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Charles Fried and Scott Horton (Harper's, human rights attorney) at Justice After Bush Panel, Princeton by Cheryl Biren
A lot of people were apparently very upset when Scott Horton beat out Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article on the Koch brothers and Michael Hasting’s Rolling Stone article on Gen. McChrystal and won the National Magazine Award for Reporting this year. Horton’s January 2010 article in Harper’s, “The Guantanamo Suicides,” was based on a number of named sources, including the guard in the watch tower mere yards away from the scene of much of the action, and questioned the official story given by the Department of Defense about the purported suicide of three detainees on the evening of June 10, 2006.
Despite articles written that Horton claimed the murder of the detainees, Horton, along with a report by Seton Hall University School of Law, Center for Policy and Research released around the same time, strongly questioned the procedure and results of the DoD investigations and called for a new investigation. Guantanamo authorities had already announced their position within 24 hours of the discovery of the dead bodies: the deaths were supposedly planned suicides, part of an act of “asymmetrical warfare” on the part of the Taliban and Arab prisoners.
After Donald Rumsfeld and ex-DoD flak Cully Stimson wrote articles last month lambasting those who would question the official investigation, former Salon.com WarRoom editor Alex Koppelman produced his own critique in the pages of Adweek. The story, “The National Magazine Award and Guantánamo: A Tall Tale Gets the Prize,” posted May 23, got a big reception.
I’m not going to repeat all that was wrong with that story here. I’ve already produced a comprehensive examination of Koppelman’s points in an article posted at Truthout. But I will highlight one crucial area here, and expand upon the Truthout article.
What did Patrice Magnin’s Autopsy report really say?
After the death of one of the detainees, Ali Abdullah Ahmed (ISN 693), a 27-year-old Yemeni national, Ahmed’s father, not believing his son would transgress Islamic law and kill himself, asked for an independent autopsy after his son’s body was returned to the family.
Well, not all his body was returned. The Department of Defense withheld crucial neck organs that would be necessary to determine if the death was due to hanging or other form of asphyxiation. Swiss pathologist Patrice Mangin examined the body. According to Alex Koppelman, the autopsy report (written in French and linked here — the link originally posted by Horton and Harper’s, by the way) “ended with the conclusion that hanging was, in fact, the most likely cause of death.”
Koppelman even quotes from the autopsy report: “Yet Horton left out a key conclusion of Mangin’s report. ‘The cause of death is most likely the consequence of mechanical asphyxia by violence exercised against the neck as part of a hanging, without being able to formally exclude a different mechanism,’ said the report, which was written in French. Mangin reiterated this point in a press conference.”
Apparently Koppelman cannot read even English. The quote clearly shows that the death was by “mechanical asphyxia” (“asphyxie mécanique par une violence exercée contra la cou”), and adds that one cannot “formally exclude a different mechanism” (“sans pouvoir exclure formellement un autre mécanisme”). In other words, it may not have been hanging, and without the missing organs, he could not deliver a definitive cause.
But let’s hear what Mangin himself told the press in an interview delivered in English, from the Truthout article:
Mangin was quite explicit about his findings in a March 3, 2007 interview in English with Carol Vann at InfoSud. Mangin told Vann, “There was asphyxiation which could be due to suicide but also to other reasons. We have too little information to make any definitive conclusions…. And above all, what was the state of the missing organs? We have written to the American authorities, but so far we have not had any reply.”
So Koppelman misinterpreted or misrepresented the autopsy report. But did he even really read it? Another portion of the report, heretofore unreported, notes (French followed by English):
Il est par ailleurs nécessaire de souligner les limites de l’interprétation médico-légale, résultant d’une part d’un début d’altération postmortem, et d’autre part des remaniements induits par la première autopsie, entraînant l’impossibilité de prélever certains échantillons biologiques en vue d’analyses toxicologiques (notamment sang périphérique et urine), et l’impossibilité d’examiner certains ou de parties d’organes, tel que le larynx avec son squelette.
It is also necessary to emphasize the limits of the medico-legal interpretation, resulting on one hand from postmortem deterioration, and on the other hand from rearrangements induced by the first autopsy, resulting in the inability to collect some biological samples for toxicology testing (including peripheral blood and urine), and the impossibility of examining some or parts of organs such as the larynx with its skeleton.
Another portion of the autopsy report states:
Les lésions odontostomatologiques constatées, en particulier l’exarticulation fraîche de l’incisive inférieure à gauche, en l’absence de contusion des lèvres, nécessite impérativement de pouvoir accéder aux rapport établis par les autorités américaines.
Dentistry lesions are detected, especially fresh exarticulation [loss] of the lower left incisor, in the absence of any bruising of the lips, one imperatively needs to have access to reports by American authorities [wondering, as a later sentence elaborates, if the tooth's loss was due to trauma during attempts to resusciate the body].
In other words, Mangin went to some lengths to spell out problems with any medical or legal conclusions from the autopsy, including the inability to even make toxicological sampling on some portions of the body and its fluids. More than once he reiterates the necessity of more information or items from the U.S. authorities. In the end, the autopsy mainly rules out other forms of death besides mechanical asphyxiation, which could have been caused by hanging, or frankly, from the rags found in each of the mouths and/or throats of the deceased (a fact that was covered up in DoD’s report, but can be readily accessed by reading the CITF recorded statements by medical personnel at Guantanamo — large PDF), or some other cause. One such cause would be strangulation, but lacking the neck’s hyoid bone, withheld from the independent autopsy, the crucial forensic determinations could not be made.
This is very different from what Koppelman declared, and which has been picked up and spread all over the Internet like a virulent virus. Still, Koppelman was joining a quite large gaggle of neo-con bloggers and supposedly liberal apostates, like Mark Benjamin.
One of the more purple descriptions of incredulity was made by Benjamin Wittes, who blogged after Harper’s and Horton won the magazine award, “The Harpers story is nothing more than a set of wholly unfounded accusations of murder and conspiracy directed against our men and women in uniform dressed up as investigative journalism.” He followed this thundering pronouncement with a full reposting of Cully Stimson’s own blog post on “Horton’s delusional article.” (Stimson was former deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs at the time of the prisoners’ deaths, a fact that does not cause Wittes to pause a second for possible examination of bias.)
Wittes, Koppelman and a host of others, have chosen to do the bidding of the Department of Defense for reasons of their own. Truth is the victim, and truth-seekers are vilified. That’s the way it is in 21st Century Obama’s America.
39 Comments
Interestingly, Spencer did an article critical of one of the early “take-downs” of Horton’s article (by Jack Shafer at Slate).
http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2010/01/29/jack-shafers-unpersuasive-case-against-scott-horton/
FYI, Andy Worthington, who was one of the people who worked with Wikileaks on the release of the Guantanamo Files, has released his “Guantánamo: The Definitive Prisoner List — Updated for 2011, With New Information and Photos from WikiLeaks.”
Andy is THE authority to turn to for info on who’s who at Guantanamo, and his work deserves bookmarking.
There is only one reasonable explanation for the pathologist not receiving all of the body tissue: the person did not commit suicide. Thank you for continuing to call it what it is.
Just to play devil’s advocate, what do you say to those who reply that they kept the body parts in case there were any subsequent investigations (this is the opinion of Joe Carter, in his series of articles on the subject)?
I’d say the crime scene has been tampered with to obscure the crime. Even those executed in US prisons are left with all their body parts intact from what I understand (e.g. “NJ 2C:49-9. Disposition of body” as quoted here).
I agree about the tampering, but your link pertains to dispositions of bodies that have been “lawfully” executed, and not from crime scenes.
Ahmed’s body, per Mangin’s report, had been completely eviscerated by the autopsy, with soft portions accompanying the body in a plastic bag, sans the missing body parts, which if I didn’t mention them in the article were the larynx, the hyoid bone and the thyroid cartilage.
I researched the issue of the hyoid bone. It sometimes is broken in suicide hangings, but usually only in older people, not someone 27 years old, and even then only rarely. Because it’s buried so deep in the neck, it’s only usually broken when special undo pressure is exerted on the neck, as in strangulation, especially by hands.
The ligatures, or noose marks, is another interesting factor, as the ones on these bodies had some very intricate designs, and it’s hard to understand how each of these detainees, without scissors or cutting devices, supposedly got the means to cut up sheets and t-shirts with no authorities knowing.
It’s kind of like the tale about the recent “suicide”of Inayatullah, who Carol Rosenberg reported was found hanging in the outside exercise yard. How did this go unseen, and how did he, taken by guards and wearing shackles, bring along his hanging sheet?
But who in America seems to care? What a strange country we live in. Will we have to wait until citizens here start disappearing from the streets, or bodies floating down streams and rivers, as once they did in the Tigris river when the bloody knives of the death squads were unleashed?
it’s not necessary to have scissors to cut or tear fabric. all that is needed is to chew some threads away and begin a start of a tear in the fabric, and then tear it down the length.
how convenient.
Thank you Jeff.
I’ve hounded and will continue to call my congress people about this.
Three questions I want the government to answer.
1 Where are KSM’s children ?
2 Will they be at their father’s ” trial”
3 Where are the missing thoraxes from “camp no” suicides ?
I don’t think it will move mountains but Mike Fitzpatrick Pa-08, just happened to visit gitmo during the last break after repeated calls with these three questions. Of course the official line everything is hunky dorie but we’re talking conspiracy to murder and in fact murder with the trail leading right to bush and cheney with no statute of limitations.
I would suggest others call there congress people with these three questions.
“Redrum.”
Seriously, I do not know what to say much of the time, Jeff. They are actively hindering a current investigation, in order to preserve future hypothetical investigations? In some circles they call this tampering.
I read your important article at Truthout yesterday and was hoping you’d follow up here, Jeff, so thanks!
Haven’t finished yet, but the first sentence in the second paragraph is confusing to me…
I really appreciate all of this detailed response to the DoD/media campaign against Horton’s work.
Thanks for helping to keep Truth alive, Jeff!
Glenn Greenwald today notes an interesting parallel campaign, here:
The WH/Politico attack on Seymour Hersh; Glenn Greenwald; 6/2/11
Scott Horton is a talented, studious, sometimes annoyingly reserved and careful international lawyer. He is a multicultural linguist and specialist in certain aspects of the criminal law, and is (or was) on the adjunct faculty at Columbia Law School.
Wittes and his cohort’s claim that Horton’s accessible and well-documented article is “unfounded” is as faith-based a pronouncement as that made by a follower of intelligent design, decrying evolution as a “theory” based on insufficient, testable research, a characterization that upends logic and life as we know it.
The government could have easily put to bed the canards over these deaths by properly investigating them, by conducting competent autopsies and releasing full reports of them, and by releasing the complete remains to medical representatives of the bereaved. Instead, they conducted faulty investigations, botched the autopsies and “lost” key biological evidence in Kennedyesque fashion, and started selling convenient lies before the bodies were cold.
The timeline alone makes the government and the jailers and interrogators of these men liars. Not content to rely on the obvious, Mr. Horton talked to named individuals, tested their stories against each other and the government’s, and reached conclusions that embarrass a government. That’s the crime Horton’s critics want punished, not the unlawful killing of three more harmless detainees at America’s Devil’s Island.
The immediate claim by military authorities that three dead men committed “asymmetrical warfare” by killing themselves was an act of verbal warfare normally engaged in only by those with much to hide.
That three men, in isolated cells, agreed to and executed simultaneous suicides-by-hanging is so far-fetched as to beggar belief. Such a difficult to achieve “success” required an elegant sense of timing, luck and ingenuity, and multiple violations of protocol and derelictions of duty by prison guards. It also required three exhausted, physically dissimilar men to contort themselves in a fashion comparable to Dick Cheney’s suggestion to a US Senator that he “Go fuck himself”.
To date, the evidence for such an extreme, unlikely series of events is sparse to non-existent. The evidence proposed by Mr. Horton for a contrary version of events bears some semblance to reality, and remains inadequately refuted by the US military and its government. Instead, it sends out its pet pundits and “reporters” to do another hatchet job, for which they are paid or otherwise handsomely rewarded.
Thank you for these two well-written comments. Suicide in an isolation cell by hanging is impossible. Reality check: There is nothing in such a cell to hang from. “Extreme, unlikely series of events is sparse to non-existent” is an absolutely true statement.
As you say, the autopsy report does not rule out death by hanging – whether self-induced or not – but makes clear that would not be the only cause of death consistent with its findings. Those are necessarily incomplete because of the time and decay that have occurred since death, the effects of the first autopsy, and the missing body parts.
The apparently asymmetrical damage to the right and left neck implies another possibility: strangulation by a right-armed choke-hold from behind, obstructing breathing.
The bloody, pre-death loss of a left lower incisor, with no exterior trauma, suggests emergency medical intervention rather than self-inflicted trauma or beating, which would have damaged adjacent facial tissue, not just the inside of the mouth.
The pre-death injection sites are interesting, too. The bodies discovered in their cells showed signs of stiffness owing to the onset of rigor mortis, which would ordinarily mean death had occurred hours beforehand. Its presence, along with other obvious signs, would logically have precluded emergency attempts at resuscitation, such as CPR or injection of fluids or drugs.
As the bard says, something is rotten and not just in Denmark.
You do not have to answer this, but are you a pathologist? (two of them in my family, made for some interesting, albeit unusual, dinner conversations)
I should add that the autopsy report makes clear that the injections or punctures were pre-death, as was the loss of the tooth. Neither could have occurred post-discovery of the “hanging” body in its cell, since the prisoner was already dead. Both were recent.
If these occurred owing to resuscitation efforts, they were made earlier and elsewhere, which means they didn’t follow a successful attempt at suicide by hanging. That would make the military’s and government’s version of events a fairy tale invented to scare children and to hide what really happened. At a minimum, they suggest that it is Mr. Wittes who has not done his homework, not Mr. Horton.
Was the guy tubed? In fact, what lines, tubes and catheters, if any, were improperly removed, do you think?
Catheters, tubes and IV lines are never to be removed prior to autopsy. Those puncture sites should have had lines in them, don’t you think? Makes me wonder just what all else they removed.
As does Jeff’s article, I’m referring to the report on the second autopsy done by pathologists in Lausanne, Switzerland, which he links to. It indicates that the injections or punctures appear to have been made pre-death (as was the loss of the tooth). What the guys in Lausanne apparently didn’t have or couldn’t get information on was how soon before death they were made – during resuscitation efforts, if any, or earlier for some other reason (vaccination, etc.). Ditto re the reason for the lost tooth.
If resuscitation was pointless because rigor had already set in, then when and where were the injections or punctures made and why? How does that jive with the explanation of where the body was found and the claimed cause of death? I suspect we’ll be treated to further governmental silence and trashing of reporters who dissect their incredible story. The truth, it seems, has left the building.
Funny thing about lies. They never make any sense. The truth, on the other hand, just is.
The quote above is from Seton Hall School of Law Center for Policy and Research publication, “DoD Contradicts DoD: An Analysis of the Response to Death at Camp Delta” (PDF)
DoD could settle much of this right away. They could release the video tapes. They could let independent examiners look at the neck organs. DoJ could have interviewed the army guards who never had statements taken from them. NCIS could release the statements from the guards in the cell block that night who were identified as making false statements.
A lot of things could happen, but won’t and at this point I blame the press, the blogs and the public, who evidently — present company on this thread excepted — don’t care enough to make enough of a stir to force a real investigation, or have drank deeply from the government’s kool aid, believing as they must that they live in a democratic paradise, the best of all possible worlds.
I think the point I was making, and I’m too busy to rewrite it now, is that a number of articles (and I didn’t leak to them, but they’re easy enough to find) claim Horton made wild claims about the detainees being tortured to death, while Horton, along with Seton Hall investigators who also looked into the case, and talked with Horton, have never made such claims. They have only said the investigation was flawed and the conclusions mistaken.
At this point, we really don’t know what happened that night at Camp Delta, though we may have suspicions and some uncomfortable facts (though not enough facts).
I can see you’ve read the report. For those who haven’t, one more quote…
Dr. Mangin wrote specifically: “Cette asphyxie est compatible avec une pendaison, sans cependant pouvoir exclure formellement un autre mécanisme de violence (par exemple strangulation), seul ou combiné avec las pendaison.” I translate this as: “This asphyxiation is consistent with a hanging, without, however, formally excluding another mechanism of violence (for example strangulation) alone or combined with hanging.”
Thank you, that’s a very important point.
In my reading about forensic examinations of this sort post-mortem. If the attempts to resuscitate are made, one should make sure they are really needed, because apparently such attempts, like trachetomy, can destroy forensic evidence needed to establish cause of death. Since these bodies were reported to be blue, stiff, they had to get special implements to open jaws frozen shut with rigor mortis, was this resuscitation or attempts to destroy evidence?
Yes, and it does not exclude hanging by a third person vs. suicide by hanging.
The condition of the missing body parts, the hyoid bone in particular, would have allowed an examiner to differentiate between typical manual strangulation and hanging. That US authorities “lost” only the parts that would allow such a differentiation suggests an attempt explicitly to deny later investigators of the ability definitively to challenge the government’s claims.
One would think that was clear at least since the tracheotomy performed at the Parkland Hospital in November 1963.
Thank you so much for this, Jeff. (it was linked from GlennZilla’s place).
And thanks also to EoH for his usual thorough and cogent analysis.
FunnyDiva
I call them simply, Blue Crime
or
Anthem Blue Crime Wave
they love it at the doctors’ offices.
whoops….
Why would it have been necessary forcibly to open jaws locked in the temporary grip of rigor mortis? Hours later, they could have easily been opened, which would have suited the purposes of completing a post-mortem examination.
If the jaws were firmly shut owing to rigor, death would have been hours old, mooting any need to open them for the purposes of resuscitation. Then, too, had the jaws been broken or forcibly opened during rigor, there would have been signs of that damage and it would have been obvious it was done after rather than before death.
One scenario that should be considered – and refuted or left open according to the evidence – is that the jaws weren’t forcibly opened, causing the tooth damage. The damage occurred before death, which begs the question of why: an affect of interrogation, emergency resuscitation efforts, something else?
AdWeek? ADWEEK??? Says. it. all.
Thanks, Jeff.
Why is anyone listening to anything “Adweek” might say about an autopy, FFS?!?
Did Adweek become a peer viewed journal when I wasn’t looking?
Really. It’s like using Popular Mechanics to dispute peer review science journal articles…. oh yeah… same people did that, too.
Exactly. Couldn’t get anyone else to print it, perhaps?
Yup. I was gonna make that observation as well. And now I am wondering about AdWeek’s understanding of and/or relationship with their audience …. hum.
The source of the criticism is less relevant than that it’s published, copied, broadcast and rebroadcast, taken up and repeated by others. That’s an emotional campaign, not a rational one, as is a campaign to demolish the credibility of a supremely knowledgeable legitimate critic. Ask Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame.
Intelligent design, for example, lives not just because its proponents are well-funded by predatory think tanks as much as it is supported by devout fundamentalists. It continues as a platform because it is an emotional assault, not a rational way to teach science or to help inquiring minds distinguish the difference between science and religion.
Thank you, I do not read French. Appreciate the translation. Is there, by any chance, an English copy?
Edit: I cannot read French.
Thanks for your comment at Glen’s, Harpie. Much appreciated. How wonderful it is to have someone like you support their work. Makes one feel lucky.