe to close the camp, saying he's waiting for the Supreme Court to determine whether his military commissions are constitutional.
Bush concerned
President Bush expressed "serious concern" over the deaths and asked his cabinet to take diplomatic steps to assure critics that the matter is being fully investigated, a White House spokeswoman said.
But the commander of prison operations at the camp called the suicides, "not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."
"We have men here in Guantanamo who are committed jihadists, al-Qaida and Taliban," said Navy Rear Adm. Harry Harris Jr., in a telephone conference call. "They're continuing to fight against us here. These are dangerous men who will do anything they can to gain support for their cause."
He said the men were in the same cell block but not adjacent to each other, but that the suicides appeared to have been coordinated, noting that the "methods of hanging were similar."
Found by guards
According to Harris, an "alert" guard noticed one of the men had hung himself in his cell, shortly after midnight. The prisoner was "unresponsive and not breathing." He said the guard tried to help the man and guards checked on the other detainees, finding the two others.
Medical teams tried to revive the men, Harris said, but were unsuccessful and the three were pronounced dead by a physician.
The names of the dead were not released, but the State Department was notified and in discussions with the governments of Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Harris said the three men have not been charged and do not have attorneys, but are classified as "enemy combatants."
"They were enemy combatants, taken off the battlefield to Guantanamo," Harris said.
He classified one of the men as a "mid- to high-level operative in al-Qaida" and said another was part of an uprising in Afghanistan.
"These are dangerous men, not here by accident or happenstance," Harris said.