Wednesday, May 30, 2007


A Saudi Arabian detainee died of an apparent suicide early Wednesday afternoon at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the military announced today.

The death marked the fourth detainee suicide at Guantanamo Bay since the U.S. began jailing suspected terrorists at the U.S. Navy base in January 2002, said Jose Ruiz, a spokesman for U.S. Southern Command in Miami.

The detainee was found “unresponsive and not breathing in his cell by guards,” according to a Southern Command press release. A physician pronounced the detainee dead “after all lifesaving measures had been exhausted.”

Ruiz said the Naval Criminal Investigative Service has launched an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death and that the command “will release the details as soon as they become available.”

Ruiz, based in Miami, did not yet have details such as the detainee’s age, where the detainee was captured or the length of time spent in captivity.

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.
You won't have a name when you fly the big airplane
And all they will call you will be "Deportee."
-- Woody Guthrie

3 comments:

  1. One of the most famous lines in all of "Pogo" applies here, the one that starts, "We have met the enemy..."

    Terrible things have happened to our country. But I'm not commenting anything of news to any readers of this blog.

    Mike, the graphic is moving, a fine example of what Carl Fink might have been talking about over in lower-case-r ronnie's blog when he pointed out that propoganda doesn't always mean "bad". Is that an image of your own making?

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  2. It is of my own design, and I've used it before. If necessary, I'll use it again.

    Repetition of an image can be effective as a tool of commentary. There was a newspaper in Central America (I forget where -- Honduras or maybe Nicaragua) that, when the government censor insisted they drop an article, they would run a picture of Rita Hayworth in its place. Understand, this was in the 1970s and 80s, and so the picture was strikingly out of place, though Rita was not hard on the eyes. Readers knew exactly what it meant, however, and could judge the degree of censorship by the size of the picture.

    That's constructive propaganda!

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  3. Too sad for words. :(

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