Detainee suicides at Guantanamo Bay

Re “Guantanamo’s First Suicides Pressure U.S.,” June 11

I don’t think I’ve ever felt as nauseated as I did today. The notion that individuals could be held indefinitely, without charges, would have been considered fiction only 10 years ago. Now, it is a practically elementary aspect of reality. How can we, as U.S. citizens, continue to allow the Bush administration to unabashedly trample upon human rights, dignity, truth and justice?

Navy Rear Adm. Harry Harris called the three men who took their lives “committed jihadists” -- yet I am skeptical as to the accuracy of this claim; it is common knowledge that these men, along with others, were being held indefinitely without any formal charges having been brought against them. We saw similar occurrences in the McCarthy era when anyone subject to governmental scrutiny, for whatever reason, was a Red. Now, they’re terrorists. What is this world coming to?

OMAR ZAHZAH

Long Beach

*

The deaths at Guantanamo will do more to draw support for radical Islamic organizations from moderates than President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld could ever reasonably want. It is time to end the policy without delay.

The Bush administration could learn a valuable lesson from the deaths of 10 Irish Republican hunger strikers 25 years ago. In 1981, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher refused to stop her policy of criminalization, and the hunger strikers resisted; holding fast unto death. Bobby Sands was an elected member of Parliament before he died. And vast numbers of young Irish people were radicalized as the world watched, in shock and horror, as one after another of those 10 young men died. The United States should not become what it professes to despise. The Gitmo internees should be charged and tried or set free. To do otherwise is anti-American.

MICHAEL KERRY

San Luis Obispo

*

The suicides of three Islamic radicals is unlikely to cause any important additional pressure on the United States to close the prison. Most Americans, and likely most citizens and governments of non-Muslim countries, are more likely to feel neutral or even glad that these three men are dead than to think that the U.S. is somehow responsible for their deaths.

Unfortunately, the U.S. military is pandering to Muslims and human rights groups by emphasizing being “culturally sensitive” in how they treat the bodies. Such behavior can only further encourage Islamic radicals to risk their lives to hurt us.

ROSS G. KAMINSKY

Nederland, Colo.