On June 9, 2006, three high-value terrorist suspects in Alpha Block, Guantánamo Bay, were found hanged in their cells. With unusual haste the camp commander, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, stated that the deaths were suicides and went on to describe them as “an act of asymmetrical warfare.” Shortly afterwards, a White House official repeated the assertion that the prisoners, none of whom had been charged with a crime, had used their suicides to embarrass their American captors. Two years later, an official report by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), concluded that the deaths had, indeed, been suicides. That is where the matter would have ended, despite protests by the dead men’s families, had the Pentagon not been forced, by a Freedom of Information request, to publish a heavily redacted copy of the NCIS report. Following its release, a team of law students and faculty members at the Seton Hall University Law School, combed through the available evidence and highlighted a number of inconsistencies and doubtful assertions in the official account, and they raised serious concerns about what had really happened on the night in question.

Writing in the January issue of Harper’s magazine, attorney Scott Horton points out that the NCIS’ conclusions assume that “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 [and] 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 document] also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.” It is also worth noting that this elaborate sequence would have taken place in a prison where standard operation procedure requires the guards to check on prisoners every ten minutes, and in cells with strictly rationed amounts of linen.

When the Seton Hall researchers were approached by a prison guard who had been on duty that evening, they were surprised to learn that the NCIS had not interviewed any of the relevant camp guards while compiling their report. Another surprise was that none of the guards had been disciplined for not adhering to standard operating procedure. There was no explanation given for the removal (during autopsies carried out without permission from the families) of parts of the neck that would have indicated whether the deaths had been caused by hanging, choking or strangulation. Also unexplained were the damage to the teeth on one corpse, and a broken hyoid bone – a common indicator of strangulation – on another. After further investigation of the Seton Hall findings, and with the help of new information provided by several former Guantánamo guards, Horton put together a far more coherent account of what might have taken place that night. Based on guards’ statements about traffic between the camp and a notorious interrogation facility nearby, it appears that the three prisoners were either beaten or tortured to death outside the prison walls, and returned to their cells, where their ‘suicides’ were staged as a cover-up.

Three years after the Alpha Block suicides, and six months after President Obama came into office, another Guantánamo prisoner was found dead in his cell. To date the circumstances of his death, like those of the three men before him, remain uncertain. And yet, despite the questions raised by close analysis of the official narratives, the new administration’s response has been shamefully evasive. As Scott Horton has observed, “Those charged with accounting for what happened – the prison command, the civilian and military investigative agencies, the Justice Department, and ultimately the attorney general himself – all face a choice between the rule of law and the expedience of political silence. Thus far, their choice has been unanimous.”

When he took office, President Obama promised to close Guantánamo Bay within a year, and he spoke with apparent conviction of the need to restore due process to American justice. At the same time, he urged the country to focus on the future instead of harping on the past. One year later, the prison facilities at Guantánamo are still open and nearly 200 detainees have yet to emerge from the legal black hole created by the former President’s now-derided Global War on Terror. Today, however, the responsibility for addressing the constitutional sleights-of-hand, secret prisons, “enhanced interrogation techniques” and torture memoranda which led to the abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, sits squarely on the shoulders of the new President, and it is pointless for his administration to pretend otherwise. If President Obama remains committed to the ideals set out in his inspiring campaign, he will have to confront cases like the doubtful suicides in Guantánamo Bay. So far a proper reckoning with the Bush years has been avoided, with political generosity and tact, but the evidence of serious abuses has now grown too great. Far from being an ongoing political embarrassment, these cases could provide the President with an opportunity to define the limits of his tolerance. The delay in closing the prison is disappointing but understandable, given the legal, logistical and political hurdles, but a failure to investigate apparent homicides, and a cover up, ought to and would be unforgivable.