The Gitmo suicides

Scott Horton at Harper's and Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic have been shining light on the strange deaths of three inmates at Guantánamo, which the government is claiming were suicides. From Horton's January 18th article:

According to the NCIS [U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service] documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

Horton wrote a more recent piece on the autopsies that were conducted, which Sullivan discusses here:

Horton has the actual letter [from the families] requesting the organs (see after the jump). So either it got lost in the mail or this is another demonstrable untruth from the government. Now Horton has asked one of the most respected autopsy pathologists inn the country to review the procedures of the autopsies as performed at Gitmo. Read the whole disturbing thing. It seems extremely clear that they violated standards and procedures that are routine for both civilian and military autopsies. For example, organs removed from bodies are always returned to the next of kin for secondary autopsies if requested. That didn't happen.

Another Sullivan post here.

The government's story on what happened has enough holes and inconsistencies to leave me feeling pretty skeptical. We need some change we can believe in... and we need to close Guantánamo now.