WASHINGTON, May 20, 2006 (IslamOnlien.net) – In the most serious uprising since it came into being four years ago, US jailers at the notorious Guantanamo prison have used rubber bullets and pepper spray to overpower desperate and furious inmates, who tried to kill military guards by staging a fake suicide bid, Britain's The Guardian newspaper reported Saturday, May 20.
Detainees smothered the floor with human excrement and soapy water to make it slippery before guards rushed in believing they were saving a man from hanging himself, according to Rear Admiral Harry Harris, commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo.
The clashes broke out as 10 detainees wielding improvised weapons made from lights, fans and pieces of metal, fought with 10 US military guards.
Six of the detainees were injured, while some of the guards suffered bruising.
Another camp officer, Colonel Mike Bumgarner, said how guards opened fire believing they were losing control.
"Detainees were jumping out of the beds on top of the guards" and some had been knocked to the floor, Agence France-Presse (AFP) quoted Bumgardner as telling a press conference.
"Frankly we were losing the fight at that point," he said, so five rounds of rubber-cased shotgun pellets were fired.
The ambush came as the UN anti-torture panel issued a report Friday, May 19, demanding the United States to close the camp.
The report was a rebuke for the Bush administration and some of the main counterterrorism approaches it adopted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
It was delivered as the United States faces increasing pressure from international critics, including UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, where the US holds some 460 prisoners incommunicado and without trial for four years.
Growing Despair
The incident was the second organized protest by prisoners in less than a year, following last August's mass hunger strike.
It was seen by human rights activists as a sign of growing despair among the prison's inmates.
Earlier on Thursday, two prisoners made suicide attempts by swallowing prescription medicine they had been hoarding. Military officers described their condition Friday as stable but unconscious.
According to a Pentagon count, there have been 41 suicide attempts at the facility since it was opened in January 2002.
In 2003, 23 detainees carried out a coordinated attempt to kill themselves during a week-long protest.
The attempts were classified as "self-injurious behavior" rather than suicide attempts.
One prisoner, Bahraini Juma'a al-Dossari, has made 12 suicide attempts in four years - including one last October during a visit by his attorney, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan.
"I saw a pool of blood on the floor in front of me, and then I looked up and saw him hanging from the inside of the steel mesh wall of the cell. He had a large gash in his arm, and he was unconscious," Colangelo-Bryan told the Guardian.
James Yee, a former US army chaplain at Guantanamo, said the number of suicide attempts had become much worse.
"When I was down there it was happening pretty often," he told CNN.
Revelations of torture, mistreatment and desecration of the Noble Qur’an by its jailers to "soften" detainees have sparked a global outrage at the US, whose image has been already badly sullied by the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib.
Amnesty International called the prison the "gulag of our time" and said it has become a "symbol of abuse and represents a system of detention that is betraying the best US values and undermines international standards."
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