| abstract | - The United States Department of Defense (DOD) had stopped reporting Guantanamo suicide attempts in 2002. In mid-2002 the DoD changed the way they classified suicide attempts, and enumerated them under other acts of "self-injurious behavior". On January 24, 2005 the U.S. military revealed that in 2003, there were 350 incidents of "self-harm." 120 of those incidents of self-harm were attempts by detainees to hang themselves. Twenty-three detainees participated in a mass-suicide attempt from August 18 to 26, 2003. A number of incidents happened after a change in command at the camp in 2003 increased the severity of interrogation techniques used by military and CIA intelligence officers. On June 10, 2006, the DOD announced that three prisoners held by the United States at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camps had committed suicide. The June 10, 2006 suicides were the first inmate deaths at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp. The DoD acknowledged there had been a total of 41 suicide attempts among 29 detainees until that date. Since June 2006, DOD has announced three suicide deaths by detainees at Guantanamo. In 2008, the NCIS released a heavily redacted report of its investigation of the three suicides at Guantanamo in 2006. In reports published in 2009 and 2010, Seton Hall University Law School's Center for Policy and Research and a joint investigation by Harper's magazine and NBC News, respectively, strongly criticized the government's account of the 2006 suicides. Harper's 2010 article, based on accounts by four former Guantanamo guards, asserted that DOD had initiated a cover-up of deaths resulting from torture during interrogation. The DOD has denied these allegations.
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