Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally - a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man’s land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You’re either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.
- Harold Pinter, 2005 winner of the Noble Prize for Literature

The prisoners of Guantanamo Bay have popped up again, this time with news that there are 89 inmates on hunger strike at the “gulag of our times” (Amnesty) or the “anomaly” (Tony Blair). A few months ago, it was admitted that several hunger strikers were being force fed in a process that Captain John S Edmondson, commander of the Guantanamo Hospital, admitted resulted in bleeding and nausea. Despite the latest news that dozens of the hunger strikers have given up their attempt, this is just another sordid chapter in the history of Guantanamo’s force feeding.

The US military prefers to call this “assisted feeding”. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, “it remains a point of pride among medical workers, security staff, and military leaders at Guantanamo that there have been no deaths among Camp Delta prisoners.”

Clearly, [Major General Jay W. Hood, Camp Delta’s commander] hopes to maintain that record. “I will not allow them to do harm to themselves,” he told us. The military’s policy of tube feeding prisoners on hunger strike is controversial, and military health care providers are “screened” before deployment to Guantanamo “to ensure that they do not have ethical objections to assisted feeding,” Edmondson told me. The World Medical Association declared in 1975 that prisoners who refuse food and whom doctors consider capable of understanding the consequences should not be fed artificially, and British authorities allowed hunger-striking members of the Irish Republican Army to starve to death in prison in 1981. Yet civilian doctors in U.S. federal prisons are permitted to order the force-feeding of hunger strikers, and some lawyers representing Guantanamo detainees concur with the policy of “assisted feeding” (as military officials prefer to call it) if it is judged medically necessary.

Edmondson claimed that “In none of these [cases] have I ever gotten the impression that these guys want to die”, a strange statement indeed (one wonders if anyone ever wants to die in such cases, but rather see it as the only option available to them). Also, considering that just recently another four suicide attempts were made by inmates, adding to the previous total of around thirty six suicide attempts, it is quite clear that inmates are trying very hard to give an “impression” that they “want to die”. (We’ll get back to Edmondson’s statement in a second).

Edmondson’s revelations led to protests from the medical profession and the United Nations. The LA Times reported on a draft of the UN Report on Guantanamo that gave deeper insight into the murky world of “assisted feeding”. From the LA Times:

Thomas B. Wilner, a lawyer at Shearman & Sterling in Washington who has represented 12 Kuwaitis held at Guantanamo Bay, said that [Kuwaiti Fawzi Al Odah] told him that in December guards began taking away clothes, shoes and blankets from about 85 hunger strikers.

Wilner said Odah described guards mixing laxatives into the liquid formula they gave to about 40 prisoners through the nose tubes, causing them to defecate on themselves.

Wilner said Odah told him that on Jan. 9, an officer read what he said was an order from Guantanamo Bay’s commander, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, stating that hunger strikers would be strapped into a restraint chair and force-fed with thick nasal tubes that would be inserted and removed twice a day. After hearing a neighboring prisoner scream in pain and tell him not to go through it, Odah reluctantly ceased his hunger strike, Wilner said.

“I stopped it because they forced me to stop,” Wilner quoted Odah as telling him. “They stopped it through torture.”

Pentagon officials said the number of hunger strikers had dropped to four.

Officials have been forcefeeding detainees since August, but they started leaving the long nasal tubes in place in September after detainees complained that having them jammed down their noses to their stomachs and removed twice a day caused intense pain, bleeding, vomiting and fainting, Wilner said.

In January, he said, after harsh treatment resumed and hunger strikers were left strapped in the restraint chair in their own excretions, most gave up their protest.

“It is clear that the government used force to end the hunger strike,” Wilner said. “It was brutality purposely applied to them to make them stop.”

The US response? “Well, yes, we know that Al Qaeda is trained in trying to make wild accusations and so forth”, and that the US did not support or condone torture.

The current hunger strike, however, is seen as a publicity stunt by the military. According to Guantanamo Bay’s Public Relations Director Commander Robert Durand, it is “a short-term sympathetic hunger strike that is designed to elicit pressure on the United States to release the enemy combatants back to the battlefield.” Back to the battlefield? As usual guilt is automatically assumed, despite routine evidence that there are innocents located in the prison (38 prisoners released in 2005; the Tipton three; a twelve year old boy; nine Chinese detainess from Uighur; Adel, Abu Bakker, Ahmet, Ayoub, Zakerjain and Sadiq … these, according to lawyers trying to represent around 300 of the detainess , �??are far from the only innocent non-combatants languishing at Guantanamo.�?�).

Anyway, Durand went on to explain that force feeding was done because “our policy is we don’t let anyone die on the battlefield as an enemy.”

We would pick them up and treat them with the same military and medical care that we would to a US service member, following that general philosophy of, you know, we’re not going to let them die on the battlefield, we’re not going to let them die in our custody.

Isn’t that so nice and kind of them? Perhaps, if they’re so interested in their health and well-being, they should actually charge them with some crime, and try them in a court of law. I still find it incredible that the alleged 19th hijacker of 9/11, Moussaoui, was actually granted the privilege of being tried in a court of law on American soil, whereas the inmates of Guantanamo are still routinely refused any rights in this regard. Surely Moussaoui is every much an “enemy combatant” in the War on Terror as those with tubes in their noses?

Interestingly, Durand mentions something that directly contradicts Edmondson’s assertion that there was no “impression that these guys want to die”. According to Durand, “The reason we use [restraints for force feeding] is because in the past when we attempted to do this many of the detainees would purge their food that they had taken. They would reverse siphon the contents of what they’d fed, so they were denying themselves nutrition.” (Emphasis mine).

Oops. You’d think PR director would at least know to keep quiet about that sort of thing.