Last Tuesday, the Pentagon Memorial Fund announced groundbreaking for a monument to the victims of 9/11:

The president of the Pentagon Memorial Fund announced yesterday that a groundbreaking ceremony will occur June 15, a huge milestone in the nearly five-year fundraising effort for the 9/11 monument.

About 150 family members and other guests, including Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, are expected to attend the invitation-only ceremony, which will be held at the memorial site on the west lawn of the Pentagon, James J. Laychak said.

"It is one step toward completion of the memorial," said Laychak, who lost a brother in the attack on the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. "It gets us closer to the vision that I have of all of us family members sitting in a quiet corner at the completed memorial watching everyone enjoying what we helped create."

In advance of the event, the Pentagon provided a more grisly offering of the Old Testament variety:

Three Middle Eastern detainees being held without charges at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay hanged themselves, military officials said Saturday, becoming the first captives to take their own lives at the prison and prompting new calls for an immediate shutdown.

The Defense Department said Saturday that the men — two from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen — were found in their cells and had left suicide notes. By taking their own lives, the prisoners confounded strenuous measures by military officials to prevent suicides. And the deaths come as the Bush administration battles growing international criticism of its detention procedures and faces a potentially fateful Supreme Court decision this month.

The military did not name the prisoners and released few details about the men, but said at least two were believed to have been members of international terrorist organizations and the third part of a Taliban uprising.

All three had been on hunger strikes and all had been force-fed, a process that frequently involves the use of nasal tubes and restraints.

Naturally, the military released few details about the men, but then paradoxically proceeded to reassure everyone that two of the detainees were believed to have been members of international terrorist organizations, with the third part of a Taliban uprising. Of course, the military declined to provide any reasons for its beliefs regarding the three detainees:

Lawyers for the detainees, human rights groups and legal associations have increasingly questioned whether many of the prisoners can even rightfully be called terrorists. They note that only 10 of the roughly 465 men held at Guantánamo have been charged before military tribunals, and that recently released documents indicate that many have never been accused even in administrative proceedings of belonging to Al Qaeda or attacking the United States.

Understandably, people become quite desperate in such circumstances:

Ken Roth, head of Human Rights Watch in New York, told the BBC the men had probably been driven by despair.

"These people are despairing because they are being held lawlessly," he said.

"There's no end in sight. They're not being brought before any independent judges. They're not being charged and convicted for any crime."

That view was supported by British Muslim Moazzam Begg who spent three years in Guantanamo. He said of the camp's inmates: "They're in a worse situation than convicted criminals and it's an act of desperation."

Among the sadists that run Guantanamo, there was a quite different perspective:

Rear Adm Harris said he did not believe the men had killed themselves out of despair.

"They are smart. They are creative, they are committed," he said.

"They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."

Incredible, absolutely incredible. Suicide is not something to be considered tragic, to inspire reflection among the living, but, rather, an act of assymetrical warfare. If ever there was a statement that exposed the depravity of the purported "war on terror" as an excuse to intimidate and abuse Muslims, it is this comment by Harris.

As I have posted here previously, Guantanamo, both in terms of the reality of the day to day experience of detainees, as well as its notorious reputation around the world, exists to frighten Muslims around the world with the recognition that any kind of opposition to the United States can result in seizure, indefinite incarceration and the transformation of medical treatment into an instrument of torture. Indeed, it is even more perverse, an attempt to demonstrate American omnipotence, the power to seize and detain people released from the constraints of the Anglo-American legal tradition that enshrines the rights of the individual as a defense against tyranny, immune to common norms of human compassion that we display in our daily lives, even if the exercise of this power is frequently utterly irrational.

Guantanamo in its rawest form, much like the war and occupation in Iraq, fulfills a craving for vengence against people it is easy to hate because they are so culturally different from us. And, so, the suicides are, in their own way, an offering by the Pentagon to the victims of 9/11, proof that the military understands its true mission well and carries out its directives with a ruthless efficiency. Several 9/11 families have already condemned the exploitation of the deaths of their loved ones to justify the war in Iraq. It would be inspiring if some would now step forward, during the June 15th groundbreaking ceremony, or, if necessary, at a separate event held that same day, and demanded the immediate closure of Guantanamo.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Empire, Guantanamo, Sadomasochism