In the midst of a June evening 17 years in the past within the Guantánamo jail camp, guards and medical orderlies had been urgently summoned to one of many inmate clinics, the place an emergency was unfolding.
Two inmates, Ali Abdullah Ahmed and Mani Shaman al-Utaybi, had been introduced in useless. A 3rd, Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, had been rushed to the hospital on the US naval base however was declared useless there quickly afterwards. The three males had been discovered hanging from their necks, with their palms and ft certain and rags of their throats.
It was the worst lack of life within the jail camp’s historical past – within the midst of a turbulent 12 months during which there have been starvation strikes and riots in addition to the three deaths – and officers across the base had been roused from their sleep and rushed to Camp Delta, the principle internment centre.
Rear Admiral Harry Harris arrived, the bottom commander who would go on to command the Pacific fleet, accompanied by Col Michael Bumgarner, the pinnacle of the general jail complicated. In some unspecified time in the future, witnesses say, a extra junior officer turned up, a 27-year-old navy lawyer, or choose advocate common (JAG), Lt Ron DeSantis.
The longer term Florida governor and Republican presidential contender had been assigned to Guantánamo three months earlier, a part of a small authorized workforce tasked with guaranteeing the guards and different army personnel adopted the legislation. He was essentially the most junior JAG within the camp, however after the three deaths on the evening of 9 June 2006, his superior officer, Capt Patrick McCarthy, ordered him to begin accumulating preliminary proof.
It’s unclear when precisely DeSantis grew to become concerned within the investigation. Among the witness statements point out an unnamed JAG on the scene within the early hours of 10 June. McCarthy didn’t reply to a request for remark however confirmed to the Washington Publish he had ordered DeSantis to collect info.
“I can’t let you know particularly what [DeSantis] did,” McCarthy instructed the Publish, however stated his subordinate was in all probability “concerned in facilitating entry to info, attempting to be sure that privileged info didn’t get swept up. He would have been one of many of us that I dispatched to assist facilitate the investigative effort.”
Ahmed Abdel Aziz, a Mauritanian inmate at Camp Delta, stated he had recognised DeSantis a lot later when he grew to become well-known as Florida governor.
“DeSantis and his group, the JAGs folks had been there. They had been conducting the investigation,” Aziz stated. “They had been coming the identical day the folks died. They got here to the cells.”
What DeSantis noticed and heard within the hours and days after the three deaths may very well be key to an everlasting thriller that has hung over Guantánamo ever since: how did Ahmed, Utaybi and Zahrani die?
Earlier than the investigation even started, Harris, who would additionally later function US ambassador to Seoul, declared the three prisoners had killed themselves, describing it as “an act of asymmetrical warfare waged towards us”. An official inquiry by the Navy Legal Investigation Service (NCIS), who DeSantis had been detailed to help, concurred with Harris’s verdict inside 11 days, although its findings had been solely made public two years later, in a report that was rife with contradictions and literal holes, with a number of pages lacking.
Anybody who was on the scene would have recognized there have been critical questions concerning the official account. In accordance with that narrative, the useless males certain their palms and ft, caught fabric deep down their very own throats, usual nooses from strips of fabric, climbed on their washbasins with the noose round their neck and stepped off.
That they had solely been in the identical jail block, Alpha, for 72 hours, in separate cells with empty cells in between. Alpha block was for high-security prisoners who had been forbidden to mingle and even discuss to one another. But the three males had been alleged to have conspired to kill themselves in precisely the identical method at precisely the identical time.
By the point they had been delivered to the clinic, Ahmed and Utaybi’s our bodies already had superior rigor mortis, setting the time of dying to earlier than 10.30pm. That meant that, in accordance with the official model, they might have been hanging for greater than two hours in cells with clear wire mesh sides, in a block holding about 15 prisoners that was meant to be regularly patrolled alongside a central walkway by a workforce of six guards.
Mark Denbeaux, a professor at Seton Corridor legislation college, who led to forensic analyses of the three deaths, stated it was exhausting to think about that anybody with DeSantis’s authorized coaching would fail to see the inconsistencies within the official model.
“Any JAG would wish to know the way guys would die whereas they’re in a cell guarded by 5 guys, and the way they might have been hanging lengthy sufficient for rigor mortis and with a rag shoved down their throats,” Denbeaux stated.
The NCIS report stated that the three males had blocked the view into their cells with blankets and mattresses and stuffed different material into their beds to make it look as in the event that they had been asleep. It was by no means defined the place they might have all acquired a lot materials, which was severely restricted. A routine search of all of the Alpha block cells by a guard shift a couple of hours earlier discovered no proof of any such banned materials. The official report stated “obvious suicide notes” had been discovered, however the paperwork had been by no means submitted for fingerprint or handwriting evaluation.
The NCIS investigators didn’t formally interview the senior medical officer on obligation that evening, nor did they discuss to the troopers from a army intelligence unit within the guard towers with a transparent sight of the camp, and whose model of occasions was fairly completely different from the NCIS account.
In accordance with Joseph Hickman, who was sergeant of the guard that evening, nobody was taken from Alpha block to the medical clinic. Nevertheless, hours earlier within the night, a white jail van got here 3 times, and every time navy guards took away a prisoner and drove in direction of a secret web site that appeared on no maps, hidden from view and surrounded by razor wire. Hickman and his fellow troopers referred to it as Camp No as in “No such camp”. It was revealed a lot later to be a CIA black web site, the place inmates had been subjected to “enhanced interrogation”.
Hickman and his unit had been beneath standing orders to not intervene with the van or to document its actions. The car returned at 11.30pm however Hickman didn’t see who was in it, as a result of it backed as much as the medical clinic the place it was unloaded. The troopers noticed no different exercise till about 12.15am, when the camp lights had been immediately turned on and the alarm was sounded.
In 2009, two years after he left the military, Hickman approached Denbeaux and collectively they approached the justice division, then beneath Barack Obama’s administration, and introduced testimony of what he and eight different troopers noticed that evening. Officers assured them the deaths could be investigated, however almost a 12 months of silence glided by earlier than Denbeaux obtained a name saying, with out rationalization, the investigation had been dropped.
“It was disappointing as a result of the justice division simply dropped it. The FBI didn’t wish to report it as a result of it was coping with a CIA black web site,” Hickman stated. “I had waited for Bush to depart workplace and Obama to return in and I used to be so optimistic. They only let me down huge time.”
Pissed off, they went to the press. Hickman and three of his troopers gave their accounts to Scott Horton, a human rights lawyer, who wrote an article for Harpers journal in March 2010, casting doubt on whether or not the deaths had been suicides. Hickman wrote a e book in 2015 referred to as Homicide at Camp Delta.
He stated he remembered DeSantis from his time at Camp Delta. “He was there fairly a bit. I’d see him jogging round. He was very athletic and really good-looking and all of the navy women beloved him.”
On the time DeSantis was assigned to Guantánamo, there have been 4 or 5 employees choose advocates all the time current on the camp engaged on rotation, from a small, safe prime flooring workplace, with sweeping views of the bay. It was a time of frantic exercise on the jail, amid mounting authorized challenges filed on behalf of detainees and widespread starvation strikes the 12 months earlier than.
In accordance with one former Naval JAG, who served at Guantánamo similtaneously DeSantis however didn’t work instantly with him, “It was a time frame the place they had been placing one of the best attorneys they might discover into this workplace.”
“We wanted fine quality folks down there,” the previous JAG recalled, including that DeSantis was described to him by his superiors as a “sharp, good man”.
Nonetheless, the supply confirmed: “He [DeSantis] was approach down the meals chain. He ain’t making coverage, he’s making paper. And he was additionally a brief timer. It was apparent from his trajectory that he had no profession aspirations [in the JAG corps].”
Part of the Harpers investigation centered on the expertise of a fourth detainee, the British resident Shaker Aamer, who knew the three males properly. He claimed he was overwhelmed for over two hours by a number of naval army police on the identical evening the three males died, alleging in a later authorized criticism he was choked and his eyes gouged in the course of the assault after failing to offer a retina scan and fingerprints to authorities.
“I keep in mind having a dialog with Shaker on the time about his trauma,” recalled Aamer’s legal professional, Clive Stafford Smith, who was current at Guantánamo within the quick aftermath of the deaths. “I keep in mind it as a result of he thought he was subsequent.”
“He was all the time imprecise about whether or not it was homicide, or them being pressed into taking their very own lives. From his view it was all the identical. They had been being handled so horribly.”