Scott Horton has produced a nearly 8,000-word recounting of what really happened with those three Guantanamo “suicides” back in 2006. Coming near the day that the prison camp at Guantanamo was supposed to be closed for good, the article makes the case not only that the three detainees were murdered outside their cells, but that the Obama Administration neglected to probe the elaborate cover-up shielding the perpetrators from accountability.

Horton reviews the official story of the June 2006 deaths of Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, and finds them unbelievable.

According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

Digging further, Horton gets four Camp Delta members to come forward and admit that the detainees did not commit suicide, that they were found dead not in their cells but in a secret “black site” location on the base nicknamed “Camp No” (if anyone asked if it existed would, they would be told, “No, it doesn’t”), and that a massive cover-up prevented them from telling their story until now.

The whole story is worth reading, not my limited excerpts which cannot do the chilling tale justice. Here’s just a taste, from a different prisoner, Shaker Aamer, about what happened to him on the night of June 9, 2006:

On June 9th, 2006, [Aamer] was beaten for two and a half hours straight. Seven naval military police participated in his beating. Mr. Aamer stated he had refused to provide a retina scan and fingerprints. He reported to me that he was strapped to a chair, fully restrained at the head, arms and legs. The MPs inflicted so much pain, Mr. Aamer said he thought he was going to die. The MPs pressed on pressure points all over his body: his temples, just under his jawline, in the hollow beneath his ears. They choked him. They bent his nose repeatedly so hard to the side he thought it would break. They pinched his thighs and feet constantly. They gouged his eyes. They held his eyes open and shined a mag-lite in them for minutes on end, generating intense heat. They bent his fingers until he screamed. When he screamed, they cut off his airway, then put a mask on him so he could not cry out.

The treatment Aamer describes is noteworthy because it produces excruciating pain without leaving lasting marks. Still, the fact that Aamer had his airway cut off and a mask put over his face “so he could not cry out” is alarming. This is the same technique that appears to have been used on the three deceased prisoners.

Shaker Aamer is the only British subject requested for release by the British government who has not been returned to the country.

What’s just as troubling as the obvious brutality, the homicides to which it led, and the almost immediate cover-up of the crimes (including a rushed autopsy done without waiting for more experienced medical examiners), is the degree to which this cover-up remains unexamined by the Obama Justice Department. Sergeant Joe Hickman, one of those who ended his silence about the cover-up, said he did so because of the new Administration’s commitment to right the previous one’s wrongs on civil liberties and detention policy. But Justice Department officials held one or two meetings with Hickman and his colleagues and then closed the investigation without prosecution, with a DoJ official saying to Hickman that his conclusions “appeared” to be unsupported. Horton suggests that DoJ is potentially covering up their own mess here:

Teresa McHenry, the investigator charged with accounting for the deaths of the three men at Guantánamo, has firsthand knowledge of the Justice Department’s role in auditing such techniques, having served at the Justice Department under Bush and having participated in the preparation of at least one of those memos. As a former war-crimes prosecutor, McHenry knows full well that government officials who attempt to cover up crimes perpetrated against prisoners in wartime face prosecution under the doctrine of command responsibility. (McHenry declined to clarify the role she played in drafting the memos.)

As retired Rear Admiral John Hutson, the former judge advocate general of the Navy, told me, “Filing false reports and making false statements is bad enough, but if a homicide occurs and officials up the chain of command attempt to cover it up, they face serious criminal liability. They may even be viewed as accessories after the fact in the original crime.” With command authority comes command responsibility, he said. “If the heart of the military is obeying orders down the chain of command, then its soul is accountability up the chain. You can’t demand the former without the latter.”

The Justice Department thus faced a dilemma; it could do the politically convenient thing, which was to find no justification for a thorough investigation, leave the NCIS conclusions in place, and hope that the public and the news media would obey the Obama Administration’s dictum to “look forward, not backward”; or it could pursue a course of action that would implicate the Bush Justice Department in a cover-up of possible homicides.

The sickening act of torture and homicide is compounded by the stubborn refusal of the Justice Department to account for the crimes, whether out of protection for personnel still working there or a disinclination to involve itself in a controversial issue. But an Administration that absolves conduct like torture and murder without accountability has little leverage or moral authority to deny additional allegations of torture:

Five Americans being held in Pakistan on suspicion of terrorism alleged they were being tortured in comments shouted to reporters Monday as they were driven from court.

Police and prison authorities denied any ill-treatment, and said the men did not bring up their complaints in court.

Guantanamo is a blight, but the bigger blight is the failure to reckon with the truly evil crimes committed there and elsewhere around the world. As the information about the past struggles to be free, every revelation chips away at the legitimacy of the “looking forward, not backward” construction, which simply undermines the rule of law, now and in the future.