Ambassador for Australia nominee: in charge during possible coverup of deaths at Guantanamo

[muriel_volestrangler]

claimed they were suicide, which he called "asymmetric warfare". Plus force-feeding. And head of naval Pacific Command when 17 sailors died in 2 collisions.

Admiral Harry Harris named US ambassador to Australia

In March 2006, he assumed command of the joint task force at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. During his command, three prisoners – Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi al-Utaybi, Salah Ali Abdullah Ahmed al-Salami and Yasser Talal al Zahrani – died in the custody of US forces. US Defence reported the deaths as suicides.

Harris ordered a full investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which published its report in a heavily redacted version in August 2008.

However, a subsequent report by the centre for policy and research of Seton Hall University School of Law, under the supervision of its director, Professor Mark Denbeaux, attorney for two Guantanamo detainees, pointed to numerous inconsistencies in the official accounts of these deaths. The report suggested there had either been gross negligence or an attempt to cover up homicides of the men, perhaps owing to torture under interrogation.

In 2010, Harper’s Magazine published a story suggesting the three prisoners had died as a result of accidental manslaughter during a torture session, and that the official account was a cover-up.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/feb/10/admiral-harry-harris-named-us-ambassador-to-australia

“They are smart, they are creative, they are committed,” Admiral Harris said. “They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/06/guantanamo-has-driven-rear-admiral-harry-harris-insane/

At Gitmo, however, dead prisoners are something the U.S. military wishes devoutly to avoid. So force-feeding has been standard policy at the camp ever since hunger strikes began in early 2002. The facility's top physicians have also told TIME that prisoners who resist are subjected to especially harsh methods. In one case, according to medical records obtained by TIME, a 20-year old named Yusuf al-Shehri, jailed since he was 16, was regularly strapped into a specially designed feeding chair that immobilizes the body at the legs, arms, shoulders and head. Then a plastic tube that is 50% larger, and more painful to insert, than the commonly used variety was inserted up through his nose and down his throat, carrying a nutritional formula into his stomach.

Thousands of people, of course, endure some form of voluntary intra-nasal feeding every day in hospital settings. But when force-feeding is involuntary and the recipient is in a state of high anxiety, the muscles tense up and the procedure can trigger nausea, bleeding, diarrhea and vomiting. "We are humane and compassionate,"; Guantanamo commander Harris told TIME, "but if we tell a detainee to do something, we expect the detainee to do it." As a note scrawled in al-Shehri's medical records put it: "[The prisoner] was informed that dying is not permitted."

http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1209530,00.html

Two deadly collisions involving U.S. warships in the Pacific also occurred during his time as head of Pacific Command.

Ten sailors aboard the guided missile destroyer John S. McCain died when it collided with a tanker near Singapore on Aug. 21. Its sister ship, the Fitzgerald, almost sank off the Japanese coast on June 17 after colliding with a container ship. Seven crew died.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-australia/trump-taps-u-s-pacific-commander-harris-as-ambassador-to-australia-idUSKBN1FT2PA

What a lovely man. Via Wonkette.