3 detainees hang themselves in first Guantanamo deaths

? Three Guantanamo Bay detainees hanged themselves with nooses made of sheets and clothes, the commander of the detention center said Saturday. They were the first reported deaths among the hundreds of men held at the base for years without charge.

The suicides, which military officials said were coordinated, triggered further condemnation of the isolated detention center, which holds some 460 men on suspicion of links to al-Qaida and the Taliban. Only 10 have been charged with crimes and there has been growing international pressure on the U.S. to close the prison.

Two men from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen were found dead shortly after midnight Saturday in separate cells, said the Miami-based U.S. Southern Command, which has jurisdiction over the prison. Attempts were made to revive them, but they failed.

“They hung themselves with fabricated nooses made out of clothes and bed sheets,” Navy Rear Adm. Harry Harris told reporters in a conference call from the U.S. base in southeastern Cuba.

“They have no regard for human life,” he said. “Neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us.”

To help prevent more suicides, guards will now give bed sheets to detainees only when they go to bed and remove them after they wake up in the morning, Harris said.

Gen. John Craddock, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, said in the conference call that the three had left suicide notes, but refused to disclose the contents.

One of the detainees was a mid- or high-level al-Qaida operative, Harris said, while another had been captured in Afghanistan and participated in a riot at a prison there. The third belonged to a splinter group. Their names were not released.

Some of the evidence against detainees is classified, so they are not permitted to know of it, and are thus unable to challenge it.

“They’re determined, intelligent, committed elements and they continue to do everything they can … to become martyrs in the jihad,” said Craddock.

He said all three had engaged in a hunger strike to protest their indefinite incarceration and had been force-fed before quitting the protest action. Military commanders said two were participating in the hunger strike as recently as last month, and described one of them as a long-term hunger striker who had begun the protest late last year and ended it in May.

Bush, who was spending the weekend at Camp David, expressed “serious concern” about the incident, White House press secretary Tony Snow said.

His immediate concerns were making sure that an investigation was being conducted and that the bodies were “treated humanely and with cultural sensitivity,” Snow said.

In a sign of concern over the diplomatic fallout, the administration conducted an extraordinary round of global outreach within hours. Among those contacted were the United Nations, European Union member states, and Middle Eastern embassies, Snow said.

Amnesty International said the apparent suicides “are the tragic results of years of arbitrary and indefinite detention” and called the prison “an indictment” of the Bush administration’s human rights record.