In other news today, evidence has emerged suggesting the US military covered up the murders of three prisoners at Guantánamo Bay in 2006 by claiming they had committed suicide. A six-month investigation by Harper’s Magazine indicates the three prisoners were suffocated and tortured during questioning at a secret black site facility at Guantanamo known as Camp No. Scott Horton, the human rights attorney who broke the story, appeared on the MSNBC show Countdown last night.
Scott Horton: “I think now we know where they died. One of the big questions is, who’s the landlord at that facility? Who was running it? It really seemed to have been off the map for the Guantánamo command. Many of the soldiers speculated that this was a CIA facility. Other information we see suggests maybe JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command. But frankly, I don’t think this is something that was being run by the prison guards and the Gitmo command.”
A fourth prisoner at Guantánamo, a British citizen named Shaker Aamer, has alleged he was also partly suffocated while being tortured on the same evening when the alleged suicides took place. Aamer is the only British prisoner the US has not released. One of the main sources for the article, former staff sergeant Joseph Hickman, approached the Justice Department last year after President Obama was elected, but an investigation into his claims was shelved.