bringing the amerikan police state to the rest of the world Original Article Detainee tried to kill self 9 times, lawyer says Carol Rosenberg Knight Ridder Newspapers Nov. 20, 2005 12:00 AM A combination of isolation, despair and humiliation has driven a Bahraini captive to attempt suicide at least nine times, one as recently as Monday, at the U.S. interrogation center for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, his lawyer said Friday. Jumah Dossari, 32, tried to yank stitches out of his arm from an earlier suicide attempt last month, according to U.S. military affidavits filed in federal court. The military defends its treatment of Dossari. The Dossari case is the latest effort by civilian attorneys to get federal judges to address Guantanamo conditions by seeking injunctions in some of the 300-plus habeas corpus petitions filed in Washington. Although not yet law, legislation limiting detainees' court access was approved by the Senate last week. Dossari's attorneys want the court to order the military to let him see a DVD recorded by family members urging him not to kill himself, let him have English-Arabic copies of children's books such as Puss in Boots and Jack in the Beanstalk to lift his spirits and let him chat by telephone with relatives in Bahrain. U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton has yet to rule. 'Comfort items' provided Guantanamo commanders have consistently said certain "comfort items" are given to prisoners who are compliant and defend censorship of family mail as a security measure against secret al-Qaida messages. "He feels incredibly isolated. He's been told he'll be there for 50 years. He's never been charged with anything," defense attorney Joshua Colangelo-Bryan said Friday in a telephone interview from New York. In October, Colangelo-Bryan stepped outside a holding cell at Guantanamo so Dossari could use the bathroom, and soon discovered his client hanging from the cell, and a gash in his arm. A guard cut him down and, according to military affidavits, his arm was sutured. His effort to yank out those stitches on Monday was the latest of nine confirmed suicide attempts, according to a news release issued last week by the Southern Command. Now the affidavits, by both the attorney and commanders, give a glimpse of the life of the 5-foot-6, 120-pound Bahraini whom the U.S. government alleges is an al-Qaida member or sympathizer who at one point was at Tora Bora, Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden is believed to have escaped U.S. and Afghan military forces. Denies any al-Qaida links Dossari denies the allegations. He says a prison camp snitch framed him, according to Colangelo-Bryan, and that he was in Afghanistan supervising a Saudi mosque-building charity and was captured fleeing the U.S. war on al-Qaida and the Taliban. Both sides agree that the case record shows the young man who worked for a Saudi insurance company has repeatedly tried to kill himself. It's something that no captive has yet succeeded in doing at the prison camp. But military officers at the base cast Dossari's desperation as of his own making. In the past six months, Army Col. Michael Bumgarner wrote in an affidavit, Dossari accepted only 25 of 97 offers of recreation, a one-hour transfer to an open-air, chain-linked enclosure outside his cell. Inside his prison building, the colonel said, Dossari has interaction with other prisoners by speaking through the steel slots in his cell and "has often led prayer periods for detainees" that way. During 29 interrogations over two years he got pizza, hamburgers and saw the films Troy and Gladiator with an intelligence team. Navy Capt. John Edmondson, a physician, said Dossari's suicide attempts began in March 2003 and that for the past three weeks Dossari has been on a hunger strike as well. He often refuses his medications and generally shuns talk therapy, Edmondson said.