Guantanamo inmates deaths a "good PR move"

The detention centre at Guantanamo Bay represents all that is hypocritical about the USA.

First of all, for all US posturing about the rights of accused to a fair trial, not one charge has been laid against most of the inmates.

Secondly, despite having been in a state of war in, firstly Afghanistan and then secondly, Iraq, the USA refuses to acknowledge that anyone captured in battle in either of these war zones is entitled to the provisions of the Geneva Convention.

Lastly, why does the USA insist on keeping the "internment camp", as they've termed it, here at the upturned arse-end of the world rather than on US soil? Nothing to do with the US Bill of Rights, I don't suppose?

This camp has been referred to by Amnesty International as "the gulag of our times". Inmates are kept blindfolded, are tortured frequently, kept in isolation regularly, the inmates are referred to as "enemy combatants" for convenience rather than anything else and it is all justified by "the war on terror" - a phrase which means something along the lines of "we needed an excuse to deprive people of their civil rights and just how good are terrorist attacks for this?"

Now there have been 3 suicides in custody at Guantanamo Bay.

Normally, the correct procedure is for the authorities concerned to apologise to the families of those who took their own lives and express some regret for the circumstances in which this happened.

But not the US authorities.

In what appears to be the most insensitive use of spin doctoring since, well the last invasion of Iraq, actually, the US have deemed it necessary to describe the deaths as "coordinated acts of protest."

US State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary, Colleen Graffy, has told the BBC the deaths were part of a strategy and "a tactic to further the jihadi cause". (Thank you SBS, Reuters, BBC and AFP)

The SBS news put a little more starkly - they paraphrased this as being considered "a good PR move."

This is, as far as I'm concerned, the last straw.

The fact is, for all the USA's high and mightiness about these people not even valuing their own lives it appears that the USA appears to trivialise human lives more than they would like to believe possible.

Rear-Admiral Harry Harris said this:

"They have no regard to life, neither ours nor their own. And I believe this was not an act of desperation, rather an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us."

And that just about says it all. Doesn't he see the irony in such a public statement?

Seriously, how these nozzlefucks can live with themselves is just beyond me. They are completely and utterly bereft of any sense of normal goodness towards their fellow human beings.