Tracey Barnett: Ugly spin turns desperation into 'public relations move'

If that was acting, somebody better tell the American Government that dead men don't need Oscars.

Three men killed themselves last week at Guantanamo Bay and for once I can honestly say that the Bush Administration has outdone itself.

United States deputy "diplomacy" secretary, Colleen Graffy, told the BBC "taking their own lives was not necessary but it certainly is a good PR move".

Spin doesn't get any uglier. The icy distaste of that remark is every bit as poisonous a public relations disaster as the suicides themselves.

It would be one thing if Ms Graffy's comment was one aberrant statement from a loose cannon. But she wasn't alone.

The commander of the camp said, "They are smart, they are creative, they are committed. They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."

Asymmetrical warfare. That was this week's second new synonym for a good public relations move - which was last week's winning phrase for killing yourself. It's hard to keep up.

In Bush Administration speak, hanging yourself from a bed sheet is the new ultimate public relations statement.

It is not a move of political desperation. It is not an act of hopelessness from men held without trial for four and a half years.

A Pentagon study says only 8 per cent are al Qaeda and reports 55 per cent had committed no acts hostile to the US, according to the New York Times. Human rights groups put the number of innocent even higher, at 70 per cent.

These men are rotting in there. Today, only 10 men have been charged before a military tribunal, the Bush Admini-stration's answer to jurisprudence.

Officials at the camp say a "mystical" belief has sprung up among the prisoners that after three of them die, their voices will finally be heard.

Are you listening now?

This column isn't about al Qaeda or Saddam or the "war on terror" or September 11.

It is about the rock on which American democracy has stubbed its toe.

I am an American. I have watched my country wage an illegal war at a cost that is unconscionable to the next generation of both Iraqis and Americans who will pay the price.

I have listened to my president and vice-president and secretary of defence defend their right to "keep America safe" by torture, illegal imprisonment, secret ghost prisons and illegal wire-tapping.

I have seen the realisation of an ill-conceived war with disastrous international repercussions for which America must now answer.

What I haven't seen is America listening.

American democracy is working so slowly carrying these men's destinies through the US courts. Still they are in legal limbo.

Internationally no one has missed the irony that America is flagrantly abusing the very democratic ideals it so covets.

That failure is especially painful to watch for those of us sitting in other democracies. It calls into question the efficacy of the checks and balances our own governments have in place.

In a sense Hurricane Katrina and Guantanamo are two sides of the same coin. In both cases, the world watched America fail in the very ways in which everyone assumed they were superior.

The hundreds of men left in Guantanamo are the perfect symbol representing how effectively American policy on the "war on terror" has ignored its own principles.

These men have been tortured. They have not been held under the laws of the Geneva Convention. They were denied the right to legal counsel for years.

They still have not been granted the right of a fair trial.

And they have not been allowed the right to kill themselves as they have been trying to do for years now.

There have been over 350 "manipulative self-injurious behaviours" that have taken place at Guantanamo. The military will only call 41 of them true suicide attempts. But who's quibbling over numbers when they've been so busy dealing with men who have been trying to starve themselves to death in wave after wave of hunger strikes?

In February restraint chairs were brought in to stem the tide of prisoners weakened by continuous self-starvation countered with force-feeding.

When a hunger strike begins individuals are strapped to the chairs and so violently "tubed" up their noses and down their throats that they bleed and pass out from the pain, lawyers for detainees told the New York Times.

International doctors' organisations and the prisoners' lawyers are protesting the use of a medical procedure as possible torture. They claim prisoners are now being "tubed" well before starvation as punishment for the act of trying to die.

No one is saying that all these men are innocent of terrorist intentions or actions. But on American soil even multiple murderers are granted basic human rights that these prisoners have not seen.