Did you miss Mollie's post on Scott Horton's doubters? Give that a read and come back. All set? OK.Horton just posted a follow-up to his important piece on the three Gitmo prisoners who, as he puts it, died under mysterious circumstances in 2006. Horton describes those circumstances:

According to the NCIS documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cells eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

One aspect of the case overlooked by the doubters:

All the families [of the dead prisoners] requested independent autopsies. The Saudi prisoners were examined by Saeed Al-Ghamdy, a pathologist based in Saudi Arabia. Al-Salami, from Yemen, was inspected by Patrice Mangin, a pathologist based in Switzerland. Both pathologists noted the removal of the structure that would have been the natural focus of the autopsy: the throat. Both pathologists contacted the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, requesting the missing body parts and more information about the previous autopsies. The institute did not respond to their requests or queries. (It also did not respond to a series of calls I placed requesting information and comment.)(...)The removal of their throats made it difficult to determine whether they were already dead when their bodies were suspended by a noose.

Today Horton posted a brief interview with Michael Baden, one-time chief medical examiner for New York City and forensic-science contributor to Fox News. Baden ticks off the irregularities of the autopsies.Was it normal for the U.S. government to redact the names of the pathologists and observers involved in the original autopsy reports? No, Baden says--not in civilian practice and not in military practice. "It is necessary that names of the pathologists be known to the family for accountability purposes."What about the missing throats? Is it regular practice to remove organs central to determining cause of death and then refuse to release them to the families of the dead?

In cases where death is attributed to neck compression, as here, the neck organs may also be retained for further study. The families of the deceased always have the right to have a second autopsy performed. Properly qualified pathologists representing the families should be able to examine any organs retained and not present in the body at the time it is turned over.... It is not appropriate to be unresponsive to the pathologists conducting the second autopsy. If the body parts that were removed have been properly preserved, they can still be examined years later to assist in independently establishing how the death occurred.

According to one of the autopsies, a prisoner's hyoid bone was accidentally broken while removing the throat. What does Baden make of that?

A fracture of the hyoid bone occurs more commonly in homicidal manual strangulation than in suicidal hanging. A pathologist performing the second autopsy should be able to examine the hyoid bone and larynx to independently determine if the fracture happened while the decedent was alive or inadvertently after death during autopsy removal of the larynx.

Finally, what about those mysterious circumstances. Ever heard anything like it? Prisoners who bind their own feet and hands, stuff rags down their own throats, put on surgical masks, and, while self-bound-and-gagged, climb to a height sufficient to asphyxiate themselves by hanging? Baden: "I am not aware of any other case in which suicide was accomplished in this way, at least not with a gag in his mouth covered by a surgical mask."Read the rest right here.