Guantanamo Bay homicide accusations
The United States Department of Defense (DOD) claimed their deaths at the time as suicides, although their families and the Saudi government argued against the findings, and numerous journalists have raised questions then and since.
In April 2008, Murat Kurnaz, a former detainee released without charges and repatriated to Germany, published the English translation of his memoir, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo (2007).
[2] In January 2010, Harper's Magazine and NBC News released the report of a joint investigation, based on accounts by four former Military Intelligence staff, stationed at the time at Guantanamo.
"[8] The three prisoners, two Saudis and one Yemeni, were reported to have hanged themselves in their cells with nooses made of sheets and clothes, and gone undetected by guards until after they died.
[9] All three of the families of the dead men challenged the American post-mortems at the time, and the Saudi government announced its suspicions that the true story was not being told.
Patrice Mangin, the Swiss pathologist who headed the team that volunteered to examine Al Salami's body, said that it was routine to remove some organs before autopsy - those that decay rapidly.
His memoir of his experience, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo (2008) was published in the German, French, Norwegian, Danish and Dutch languages in 2007.
The NCIS report notes that numerous guards, detainees and medical personnel attested to seeing the deceased being transferred from the cellblock to the infirmary.
The deaths went unnoticed despite the constant supervision of five guards who were responsible for only 28 inmates in a lit cell block monitored by video cameras.
[2]Journalists including Scott Horton, Glenn Greenwald, and Andrew Sullivan said that the Center report suggests that officials of multiple defense and intelligence agencies had allowed the deaths by negligence and had not conducted a proper investigation, or have tried to manage a cover-up.
[17] Based an account by four members of the Military Intelligence unit assigned to guard Camp Delta, it contradicted the NCIS 2008 report.
[3][17][18][19] Colonel Michael Bumgarner, then commander of Camp America and head of the guard forces, said shortly after the events that each of the prisoners had had a ball of cloth in his mouth, either to induce choking or to muffle the voice.
)[4] The NCIS report had acknowledged that the bodies of the three men showed signs of torture, including hemorrhages, needle marks, and significant bruising.
The government retained the throat organs (larynx, hyoid bone), which were removed prior or during the autopsy conducted by pathologists affiliated with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology when they sent the men's bodies to their home countries.
[3] The four soldiers, including Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman, said all of the guards had been ordered by their commanding officer Bumgarner not to speak out about the events, and that he had advised them what DOD was going to release to the press.
His lawyer, Zachary Katznelson, had filed an affidavit in federal court in which Aamer said that he had been taken to the black site on 9 June 2006, where he was beaten and nearly asphyxiated.
[23] Following Horton's article, the British organization Reprieve, which represents numerous Guantanamo detainees, called again for the US government under President Barack Obama to conduct a new investigation of the incident.
In a 15 January 2015 interview on Democracy Now, Hickman replied to criticisms made by NCIS that he could not have observed the activities surrounding the incident because he was a perimeter guard and not even working within the compound.
Hickman has written a recently published book, Murder at Camp Delta: A Staff Sergeant's Pursuit of the Truth About Guantánamo Bay.
[25] Jack Shafer, in Slate magazine, wrote that Horton, "lends unwarranted credence to the eyewitness testimony of Guantánamo guards-turned-whistleblowers and conflates hearsay and speculation into 'evidence' while blithely ignoring facts and statements collected by the government.
In it, Alex Koppelman claimed that many news media had passed on the story by the guards, but quoted only one source as to his reasons, who said he doubted its credibility.
[4][5] In October 2011, Ali Saleh al-Marri, a terrorist suspect tried in the federal court system and convicted in a plea bargain, reported having been subjected to an interrogation technique called "dry-boarding" in a US Navy prison brig.
[27][28][29] After being arrested at graduate school, Ali Saleh al-Marri, a legal resident of the United States, was held in a Navy brig in the USA.
