But that screening apparently did not factor in the possibility that the men might have been determined to kill themselves for other reasons — like loyalty to a cause.Sometime before midnight on June 9, three young Arab men, who were being held near one another in a single block of Camp 1, moved quietly to the backs of their small cells and began to string up nooses that had been elaborately made from torn linens and clothing. There was not a single trace of nervousness or haste.To say the least, a fight at close range is absorbing as a spectacle. A handful of hunger-strikers were still at it — a few young Saudis and Yemenites, and Ghassan al-Sharbi.
“Colonel,” he finally said, “don’t come in here giving me that.”As Bumgarner settled into a white plastic chair, Aamer crossed his legs on the bunk and began to talk about his life.
Hood was clearly uneasy with the negotiations, other officers said. “Be respectful of our religion and our Koran. Quick then picked up his Lee rifle and resumed his place on the firing line. On Dec. 10, 1903, the United States established its first overseas military … “It puts them in a much better mood to talk to you,” the colonel explained.Prisoner No. A collection of photographs of US Marines and Cuban rebels capturing Spanish-held Guantanamo Bay in Cuba during the Spanish-American War in June 1898. The bright lights had been turned down for the night. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Nov. 9, 2009. The new plan called for all or nothing.
The capture of Guantànamo Bay, Cuba, by U.S. Marines in 1898 was a brief but violent phase of the Spanish-American War.
Meanwhile, they wanted better medical and living conditions. Abdullah al-Noaimi, a Bahraini student who was released from Guantánamo last November, described in interviews at his home in Bahrain in June how Aamer initially organized their cellblock through sheer force of personality. Saying goodbye, he favored “Hoo-rah” over “See you later.”But that image could be deceiving. He described the episode during two long interviews in the well-guarded government guest house on the dusty outskirts of Kabul, where he has lived since returning home last September. At Guantánamo, compliance with the rules brought only prayer beads, packets of hot sauce, a slightly thicker mattress. The Saudi’s ideas, it seemed, were perhaps not so far from Hood’s. However, the thorny tangle of trees, underbrush, and cactus forced him to proceed with only one company. Hood said that the use of more extreme interrogation methods was curtailed within months of his taking command, around the time that the Abu Ghraib scandal became public. Only later did the officers begin to suspect that the more combative detainees were so focused on the hunger strike that they had little energy for other protests.To some of Colonel Bumgarner’s officers, it seemed that the latest group of hunger-strikers were being allowed to get too comfortable. No man wants to take his eyes from it until that time comes when he makes up his mind to run away. The guard officers saw some indications that the tougher approach was working.
“But I thought that in the end, in order to keep things going, I was going to have to do it.”Mullah Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador, had just finished his prayers in Camp 4 when a sergeant came to his dormitory. The guns of the fort on Cayo del Toro also opened fire on the Marblehead, without effect.The cables leading east to Cap-Haïtien, in Haiti, west to Santiago, and the small cable in the bay connecting Caimanera (and Guantanamo City) with Cap-Haïtien were all successfully cut, and from June 7 to July 5 the town of Guantanamo had no communication with the outside world.Upon returning to the blockading fleet from the reconnaissance, the Marblehead carried two Cuban officers who had been brought off to the ship from Leeward Point (the western side) of Guantanamo Bay.
“You continue your resistance.”Some parts of the camp were easier to manage than others. Both goals required lowering the level of conflict within the camp.After his first briefing from Hood, Bumgarner put the printout of the Geneva Conventions on his desk and left it there. And, during that time, it’s been, as it is now, a … He figured it would mean spending at least a year away from his family, managing the petty insurgencies of hundreds of angry, accused terrorists.“Is this what I went to bed at night thinking about?” he would ask nearly a year later, as he whacked at mosquitoes on a muggy Cuban night. analysts had been studying the Guantánamo population since the camp opened in January 2002. Two forward outposts were established, one at a road junction located several hundred yards ahead of the camp and known as the "Crossroads", and one called "The Bridge" placed across a road a mile and a half from the American camp, where Spanish forces bringing artillery from Caimanera were expected. They included Aamer and two of the men he met with in Camp 5: Saber Lahmar, the Algerian scholar, and Ghassan al-Sharbi, the Saudi engineer. Bumgarner wasn’t worried about stepping out of his lane. But he added, “I seriously believed that we were going to lose one of those guys if we didn’t do something different.” In the spring of 2006, General Hood and Colonel Bumgarner were suggesting that the mood at Guantánamo had turned. John S. Edmondson, M.D., worried about the prospect of having to force-feed large numbers of detainees. But the officers saw them as zealots whose threat to the smooth operation of the camp could be controlled. In one corner, it showed a shaded area labeled “the Dark Ages.” From there, a path wound through a thicket of obstacles. The number of strikers, which was at 84 in early January, soon fell to a handful.Lawyers for the detainees were appalled. “The others will put the word out.”The colonel and his prisoner drove to Camps 2 and 3. “For me, it was the only black-and-white piece of something that I could reach out and grab for guidance.”At that point, White House officials were still opposed to adopting even the most basic Geneva standard for the treatment of prisoners, a provision that bans “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” Bumgarner considered such issues above his pay grade. He ordered that American forces treat captives in ways “consistent” with the conventions but hadn’t explained what that meant. Those who broke the rules would be busted down to “basic issue,” or B.I., with nothing in between. They attached messages to long threads from their clothing with wads of hardened toothpaste and then cast them into neighboring cells.