Well, it finally happened. It was inevitable. But luckily it happened on a weekend, not in the middle of the normal news cycles. The Monday morning issues of Time and Newsweek and the others have been put to bed, as they say, and the cable news networks are running their canned "backgrounders" - and the commentators, O'Reilly and Matthews and the rest, are off-air for the weekend. This will come up on Meet the Press and the other Sunday morning talk shows, but only political junkies watch those. And since the news takes the weekend off, the story gets buried. When the national dialog, or whatever you call it, starts up again Monday, this will be old news. Other events will come along and push it aside. And there are two days to work on spin if someone does want to discuss the matter.

The Associated Press account here gives the basics -

Three Guantanamo Bay detainees hanged themselves with nooses made of sheets and clothes, the commander of the detention center said Saturday.

They were the first reported deaths among the hundreds of men held at the base in Cuba - some of them for up to 4 1/2 years and without charge.

Two men from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen were found "unresponsive and not breathing in their cells" early Saturday, according to a statement from the Miami-based U.S. Southern Command, which has jurisdiction over the prison. Attempts were made to revive the prisoners, but they failed.

"They hung themselves with fabricated nooses made out of clothes and bed sheets," Navy Rear Adm. Harry Harris told reporters in a conference call from the U.S. base in southeastern Cuba.

Pentagon officials said the three men were in Camp 1, the highest maximum security prison at Guantanamo, and that none of them had tried to commit suicide before.

That camp was also the location where two detainees tried to commit suicide in mid-May, when a riot broke out at the facility. The two men, who took overdoses of an anti-anxiety medication they hoarded, were found and received medical treatment and were recovering.

This just looks bad, and the president can't catch a break - we killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, one of the nastiest guys in Iraq, and that was something to crow about, if you're into that sort of thing. Now these three guys do this and make us look bad. We were supposed to be treating everyone humanely and appropriately, and they get all uppity and hang themselves.

We are holding four hundred sixty folks down that way in Cuba, saying they have links to al Qaeda and the Taliban, although there's some proof many of them were nobodies sold to us as bad guys for the substantial cash we offered, and there have been no real hearings in the more than four years to straighten it all out. Some were captured thirteen and fourteen-year-old kids. We say they all have intelligence value and we will extract from them, one way or another, what they know about ongoing plots to attack America. That seems a bit silly as what they know is more than four years old - we've had them more than isolated. But there they stay.

Add to this the AP item reports that the Pentagon also postponed the military tribunal of one Binyam Muhammad, an Ethiopian detainee, originally scheduled for next week. He's charged with conspiring with Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders to attack civilians and such. It seems like a bad time to start straightening things out, right now. The president was at Camp David and was told of what happened, and the State Department was immediately consulting with the governments of the home countries of the three prisoners. This needs to be handled carefully. The home governments might be a bit miffed.

But we did the right thing, after all -

The military said in its statement that "all lifesaving measures had been exhausted" in the attempt to revive the detainees. The remains were being treated "with the utmost respect," an issue important to Muslims. A cultural adviser was assisting the military.

Though the military termed the deaths suicides, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service was investigating to establish the official cause and manner of death.

But this comes after the UN report in May - holding detainees indefinitely at Guantanamo violated the world's ban on torture. The UN said we should close the place. We disagree, even if German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen and British Prime Minister Tony Blair say we should shut down the place. They may be allies, and pro-Bush, but this is our way of handling things, and we assert we know best, and it's really none of their business.

Well, actually it's more complicated -

On Friday, after the prison came up during a meeting with Fogh Rasmussen at Camp David, Bush said his goal is to do just that. A total of 759 detainees have been held there, with about 300 released or transferred.

"We would like to end the Guantanamo - we'd like it to be empty," Bush said. But he added: "There are some that, if put out on the streets, would create grave harm to American citizens and other citizens of the world. And, therefore, I believe they ought to be tried in courts here in the United States."

Bush said his administration was waiting for the Supreme Court to rule whether he overstepped his authority in ordering the detainees to be tried by U.S. military tribunals.

There are legal issues, you see, and four and half years of Cuba might make them dangerous if we let them go, even if they were or weren't dangerous before.

AP quote Josh Colangelo-Bryan of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who discovered one of his clients attempting to hang himself last year when he visited Guantanamo, saying there would be more suicides. One of the prisoners said this to him - "I would simply rather die than live here forever without rights."

But we say all these detainees pose a danger to the United States and our allies. What can we do? As the statement from the military put it - "They have expressed a commitment to kill Americans and our friends if released. These are not common criminals. They are enemy combatants being detained because they have waged war against our nation and they continue to pose a threat."

But they've proved none of that. No real hearings. You have to trust them on that. Why not?

One of those release last year, Moazzam Begg, says to the Associated Press - "We all expected something like this but were not prepared. It's just awful. I hope the Bush administration will finally see this is wrong."
Not likely. Now we can't be. We've cornered ourselves on that.

So, so far, forty-one suicide attempts by twenty-five prisoners, and three polled it off. The few lawyers we've let in say the number of attempts is far higher, but then, the military says otherwise.

Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights, representing three hundred of these folks, in telephone interview from New York, is reported to have said those held at Guantanamo "have this incredible level of despair that they will never get justice. And now they're gone. And they died without ever having seen a court."

But we said they were guilty. There were bad guys. Still Olshansky is calling for the Bush folks "for immediate action to do the right thing. They should be taken to court or released. I don't think this country wants the stain of injustice on it for many years to come."

She doesn't understand Dick Cheney, or the Texan president he manages. They've convinced most of the country that this is justice - you don't necessarily need things proved at all, or a trial or hearing or military tribunal to establish the facts. You just know some things are so.

Ah well. They'll be a bit more careful down there with the sheets now.

It hasn't been going that well -

On May 18, in one of the prison's most violent incidents, a detainee staged a suicide attempt to lure guards into a cellblock where they were attacked by prisoners armed with makeshift weapons, the military said. Earlier that day, two detainees overdosed on antidepressants they collected from other detainees and hoarded in their cells. The men have since recovered.

There also has been a hunger strike among detainees since August. The number of inmates refusing food dropped to 18 by last weekend from a high of 131. The military has at times used aggressive force-feeding methods, including a restraint chair.

Of course our "image" in the world is now going to be lower than ever. The administration's take on that - Who cares? - will be picked up by the pro-administration commentators, while the more diplomatically-minded, the dinosaurs, will wonder how much we can really do in this sorry world with no influence, no leverage, and just the biggest military on the planet. So we move further and further into becoming a pariah, and rouge state ourselves, but will the overwhelming military and the core economy.

These three sure messed things up, just when we assassinated a really awful man and everyone was supposed to admire us for that.

Now what? Let the spin begin.

First up is this -

The commander of the US Joint Task Force Guantanamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris has described the overnight suicide of three inmates "as an act of war."

Three detainees at the US detention centre committed suicide by hanging themselves with clothing and bedsheets. Rear Admiral Harris, commander of the Joint Task Force Guantanamo, described the suicides as an act of creative and committed terrorists. "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 ...warfare waged against us."

Ah, those clever devils.