This is a wretched story: “One of the three detainees who committed suicide at Guantánamo Bay was due to be released but had not been told, the man’s lawyer said today.” It’s not hard to see why he was driven to suicide here:
“His despair was great enough and in his ignorance he went and killed himself,” Mr Denbeaux said, adding that many other Guantánamo detainees felt similarly hopeless.
“These people are told they’ll be 50 by the time they get out, that they have no hope of getting out. They’ve been denied a hearing, they have no chance to be released,” he said.
That’s just a tad more likely than Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr.’s claim that he was waging “an act of asymmetrical warfare” by killing himself, no? Previous studies have estimated that over 55 percent of Guantanamo detainees “are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies,” and the vast majority were captured not by the U.S., but by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance at a time when the United States was offering very large rewards for any “suspected enemies.”
