Guantanamo

[frogcycle]

I tackled a project last week to go back through the first several years of casualties, from before I started collecting data daily, for my Zeitlangers website. In particular, for those with no photos or writeups on the websites from which I downloaded to backfill my site I did web searches to try to fill in the gaps.

I was rather surprised to find that three of these least-publicized were deaths at Guantanamo - all several years ago. One was an anesthesiologist in his 40s who "collapsed" in his quarters and died - last thing I found said it was "under investigation." Two others were assigned to guarding prisoners. One disapppeared; his belongings were found on the beach, but neither he nor his body has ever been found. The other is said to have shot himself. I could not find any hometown paper articles on any of them. I'm not finished yet - don't know whether there are more.

There have been several suicides also of soldiers, airmen, seamen assigned to guarding prisoners in the Persian Gulf area - Djibouti or someplace - I don't recall at the moment. One 19-year old supposedly shot himself in Kazakhstan while on prisioner guarding detail. Trouble is, according to his family, the wound was such that the weapon he supposedly used would have required firing with his toe or something. This was during the early days of Afghanistan, before the Iraq invasion. He had been very gung-ho initially; his last few letters indicated he was dissatisfied with his role., but didn't hint of suicidal tendency.

Either people are seeing a lot of really bad shit - enough to make them want to check out - or...

or people are seeing some really bad shit that someone does not want them to talk about.

Or maybe this is normal and I am seeing things where there is nothing. Somehow I doubt that.