As part of the War On Terror, since 2002 the American Government has taken to locking up citizens of a variety of countries (but mainly of Islamic faith) in Guantanamo Bay. Kept in degrading conditions, undergoing torture now and then without any sort of evidence or trial to find out whether they are guilty of anything, it's probably not the nicest place to be.

For anyone wondering how a "civilised" country such as the US gets away with it, well they pretend all these people are something akin to a worse version of Osama Bin Laden and that all that old fashioned idea of justice, legal trials, and the idea that kidnapping and torture is wrong, have to go out of the window now. This is not a view shared by all that many people and organisations, including Amnesty International who demand that it must be closed down immediately.

As might be expected, now and then prisoners - whether innocent or not (and who is to know, with trials not being necessary) - can't take the inhuman torture any more, and try and kill themselves. This reflects badly on the administration, because, heaven forbid, it kind of sounds like the prisoners are being treated less than royally. By September 2003, at least 32 suicide attempts had been made. The rate then dropped, because in a similar terminological construct to how calling the prisoners "enemy combatants" stops prisoner-of-war rules being applied, they retermed a suicide attempt into "manipulative self-injurious behavior". The suicide attempt statistics therefore went down, without the annoying step of actually having to reduce suicide attempts having to be implemented.

However, on June 10th, three inmates became the first people to successfully kill themselves at Guantanamo Bay. Perhaps not a title they would want to have, but hey, you can see why being illegally imprisoned and tortured for years without any suggestion of an end to it, or even a trial, might make life unbearable to the point where you would hang yourselves. It would be quite natural, as Human Rights Watch have said, for these people to be "despairing". To add to the existing tragedy, which a lawyer from the Centre for Constitutional Rights has termed "a consequence of inhumane and immoral treatment of human beings by the United States", it had actually been decided that one of the detainees, Mani al-Utaybi, was to be one of the lucky few to be released. They just hadn't got round to finding a suitable place to send him yet, nor for that matter telling him the good news and quite possibly saving his life.

But no, not according to the Bush administration. To talk of desperate tortured detainees with nothing to live for, well, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, so they reckon, these guys were probably having the time of their lives, and they probably were nothing more than euphoric at conspiring together to kill themselves. Surely, you may be thinking, this is some Poorhouse exaggeration? Well no, not really.

Some choice quotes from the associate torturers include the following:

Colleen Graffy, using her ultra-diplomatic skills that got her the current position of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy saw a future in the advertising industry for these three laughing-boys, saying "Taking their own lives was not necessary, but it certainly is a good PR move.". The Poorhouse therefore looks forward to more up-and-coming ad agency bosses following this advice, subjecting themselves to misery without end, and then killing themselves.

Navy Rear Admiral Harry Harris, the prison boss, tells us that he believes that "this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us". Gone are the bad old days you used to have to each fight against your enemies. Now you just violently capture and lock them up with no regard to law or basic humanity, and they, having little thought for your poor fragile feelings, kill themselves in revenge. To give him credit, asymmetry is most definitely the correct word.

There are no words fierce enough to describe the disgust that the existence of this "camp" and the mindsets of those making such ridiculous comments should create in us.