28/06/2006
BY CAROL ROSENBERG
crosenberg@MiamiHerald.com
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Three Arab captives who hanged themselves earlier this month had been evaluated as mentally fit less than two weeks before, the prison camp's senior doctor said today.
All three men had just weeks before abandoned hunger strikes -- one after 180 days shunning food, the Navy doctor said. And by prison camp protocols, he said, each was visited at his Camp 1 cell by a mental health specialist for a routine exam less than two weeks before guards discovered each man hanging separately in his cell June 10. ''They were sleeping well, eating well -- no problems,'' said the Navy captain, the officer in charge of the prison camps hospital, who is a physician and declined to be identified here by name. He described a prison camp review of the three men's medical files to a group of visiting journalists reporting on the aftermath of the first-ever detainee deaths at this offshore prison for war-on-terror suspects. Guards discovered the two Saudis and a Yemeni hanging from bed sheets fashioned into nooses long before dawn that Saturday and delivered them to the Navy clinic and hospital in what the Navy captain described as a perfect, by-the-book handoff -- strapped to backboards with life-saving techniques underway. Still, by the time they reached doctors, perhaps 10 minutes later, the men were blue, not breathing and without pulses, according to the Navy captain and another Navy commander, a physician who was on duty that night. Military medical staff went through life-saving protocols similar to those you would see on the television program ER, the Navy captain said. To mask their suicides, the Navy captain said, the three Arabs, who the military alleged were either members of al Qaeda or the Taliban, had fashioned their sheets and other items onto their cell beds to leave the impression they were asleep in their bed during inspections by guards walking the blocks. One detainee had hung a blanket in his cell, strategically, which hid the fact that it was hanging by a noose. ''The impression was, it was hanging up to dry,'' the Navy captain said of the blanket. Since then, guards and other prison staff have become more sensitive to comments and suggestions of suicide plans by the 450 or so captives here from dozens of nations, most held for more than three years. As of today about 20 were considered so suicidal they were not wearing prison camp uniforms, the doctors said, but were issued forest-green smocks that close with Velcro and cannot be fashioned into implements of self-harm. Nevertheless, officials reported self-harm episodes have continued since the June 10 suicides -- including a couple of ''head banging incidents'' in the cells, as well as one detainee who scratched himself until he bled. Also, guards found 15 pain tablets hidden inside one captive's prosthetic leg in searches since the suicides, the doctor said. Medical and guard staff have been on alert for suicide attempts since mid May, when two other detainees did not awake for prayer call, and were discovered in comas from overdoses of hoarded supplies of other captives' prescription drugs. Lab tests, the doctor said, concluded those men, now alert and ostensibly unharmed by the episode, took a cocktail of anti-anxiety, anti-depressants and sleeping pills in what commanders here characterized as twin suicide attempts. As a result, the military medical staff here has revamped its process for distributing medications. Rather than having a corpsman, or Navy medic, hand out drugs alone, a military guard also takes part in distribution -- and both watch while the captive ingests the drugs at his cell door. In addition, the doctors said, medical teams are now crushing detainee medications, meaning delivering them as presumably unhoardable powder, have switched some pill prescriptions to liquid medicine -- and have cut back on the number of sleeping pills given to detainees at night. As a result, the captain said, medical personnel are giving prisoners 200 to 400 fewer pills a day -- notably fewer sleeping pills -- from the estimated 1,000 pills distributed daily in mid-May, the time of the overdoses. Guards are on greater alert, he said, and medical staff have intensived their reviews of detainees' mental conditions. But he warned that a determined detainee with a political goal can still likely succeed in killing himself at Camp Delta, unless the staff there confined each and every captive to ''strait jackets, and they're not going to do that.'' The doctor then echoed a June 10 remark by the prison camp commander, Rear Adm. Harry Harris, that the three suicides were an act of ``asymmetrical warfare.'' ''I am of the opinion with the admiral that this was somewhat of a political statement,'' said the hospital commander, who argued that there had been no medical or mental health alert to foresee the triple suicides. ``When do you predict a guy will strap a bomb onto himself and kill people? I don't know that there is a medical way to pick that up.''
SOURCE: Miami Herald |
