SUICIDERS, PART 2

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The suicides of three Arab detainees at Guantanamo ignited new calls on Sunday for the United States to shut down the prison camp but a U.S. diplomat called their hangings a "good PR move" to gain attention.

Two Saudis and a Yemeni hanged themselves with clothes and bedsheets in maximum security cells on Saturday -- the first prisoners to die at Guantanamo since the United States began sending suspected al Qaeda and Taliban captives there in 2002.

Prisoner advocates blamed the Bush administration for the deaths and said the men were held under conditions that "for all intents and purposes had already taken their lives." Several countries urged Washington to shut the camp down.

"Their blood is on the hands of the Bush regime and their deaths will fuel the anger of the global Muslim community," said Cageprisoners.com, a Web site that draws attention to the cases of detained Muslims.
Saudi Arabia's Interior Ministry identified the two Saudis as Manei al-Otaibi and Yasser al-Zahrani but gave no further details.

Pentagon documents show Zahrani was 21, meaning he was sent to Guantanamo as a teenager.

Saudi Arabia, a staunch U.S. ally, asked for the return of the bodies, and said it was stepping up efforts to repatriate more than 100 Saudis held at the prison so they could be tried "based on our laws and regulations."
(To our "ally," I say this: take these people. They almost certainly are not, in fact, enemy combatants, so you can have your vermin anyway. If they are enemy combatants, or are discovered to be, we know you'll do nothing to them, and then maybe even some of the brain-dead Republicans will realize that, when you decide to do nothing with them, you're about as helpful an ally as fecal sludge, and will demand the end of the days of the House of Saud-House of Bush dynasty).

A Yemeni rights group, the National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedoms, said it could not accept U.S. accounts of the deaths without an impartial, international probe. ("Impartial" - what does that mean to these people? When the word "Mohammed" is mentioned by a non-Muslim in public, these people become so unhinged that they start resorting to killing each other. If you want others to respect your religion, you must allow for it to be held open to public scrutiny. These people won't do this, and they won't, as a corollary, abide by the results of an impartial investigation.

The prison on the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, holds about 460 foreigners captured during the U.S.-led war to oust al Qaeda from

'BIG QUESTION MARK'
Colleen Graffy, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, told the BBC World Service the suicides were a "good PR move to draw attention."

"It does sound that this is part of a strategy in that they don't value their own life and they certainly don't value ours and they use suicide bombings as a tactic to further their Jihadi cause," she said. (Perhaps - IF we knew these people were enemy combatants - which they probably are not. Wouldn't it be terrific if, in the war on terror, we actually tried fighting terrorists? Wouldn't it be terrific if, in Iraq, our policy was not to train people who do not want to be trained, not to build permanent embassies the size of the Vatican, not to install one puppet Prime Minister after another, but to actually find AND kill the terrorists who have come to the region because we went there? God forbid!)

Graffy coordinates efforts with Karen Hughes, a former top aide to
George W. Bush who is now a special envoy charged with trying to improve the U.S. image abroad, especially in Islamic countries. (And the brain-dead Hughes wonders why she hasn't been asked a single friendly question).