Guantanamo Bay detainees are staging suicide attempts and hunger strikes to undermine US policy in the war on terror, a senior US military official said, calling the acts a jihad against the US.
"The detainees view this as a struggle. They view this as a jihad ... They're trying to figure out ways that they can continue the fight," Navy Rear Admiral Harry Harris, the commander of the US prison on Cuba's southeastern tip. "They do that with hunger strikes, overdosing on medicines. And now they've succeeded in killing themselves."
Three detainees -- two Saudis and a Yemeni -- committed suicide in their cells on June 10. The US military said the men hung themselves by fashioning nooses from bed sheets.
Harris said the deaths and other suicide attempts were coordinated acts of resistance -- not acts of desperation prompted by their indefinite detention.
"I think it is less about the length of their detention ... It's less about that and it's more that they continue to fight their fight," Harris told reporters, adding that defiance in the prison was widespread. "I think the vast majority of detainees are resisting us."
A doctor at the camp hospital said on Tuesday that detainees were also found with pills stuffed into the waistbands of their pants and in one case, inside a prosthetic leg, weeks before the three inmates hanged themselves.
Guards found nooses in other prisoners' cells after the three deaths, Harris said.
He said the stashed pills and nooses indicated other prisoners planned to take part in coordinated suicides, something some have acknowledged.
US military officials have implemented new measures aimed at preventing suicides since the prisoners killed themselves, an event that intensified pressure on Washington to close the prison.
The prisoners received new uniforms and new bed mattresses, and are being watched closely while taking medication.
US President George W. Bush has said he wants to close the detention center but is seeking guidance from the nation's top court on the matter. It was possible the US Supreme Court could rule as early as yesterday on the legitimacy of military tribunals ordered by Bush, the first such trials since World War II.
Harris, who took over command at Guantanamo on March 31, said he believed a ruling by the court wouldn't affect operations at the prison, which he said served a vital role in the US-led war on terror.
"Given the battle that we're fighting as a nation, I believe there is a need for places like Guantanamo,'' Harris said.
A spokesman for Physicians for Human Rights, which is based in Boston, said that whether the suicides were a political act or the product of desperation does not change "the fact that US detention and interrogation practices have violated basic tenets" of the Geneva Conventions and the McCain Amendment, which prohibits torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners.
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