Three Suicides at Gitmo in Four Years.

Yeah, might as well shut it down.

Three detainees at the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, hanged themselves in their cells yesterday morning, the first inmates to die at the remote island prison since it opened in early 2002, according to military officials.

Guards found the three men unresponsive and not breathing in their separate cells in Camp 1 shortly after midnight yesterday, according to Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, who heads the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, and Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., who commands the Guantanamo Bay prison. The detainees had apparently used their clothing and sheets to fashion makeshift nooses in what military officials believe was a coordinated suicide pact. All left suicide notes written in Arabic, the officers said.

Okay, so three inmates committed suicide. So what?

Le’ts put this into some perspective, getting the help of TalkLeft’s Jeralyn Merritt.

To date, 759 detainees have been held at Guantanamo. Only 300 have been released or transferred. Last night, lawyers for the detainees called for a suicide probe and immediate trials or release.

…

To date, 25 detainees have attempted suicide a total of 41 times. For a report from a lawyer who was there last week, see my earlier post.

Okay, so that’s 25 detainees out of 759. That works out to .0329 percent. Three percent of all inmates – suspected terrorists taken while at war against the United States, mind you – have attempted suicide. That, by the way, works out to an average of 6.25 attempts per year, or slightly more than one every two months.

How many have been successful? Three. Since 2002, which is four years. That means that only .00395 percent – a bit over a third of one percent – of all illegal combatants ever held in Guantanamo have successfully martyred themselves. Or, if you like, one successful suicide every 16 months.

Now, consider that the goal for the vast majority of these detainees is to damage the United States in any way possible which certainly includes closing the place where illegal detainees are kept. After all, if we weren’t holding these illegal combatants, they would be free to continue working to kill us or our soldiers. That, more than anything, is what they want to do.

This story doesn’t concern me in the least. That we saw no successful suicides at all for the first three years we were holding detainees means that our soldiers were doing an exceptional job. They will not get that sort of credit from the MSM or from the likes of Ms. Merritt, but that does not mean they should not get it.

Oh, and as for this:

Note to enterprising bloggers: One of the released detainees, Shafiq Rasul, is available by telephone for interviews. Details here. He was held for two years during which he alleges he was tortured, and released to Britain with no charges ever filed against him.

Enterprising bloggers should be smart enough to know that 1) such allegations have been made often in the past and have been borne out to be wildly exaggerated or outright lies; 2) al-Qaeda terrorists are trained from the get-go to make false allegations to the press so such allegations are to be expected; and 3) that “no charges were filed” is expected since he was not arrested criminally.

I’d expect someone who is a lawyer to understand those three facts, but I could be wrong.

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Category: Fighting the Islamists