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The AP is reporting that another as-yet unnamed Guantanamo Bay detainee has killed himself.  From the article: "Defense attorneys said the death was likely an act of desperation at a prison camp where detainees are denied access to U.S. civilian courts and isolated in their cells for up to 22 hours a day.  'You have five and a half years of desperation there with no legal way out,' said Michael Ratner, president of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights. 'Sadly, it leads to people being so desperate they take their own lives.' … The former commander of the detention facilities, Navy Rear Adm. Harry Harris, described those suicides as acts of 'asymmetric warfare' - an effort to increase condemnation of the prison."

From a Christian perspective, there's a lot to condemn.

We've been told that these detainees are enemy combatants, anti-U.S. soldiers who wear no uniform, fight on behalf of no single nation, and seek to commit acts of terror against our nation wherever and whenever they can.  But a closer look puts a lot of that into doubt.  The radio show This American Life delved into Guantanamo twice in episodes titled "Habeas Schmabeas," once in 2006 and again in 2007.  I highly recommend listening to the episodes, which you can obtain from their website as an MP3, and a transcript is also available as a PDF document.

This American Life reports statistics that were gathered by the Seton Hall School of Law in a series of reports they compiled on Guantanamo Bay by reading the 517 case files that were released by the Pentagon.  The reality is that only 5% of the Guantanamo Bay detainees were picked up by American troops at all, much less from a battlefield.  The Pentagon itself only classified 8% of the detainees as Al Qaeda fighters.  That's only about 42 people.

Where did the rest come from, then?  Good, old-fashioned, American capitalism.  The Seton Hall study found that 86% of the detainees came into U.S. custody through Pakistan or the Afghanistan Northern Alliance as a result of bounties offered for the capture of Al Qaeda or Taliban fighters.  Rear Admiral John Hutson, the Navy's top lawyer and judge advocate general until 2000, told This American Life, "The problem was, we were offering bounties, you know, $5,000 or $10,000 (Al Qaeda brought more than Taliban did) and so 'ok, fine, here’s your money' and they take them to Gitmo.  And when you look at the economy at that part of the world, you know, that really is kind of a king’s ransom."

So, we've got a bunch of people incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay about which we have way more than a reasonable doubt.  In some cases, we've even admitted it:  Michael Donleavy, head of interrogations at Guantanamo, complained in 2002 that he was receiving too many “Mickey Mouse” prisoners.  The Washington Post wrote about one detainee, Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen who was raised in Germany.  Kurnaz has been held in Guantanamo Bay since 2001 and his Pentagon dossier explicitly states that there’s no evidence of any connection to Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or a threat to the United States.  The military explains that they're holding him because a friend of his blew himself up as a suicide bomber in 2003.  Aside from the issue of being detained and held for something happening two years in the future, the suicide bomber incident never even happened - the friend that supposedly died in jihad is still alive and well and living in Germany.

Even all of this wouldn't be a problem, of course, if we were regularly going through and weeding out the "Mickey Mouse" prisoners from the terrorists.  The problem is that initially the U.S. government completely suspended the right of habeas corpus.  Even after the Supreme Court said that we couldn't completely deny their habeas rights, some of the detainees have been held for five years or more with nothing more than a quick case review by a military tribunal that isn't obligated to actually examine any of the evidence in detail.  According to This American Life, the detainee isn't allowed to see the evidence, because it's classified, and the military tribunal simply assumes that all of the evidence in the dossier is correct.  In one case, the detainee's "personal representative" - a military officer appointed to represent the detainee in lieu of an actual attorney - only met with the detainee for 15 minutes before the hearing and sat silently through the entire hearing without presenting any of the exculpatory evidence available.  Mickey Mouse, indeed.  Can you say "Star Chamber"?

Our founding fathers were so concerned with these same kinds of abuses that King George had perpetrated on the colonies that they wrote habeas corpus into Article I, section 9 of the Constitution: "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."  The bottom line for me, as a Christian, is that my country now holds a double standard of the worst kind.  Since these are not U.S. citizens, it's fine to do what we like with them, but at the same time, we have high expectations for what other countries and even insurgent groups do with the U.S. citizens they capture.  Double standards don't work for me at any level, much less one that involves the basic respect due to a human being made in the image of God.  What's more, the way I read the Bible, God seems to agree: "Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD."  (Leviticus 19:18)

Should we just turn them all loose, then?  No, not at all.  But would it hurt to have a few legal protections added for their benefit?  Especially some of those "inalienable human rights" that we claim were given by our Creator?  I don’t think so.

Of course, we haven't even touched on what happens to the detainees while they're at Guantanamo, and I won't take the space to go into that here.  But when I hear This American Life say that while we tortured and humiliated a man, "we kissed the cross around our neck and said 'This is a gift from Christ for you Muslims,'" I get mad for a whole list of reasons.

The AP report on the suicide mentions how a cultural advisor is helping with the detainees final arrangements.  "The remains of the deceased detainee are being treated with the utmost respect," the military said.  Which means the man will finally get in death what he was denied in life.