Hard to believe.

Below are extracts from two recent BBC News reports:

This on Sunday, 11 June 2006

The suicides of three detainees at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, amount to acts of war, the US military says. The camp commander said the two Saudis and a Yemeni were "committed" and had killed themselves in "an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us".

The US military said the men's bodies were being treated "with the utmost respect". White House spokesman Tony Snow said Mr Bush had "expressed serious concern" at the deaths. "He also stressed that it was important to treat the bodies humanely and with cultural sensitivity," he said.

Mr Goodman, whose organisation represents some 300 detainees, said the government had denied them that. Ken Roth, head of Human Rights Watch in New York, told the BBC the men had probably been driven by despair. "These people are despairing because they are being held lawlessly," he said. "There's no end in sight. They're not being brought before any independent judges. They're not being charged and convicted for any crime."

This on the same day

A top US official has described the suicides of three detainees at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a "good PR move to draw attention". Colleen Graffy told the BBC the deaths were part of a strategy and "a tactic to further the jihadi cause", but taking their own lives was unnecessary. Speaking to the BBC's Newshour programme, Ms Graffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, said the three men did not value their lives nor the lives of those around them. Detainees had access to lawyers, received mail and had the ability to write to families, so had other means of making protests, she said, and it was hard to see why the men had not protested about their situation.

On Friday, Mr Bush said he would "like to end Guantanamo", adding he believed the inmates "ought to be tried in courts here in the United States".

[Hard to believe isn’t it? People held for years without charge or trial and with the very real possibility of spending the rest of their lives in prison without any recourse to a legal system didn’t kill themselves out of despair. It was an “act of war” or a “clever PR move” and that the bodies will be “treated humanely and with sensitivity”. Maybe if they were treated humanely before they committed suicide they wouldn’t have taken their own lives? Maybe, as George Bush ‘would like’, the surviving inmates might actually get some kind of trial and the weeping boil on the backside of democracy can close down. Personally I’m not holding my breath. After all I wouldn’t want my actions to be considered an act of “asymmetric warfare” against the US now would I? I might end up on an all expenses paid indefinite visit to Cuba.]