Guantanamo Bay detention camp suicide attempts

Self injurious behavior of detainees

The United States Department of Defense (DOD) had stopped reporting Guantanamo suicide attempts in 2002. In mid 2002 the DoD changed the way they classified suicide attempts, and enumerated them under other acts of "self injurious behavior". On January 24, 2005 the U. S. military revealed that in 2003, there were 350 incidents of "self harm". 120 of those incidents of self harm were attempts by detainees to hang themselves. Twenty three detainees participated in a mass suicide attempt from August 18 to 26, 2003. Since June 2006, DOD has announced three suicide deaths by detainees at Guantanamo. In 2008, the NCIS released a heavily redacted report of its investigation of the three suicides at Guantanamo in 2006. In reports published in 2009 and 2010, Seton Hall University Law School's Center for Policy and Research and a joint investigation by Harper's Magazine and NBC News, respectively, strongly criticized the government's account of the 2006 suicides. Harper's 2010 article, based on accounts by four former Guantanamo guards, asserted that DOD had initiated a cover up of deaths resulting from torture during interrogation. The DOD has denied these allegations.

In 2006 and later, defense attorneys were concerned about their clients' mental health. Mark Denbeaux is a law professor at Seton Hall University and director of its Center for Policy and Research, which had published numerous reports on conditions at Guantanamo. He represents two Tunisian detainees and said in June 2006 that he was worried that other detainees were candidates for suicide. In 2008 the Canadian Supreme Court ordered the release of a video of a February 2003 interrogation conducted by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer of Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was 15 years old when captured and one of the youngest detainees held at Guantánamo. In the video, the 16 year old Khadr repeatedly cried, saying what sounds to be either "help me", "kill me," or calling for his mother, in Urdu (Pakistani). The government was reviewing CSIS actions in its interrogations of Canadian citizens at Guantanamo, including the minor Khadr, as more information had been revealed about abuse of detainees prior to interrogations. Khadr was finally scheduled to be tried at Guantanamo in 2010. He pleaded guilty in a plea bargain, served a year of his sentence there, and in 2012 was returned to Canada to serve the rest of his sentence.

The Southern Command announced on the evening of May 30, 2007 that a Saudi prisoner had died of suicide. They announced: "The detainee was found unresponsive and not breathing in his cell by guards." The DoD did not immediately release the dead man's identity. The DoD asserted that his body would be treated with cultural sensitivity. On May 31, 2007 Saudi officials announced that the dead man was Abdul Rahman Maadha al Amry. The Associated Press reported that same day that al Amry had been identified as one of the "high value detainees", held in Camp 5. Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald reported his name as Abdul Rahman Ma Ath Thafir Al Amri and that he was a military veteran of the Saudi army. He had never been allowed to meet with an attorney. In 2017, FOIA documents on the investigation into the death of Al Amri revealed that he had been found hanging in his cell with his hands tied in a "snug" fashion behind his back. According to the clerk in charge of the computer logs that tracked detainee movements, Al Amri had been with an interrogator in the hour prior to his death. But other witnesses told NCIS the interrogation had been cancelled that morning, either by the interrogator, or by Al Amri himself. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) investigator that examined the death scene found it difficult to understand how this prisoner could have killed himself in the time allotted while he was under surveillance. NCIS concluded Al Amri had stood upon a folded bed mattress in order to reach the air vent to which he presumably attached the rope of his jerry rigged noose (made from bed sheets). The air vent itself was over eight feet above the floor of the cell. Despite the fact that the detainee had not supposedly met with an attorney, documents from the NCIS investigation state there were materials of a confidential attorney client nature in Al Amri's possession at the time of his death, and these were turned over to the Judge Advocate's Office at Guantanamo.