A kinder-gentler force feeding

More Winning Hearts and Minds..


"According to newly declassified interview notes, several detainees who had been
on hunger strikes told their lawyers during visits late last month that the military
had begun using harsher methods more widely in the second week of January.
One Yemeni detainee, Emad Hassan, described the chair to lawyers in
interviews on Jan. 24 and 25.
“The head is immobilized by a strap so it can’t be moved, their hands are cuffed
to the chair and the legs are shackled,” the notes quote Mr. Hassan as saying.
“They ask, ‘Are you going to eat or not?’ and if not, they insert the tube. People
have been urinating and defecating on themselves in these feedings and vomiting
and bleeding. They ask to be allowed to go to the bathroom, but they will not let
them go. They have sometimes put diapers on them.”
Another former hunger striker, Isa al-Murbati of Bahrain, described a similar
experience to his lawyer, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, in an interview on Jan. 28.
On Jan. 10, he said, a lieutenant came to his isolation cell and told him that if
he did not agree to eat solid food, he would be strapped into the chair and
force-fed. After he refused to comply, he said, soldiers picked him up by
the throat, threw him to the floor and strapped him to the restraint chair.
Like Mr. Hassan, Mr. Murbati said he had been fed two large bags of liquid
formula, which were forced into his stomach very quickly. “He felt pain like
a ‘knife in the stomach’ ” Mr. Colangelo-Bryan said.
Detainees said the Guantánamo medical staff also began inserting and
removing the long plastic feeding tubes that were threaded through the
detainees’ nasal passages and into their stomachs at every feeding, a
practice that caused sharp pain and frequent bleeding, they said. Until
then, doctors there said, they had been allowing the hunger strikers to
leave their feeding tubes in, to reduce discomfort.
Military spokesmen have generally discounted the complaints,
saying the prisoners are for the most part terrorists, trained by
Al Qaeda to use false stories as propaganda.
In a letter to a British physician and human rights activist, Dr. David
J. Nicholl, on Dec. 12, the former chief medical officer at Guantánamo,
Capt. John S. Edmondson of the Navy, wrote that his staff was not
force-feeding any detainees but “providing nutritional supplementation
on a voluntary basis to detainees who wish to protest their confinement
by not taking oral nourishment.”
From NYTimes
via:
SuburbanGuerrilla
Act:
Amnesty International